R. S. Thomas

A slow singer, but loading each phrase With history’s overtones, love, joy And grief learned by his dark tribe In other orchards and passed on Instinctively as they are now, But fresh always with new tears.

Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are.

"Sunlight's a thing that needs a window Before it enter a dark room. Windows don't happen." So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose.

We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge.

I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens

Deliver me from the long drought of the mind. Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain.

Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty

From the body at its meal’s end
and its messmate whose meal is beginning,
Gloria.
From the early and late cloud, beautiful and deadly
as the mushroom we are forbidden to eat,
Gloria.
From the stars that are but as dew
and the viruses outnumbering the star clusters,
Gloria.
From those waiting at the foot of the helix
for the rope-trick performer to come down,
Gloria.
Because you are not there
When I turn, but are in the turning,
Gloria.
Because it is not I who look
but I who am being looked through,
Gloria.
Because the captive has found the liberty
that eluded him while he was free,
Gloria.
Because from the belief that nothing is nothing
it follows that there must be something,
Gloria.
Because when we count we do not count
the moment between youth and age,
Gloria.
And because, when we are overcome,
we are overcome by nothing,
Gloria.

A power guided my hand. If an invisible company waited to see what I would do, I in my own way asked for direction, so we should journey together a little nearer the accomplishment of the design.

I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity.

Is a museum Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper Of the heart's relics, blowing the dust In my own eyes? I am a man; I never wanted the drab role Life assigned me, an actor playing To the past's audience upon a stage Of earth and stone; the absurd label Of birth, of race hanging askew About my shoulders. I was in prison Until you came; your voice was a key Turning in the enormous lock Of hopelessness. Did the door open To let me out or yourselves in?

somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time.

It is alive. It is you, God. Looking out I can see no death. The earth moves, the sea moves, the wind goes on its exuberant journeys. Many creatures reflect you, the flowers your color, the tides the precision of your calculations. There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing so small that your workmanship is not revealed.

They left no books, Memorial to their lonely thought In grey parishes: rather they wrote On men's hearts and in the minds Of young children sublime words Too soon forgotten. God in his time Or out of time will correct this.

In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason?