R. S. Thomas Quotes

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.

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.

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.

She is young. Have I the right Even to name her? Child, It is not love I offer Your quick limbs, your eyes; Only the barren homage Of an old man whom time Crucifies.

Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand.

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.

He arose, pacing the floor Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure The long torture of delayed birth.

On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one." But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."

Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What <p> to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?

The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address.
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.
Never think to surprise them.
Your face approaching ever
so friendly is the white flag
they ignore. There is no truce

with the furies. A mirror’s temperature
is always at zero. It is ice
in the veins. Its camera
is an X — ray. It is a chalice

held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting
identity never your own.

Let despair be known as my ebb-tide; but let prayer have its springs, too, brimming, disarming him; discovering somewhere among his fissures deposits of mercy where trust may take root and grow.

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 have nowhere to go. The swift satellites show The clock of my whole being is slow.