Collected Poems
1945–1990
R. S. THOMAS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
The Stones of the Field (1946)
Out of the Hills
A Labourer
Cyclamen
A Peasant
Country Child
The Rising of Glyndwr
Man and Tree
Affinity
The Mistress
Memories of Yeats whilst travelling to Holyhead
Country Church (Manafon)
Peasant Greeting
A Priest to His People
On a Portrait of Joseph Hone by Augustus John
Iago Prytherch
The Airy Tomb
Spring Equinox
An Acre of Land (1952)
The Welsh Hill Country
Song for Gwydion
Maes-yr-Onnen
The Old Language
The Evacuee
The Ancients of the World
Depopulation of the Hills
The Gap in the Hedge
Cynddylan on a Tractor
The Hill Farmer Speaks
The Tree
Death of a Peasant
The Unborn Daughter
Welsh History
Welsh Landscape
Valediction
The Labourer
An Old Woman
Farm Child
The Minister (1953)
The Minister
Song at the Year’s Turning (1955)
Children’s Song
The Village
Lament for Prytherch
Song at the Year’s Turning
Invasion on the Farm
The Poacher
Priest and Peasant
Pisces
The Return
A Welshman to any Tourist
The Last of the Peasantry
In a Country Church
No Through Road
Poetry for Supper (1958)
Border Blues
Temptation of a Poet
Evans
On Hearing a Welshman Speak
Chapel Deacon
Green Categories
Age
The Cat and the Sea
Sailor Poet
The View from the Window
The Country Clergy
Ap Huw’s Testament
Death of a Poet
A Blackbird Singing
Poetry for Supper
Iago Prytherch
Power
On a Line in Sandburg
Meet the Family
Expatriates
Absolution
Bread
Farm Wife
Epitaph
Tares (1961)
The Dark Well
To the Farmer
Walter Llywarch
The Conductor
The Parish
Genealogy
Anniversary
The Musician
Judgment Day
Abersoch
Ninetieth Birthday
Too Late
Hireling
Poet’s Address to the Businessmen
Those Others
Portrait
Hyddgen
Lore
Mother and Son
Pharisee. Twentieth Century
A Welsh Testament
Which?
Here
Alpine
The Maker
The Bread of Truth (1963)
A Line from St David’s
Country Cures
Funeral
To a Young Poet
Sorry
Becoming
Welsh
Afforestation
The Survivors
The Garden
Tramp
Welcome
Wallace Stevens
Parent
A Country
A Lecturer
Strangers
The Untamed
Movement
The Boy’s Tale
Truth
The Mill
Servant
Souillac: Le Sacrifice d’Abraham
The Figure
On the Farm
The Patriot
Looking at Sheep
Pietà (1966)
Rhodri
Because
Swifts
Rose Cottage
Hafod Lom
This To Do
Within Sound of the Sea
Pietà
Amen
Gifts
Kierkegaard
For Instance
For the Record
A Welshman at St James’ Park
The Moor
There
The Belfry
Aside
The Visit
Exchange
Gospel Truth
Service
Blondes
The Dance
Who?
The Face
Schoonermen
In Church
Not That He Brought Flowers (1968)
Careers
A Grave Unvisited
No
The Observer
Concession
Sir Gelli Meurig (Elizabethan)
Christmas
The Green Isle
The Fisherman
Traeth Maelgwn
Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant
Sailors’ Hospital
Reservoirs
Touching
The Priest
Welcome to Wales
Loyalties
Kneeling
Tenancies
Art History
The Small Window
They
Burgos
Study
That
The Place
H’m (1972)
Once
Petition
This One
Echoes
Invitation
Period
No Answer
Song
The Epitaph
Digest
Acting
Pavane
Via Negativa
Making
The Hearth
The Island
He
Postscript
The River
Female
Earth
All Right
Soliloquy
Nocturne by Ben Shahn
H’m
The Kingdom
The Coming
Other
The Fair
Young and Old (1972)
Young and Old
Boatman
Harbour
Madam
Omens
Relations
Astronauts
Islandmen
Circles
Experiments
The Country
Castaway
Seaside
The Sea
I
The Smile
Asides
Lost Christmas
What is a Welshman? (1974)
If You Can Call it Living
Somewhere to Go for a Laugh
To Pay for His Keep
He Lies Down to be Counted
His Condescensions Are Short-Lived
The Earth Does its Best for Him
He Agrees with Henry Ford
It Hurts Him to Think
Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)
Emerging
The Hand
The Word
Out There
Amen
God’s Story
Relay
The Prayer
The Tool
Poste Restante
Woman Combing. Degas
The Son
Mediations
The Chapel
The Casualty
The Problem
Probing
The Flower
Ann Griffith
The Moon in Lleyn
Suddenly
Taste
Rough
The Gap
The Annunciation by Veneziano
Ivan Karamazov
Hill Christmas
The Combat
Ffynon Fair (St Mary’s Well)
Somewhere
Marged
Thus
Alive
Which
Gone
Pardon
Marriage
Montrose
The Bright Field
Now
Llananno
The Interrogation
Sea-watching
Good
The Way of It (1977)
Travellers
In Memory
Two
The Valley Dweller
Eheu! Fugaces
The Listener in the Corner
Almost
Incense
Nuclear
Praise
Barn Owl
Tears
They
Phew!
The Way of It
Frequencies (1978)
The Gap
Present
The Porch
Fishing
Groping
In Context
The Woman
At It
Play
The Truce
Night Sky
The Small Country
Henry James
Hesitations
Bravo!
