r.s.thomas
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| R.S.Thomas r.s.thomas |
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007   Two recently discovered portraits posted by thomas | 11:26 PM Wednesday, January 03, 2007 RS had his portrait scanned for Christmas! 
posted by thomas |
1:05 AM
Tuesday, April 22, 2003 Easter. I approach the years' empty tomb. What has time done with itself? Is the news worth the communicating? The word's loincloth can remember little. A thin, cold wind blows from beyond the abysm that I gawp into. But supposing there were bones; the darkness illuminated like a museum? In glass cases I have peered at the brittle bundles, exonerating my conscience with mortality's tears. But here, true to my name, I have nothing to hold on to, an absence so much richer than a presence, offering instead of the skull's leer an impaled possibility for faith's fingertips to explore circa. 2000 posted by thomas | 4:59 PM Friday, March 28, 2003 29 March 1913-29 March 2000 Happy Birthday RS 
Coming of Age He grew up into an emptiness he was on terms with. The duplicity of language that could name what was not there was accepted by him. He was content, remembering the unseen writing of Christ on the ground, to interpret it in its own way. Adultery of the flesh has the divine pardon. It is the mind catching itself in the act of unfaithfulness that must cast no stone. 1978 posted by thomas | 10:16 PM Tuesday, December 24, 2002 Sea Christmas This is the wrong Christmas in the right place: mistletoe water there is no kissing under; the soused holly of the wrack, and birds coming to the bird-table with no red on their breast. All night it has snowed foam on the splintering beaches, but the dawn- wind carries it away, load after load, and look, the sand at the year's solstice is young flesh on a green crib, product of an immacukate conception. 1979 posted by thomas | 7:53 PM Wednesday, October 23, 2002 ringless fingers a testament r.s. thomas m.e.eldridge the frangipani press bangkapi 2002 "...how our art is our meaning" Sonata. Later Poems 1983 Ap Huw's Testament There are four verses to put down For the four people in my life, Father, mother, wife And the one child. Let me begin With her of the immaculate brow My wife; she loves me. I know how. My mother gave me the breast's milk Generously, but grew mean after, Envying me my detached laughter. My father was a passionate man, Wrecked after leaving the sea In her love's shallows. He grieves in me. What shall I say of my boy, Tall, fair? He is young yet; Keep his feet free of the world's net. I I imagine it: two people, A bed; I was not There. They dreamed of me ? No, they sought themselves In the other, You, They breathed. I overheard From afar. I was nine months Coming. . . nearer, nearer; The ugliness of the place Daunted. I hung back In the dark, but was cast out, Howling. Love, they promised; It will be love and sunlight And joy. I took their truth In my mouth and mumbled it For a while, till my teeth Grew. Ah, they cried, so you would, Would you? I knew the cold Autobiography The fall of a great house? I smile - bitterly? sadly? wrily? Anyhow but proudly. Two people cast up on life's shore: can't you see the emptiness of their pockets, and their small hearts ready to burst with love? Say 'feeling' and the explosion not loud. They come to in a lodging, make love in a rented bed. And I am not present as yet. Could it be said, then, I am on my way, a nonentity with a destination? What do they do waiting for me? They invent My name. I am born To a concept, answering To it with reluctance. I am wheeled through ignorance to a knowledge that is not joy. Nothing they have they own; the borrowed furnishings of their minds frays. I study to become a rat that will desert the foundering vessel of their pride; but home is a long time sinking. All my life I must swim out of the suction of its vortex. Sorry Dear parents, I forgive you my life, Begotten in a drab town, The intention was good; Passing the street now, I see still the remains of sunlight. It was not the bone buckled; You gave me enough food To renew myself. It was the mind's weight Kept me bent, as I grew tall. It was not your fault. What should have gone on, Arrow aimed from a tried bow At a tried target, has turned back, Wounding itself With questions you had not asked. Relations An ordinary lot: The sons dwindling from a rich Father to a house in a terrace And furniture of the cheap sort ; The daughters respectable, marrying Approved husbands with clean shoes And collars; as though dullness And nonentity's quietness Were virtues after the crazed ways Of that huge man, their father, buying himself Smiles, sailing his paper money From windows of the Welsh hotel He had purchased to drown in drink. But one of them was drowned Honourably. A tale has come down From rescuers, forced