Pre-Cambrian
Abercuawg
Dialectic
Shadows
The Signpost
Adjustments
The Game
Waiting
Gone?
The Empty Church
Album
In Great Waters
Travels
Perhaps
Roger Bacon
Emerging
After Jericho
Synopsis
The White Tiger
The Answer
The Film of God
The Absence
Balance
Epiphany
Between Here and Now (1981)
Pilgrimages
Jongkind. The Beach at Sainte-Adresse
Monet. Portrait of Madame Gaudibert
Manet. The Balcony
Degas. The Dancing Class
Cézanne. The Card Players
Degas. Women Ironing
Van Gogh. Portrait of Dr Gachet
Toulouse-Lautrec. Justine Dieuhl
Gauguin. Breton Village in the Snow
Directions
Covenant
Waiting
Saraband
Correspondence
Pluperfect
Fair Day
Voices
Arriving
Aleph
Seventieth Birthday
One Way
Mediterranean
Senior
The New Mariner
Bent
Flowers
The Presence
Forest Dwellers
Later Poems (1983)
Return
Salt
Plas Difancoll
Perspectives
Covenanters
Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man
The Other
Gradual
Measure for Measure
The Cones
Adder
Cadenza
Centuries
The Tree
Grandparents
Publicity Inc.
History
Passage
The Bush
Contacts
Inside
Island
Suddenly
Arrival
Brother
Remembering David Jones
The Moment
Gospel
Minuet
Sonata
Carol
Requiem
Ingrowing Thoughts (1985)
Prayer
Guernica. Pablo Picasso
Portrait of a Girl in a Yellow Dress. Henri Matisse
Father and Child. Ben Shahn
Portrait of Madame Renou. André Derain
The Good Inn. Frits van den Berghe
The Child’s Brain. Giorgio di Chirico
The Oracle. Giorgio di Chirico
The Red Model. René Magritte
Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale. Max Ernst
On the Threshold of Liberty. René Magritte
Captain Cook’s Last Voyage. Roland Penrose
Destinations (1985)
Drawing by a Child. Diana Brinton Lee
The Message
A Poet
The Unvanquished
Vocabulary
Obstetrics
In Memoriam E. E. T.
Gallery
Destinations
The Other
The Conviction
He and She
Sarn Rhiw
Mother and Child
Siân
Welsh Airs (1987)
West Coast
Drowning
A Land
Dead Worthies
Waiting
Deprivation
Fugue for Ann Griffiths
Experimenting with an Amen (1986)
Formula
Aubade
Cones
Testimonies
Coming
The Fly
Apostrophe
Fable
Hebrews 12.29
Roles
Gift
Harvest End (from the Welsh of Caledfryn)
The Wood
Biography
Zero
The Bank
Revision
Similarities
AD 2000
Ritual
Calling
Strands
Countering
April Song
The Window
Borders
Retirement
Questions
Looking Glass
The Cast
Court Order
Nativity
Jerusalem
History
A Thicket in Lleyn
Confrontation
Moorland
Unposted
Asking
A Life
Folk Tale
Ystrad Fflur (Strata Florida)
Approaches
Where?
This One
Truly
Retrospect
Andante
A Country
Their Canvases Are
Aim
Reply
Cures
Look Out
Revision
Fuel
Mass for Hard Times (1992)
A Marriage
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Copyright
Out of the Hills
Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull,
Dark as curls, he comes, ambling with his cattle
From the starved pastures. He has shaken from off his shoulders
The weight of the sky, and the lash of the wind’s sharpness
Is healing already under the medicinal sun.
Clouds of cattle breath, making the air heady,
Remember the summer’s sweetness, the wet road runs
Blue as a river before him; the legendary town
Dreams of his coming; under the half-closed lids
Of the indolent shops sleep dawdles, emptying the last
Tankards of darkness, before the offic
ious light
Bundles it up the chimney out of sight.
The shadow of the mountain dwindles; his scaly eye
Sloughs its cold care and glitters. The day is his
To dabble a finger in, and, merry as crickets,
A chorus of coins sings in his tattered pockets.
Shall we follow him down, witness his swift undoing
In the indifferent streets: the sudden disintegration
Of his soul’s hardness, traditional discipline
Of flint and frost thawing in ludicrous showers
Of maudlin laughter; the limpid runnels of speech
Sullied and slurred, as the beer-glass chimes the hours?
No, wait for him here. At midnight he will return,
Threading the tunnel that contains the dawn
Of all his fears. Be then his fingerpost
Homeward. The earth is patient; he is not lost.
A Labourer
Who can tell his years, for the winds have stretched
So tight the skin on the bare racks of bone
That his face is smooth, inscrutable as stone?
And when he wades in the brown bilge of earth
Hour by hour, or stoops to pull
The reluctant swedes, who can read the look
In the colourless eyes, as his back comes straight
Like an old tree lightened of the snow’s weight?
Is there love there, or hope, or any thought
For the frail form broken beneath his tread,
And the sweet pregnancy that yields his bread?
Cyclamen
They are white moths
With wings
Lifted
Over a dark water
In act to fly,
Yet stayed
By their frail images
In its mahogany depths.
A Peasant
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clouds that glint in the wind –
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
Country Child
Dropped without joy from the gaunt womb he lies,
Maturing in his place against his parents’ ageing;
The slow scene unfolds before his luckless eyes
To the puckered window, where the cold storm’s raging
Curtains the world, and the grey curlew cries,
Uttering a grief too sharp for the breast’s assuaging.
So the days will drift into months and the months to years,
Moulding his mouth to silence, his hand to the plough;