to lie off By the breakers, of men lined up At the rail as the ship foundered, Smoking their pipes and bantering. And he Was of their company; his tobacco Stings my eyes, who am ordinary too. The Boy's Tale Skipper wouldn't pay him off, Never married her; Came home by Port Said To a Welsh valley; Took a girl from the tip, Sheer coal dust The blue in her veins. Every time I go now Through black sunlight, I see her scratch his name On the pane of her breath. Caught him in her thin hair, Couldn't hold him - Voices from the ports Of the stars, pavilions Of unstable water. She went fishing in him; I was the bait That became cargo, Shortening his trips, Waiting on the bone's wharf. Her tongue ruled the tides. The Survivors I never told you this. He told me about it often: Seven days in an open boat - burned out, No time to get food: Biscuits and water and the unwanted sun, With only the oars' wing-beats for motion, Labouring heavily towards land That existed on a remembered chart, Never on the horizon Seven miles from the boat's bow. After two days song dried on their lips; After four days speech. On the fifth cracks began to appear In the faces' masks; salt scorched them. They began to think about death, Each man to himself, feeding it On what the rest could not conceal. The sea was as empty as the sky, A vast disc under a dome Of the same vastness, perilously blue. But on the sixth day towards evening A bird passed. No one slept that night; The boat had become an ear Straining for the desired thunder Of the wrecked waves. It was dawn when it came, Ominous as the big guns Of enemy shores. The men cheered it. From the swell's rise one of them saw the ruins Of all that sea, where a lean horseman Rode towards them and with a rope Galloped them up on to the curt sand. Salt The centuries were without his like: then suddenly he was there, fishing in a hurrying river, the Teifi. But what he caught were ideas; the water described a direction; his thoughts were toy boats that grew big; one he embarked on; Suez, the Far East - the atlas became familiar to him as a back-yard. 'Spittle and phlegm Listen. sailor, to the wind piping in the thin rigging; go climbing there to the empty nest of the black crow. Far is the deck and farther your courage.' 'Captain, captain, long is the wind's tongue and cold your porridge. Look up now . and dry your beard: teach me to ride in my high saddle the mare of the sea.' He fell. Was it the fall of the soul from favour? Past four decks, and his bones splintered. Seventeen weeks on his back. No Welsh, no English; but the hands of the Romanians kind. He became their mouth-piece, publishing his rebirth. In a new body he sailed away on his old course. On brisk evenings before the Trades the sails named themselves; he repeated the lesson. The First Mate had a hard boot. Cassiopeia, Sirius, all the stars over him, yet none of them with a Welsh sound. But the capstan spoke in cynghanedd; from breaker to breaker he neared home. 'Evening, sailor.' Red lips and a tilted smile; the ports garlanded with faces. Was he aware of a vicarage garden that was the cramped harbour he came to? Later the letters began: 'Dear -' the small pen in the stubbed hand - 'in these dark waters the memory of you is like a -' words scratched out that would win a smile from the reader. The deep sea and the old call to abandon it for the narrow channel from her and back. The chair was waiting and the slippers by the soft fire that would destroy him. 'The hard love I had at her small breasts: the tight fists that pummelled me ; the thin mouth with its teeth clenched on a memory.' Are all women like this? He said so, that man, my father, who had tasted their lips' vinegar, coughing it up in harbours he returned to with his tongue lolling from droughts of the sea. The voice of my father in the night with the hunger of the sea in it and the emptiness of the sea. While the house founders in time. I must listen to him complaining, a ship's captain with no crew, a navigator without a port: rejected by the barrenness of his wife's coasts, by the wind's bitterness off her heart. I take his failure for ensign, flying it at my bedpost, where my own children cry to be born. Suddenly he was old in a silence unhaunted by the wailing signals; and was put ashore on that four-walled island to which all sailors must come. So he went gleaning in the flickering stubble, where formerly his keel reaped. And the remembered stars swarmed for him; and the birds, too, most of them with wrong names. Always he looked aft from the chair's bridge, and his hearers suffered the anachronism of his view. The form of his life; the weak smile; the fingers filed down by canvas; the hopes blunted; the lack of understanding of life creasing the brow with wrinkles, as though he pondered on deep things. Out of touch with the times, landlocked in his ears' calm, he remembered and talked; spoiling himself with his mirth; running the joke down; giving his orders again in hospital with his crew gone. What was a sailor good for who had sailed all seas and learned wisdom from none, fetched up there in the shallows with his mind's valueless cargo? Strange grace, sailor, docked now in six feet of thick soil, with the light dribbling on you from the lamps in a street of a town you had no love for. The place is a harbour for stone sails, and under it you lie with the becalmed fleet heavy upon you. This was never the destination you dreamed of in that other churchyard by Teifi. And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? Six feet down, and the bone's anchor too heavy for your child spirit to haul on and be up and away? The Father Dies Ah, forget this snivel, the gone lip. I am not maudlin; it is just that all my life I tried to keep love from bursting its banks. Love is the fine thing but destructive. I strove to contain it, to picture it as the river we lived by. But to fall headlong in, to be carried away in front of you, son; to have no firm ground: a father drowning in tears and without breath to keep his voice casual as in the old days; and the smile you hold out to me breaks like a stick, because there is as much pity in it as love. Sailors' Hospital It was warm Inside, but there was Pain there. I came out Into the cold wind Of April. There were birds In the brambles' old, Jagged iron, with one striking Its small song. To the west, Rising from the grey Water, leaning one On another were the town's Houses. Who first began That refuse: time's waste Growing at the edge Of the clean sea? Some sailor Fetching up on the Shingle before wind Or current, made it his Harbour, hung up his clothes In the sunlight; found women To breed from - those sick men His descendants. Every day Regularly the tide Visits them with its salt Comfort; their wounds are shrill In the rigging of the Tall ships. With clenched thoughts, That not even the sky's Daffodil could persuade To open, I turned back To the nurses in their tugging At him, as he drifted Away on the current Of his breath, further and further, Out of hail of our love. July 5 1940 Nought that I would give today Would half compare With the long-treasured riches that somewhere In the deep heart are stored. Cloud and the moon and mist and the whole Hoard of frail, white-bubbling stars, And the cool blessing, Like moth or wind caressing, Of the fair, fresh rain-dipped flowers; And all the spells of the sea, and the new green Of moss and fern and bracken Before their youth is stricken; The thoughts of the trees at eventide, the hush In the dark corn at morning, And the wish In your own heart still but dawning- All of these, A soft weight on your hands, I would give now; And lastly myself made clean And white as the wave-washed sand, If I knew how. Luminary My luminary. my morning and evening star. My light at noon when there is no sun and the sky lowers. My balance of joy in a world that has gone off joy's standard. Yours the face that young I recognised as though I had known you of old. Come, my eyes said, out into the morning of a world whose dew waits for your footprint. Before a green altar with the thrush for priest I took those gossamer vows that neither the Church could stale nor the Machine tarnish, that with the years have grown hard as flint, lighter than platinum on our ringless fingers. Manafon Have I had to wait all this time to discover its meaning-that rectory, mahogany of a piano the light played on? What it was saying to the unasked question was: 'The answer is here.' The woman was right; she knew it: the truth china can tell in a cool pantry; the web happiness can weave that catches nothing but the dew's tears. The one flight over that valley was that of the wild geese. The river's teeth chattered but not with the cold. The woman tended a wood fire against my return from my wanderings, a silent entreaty to me to cease my bullying of the horizon. There was a dream she kept under her pillow that has become my nightmare. It was the unrecognised conflict between two nations; the one happy in the territory it had gained, determined to keep it; the other with the thought he could kiss the feet of the Welsh rainbow. I was shown the fact: a people with a language and an inheritance for sale; their skies noisy with armed aircraft; their highways sluices for their neighbours' discharge. If I wet my feet it was in seas radiant but not with well-being. I retire at night beneath stars that have gone out. I stand with my friends at a cross-road where there is no choice. No matter; that nightmare is a steed I am content to ride so it return with me here among countrymen whose welcome is warm at the grave's edge. It is a different truth, a different love I have come to, but one I share with that afflicted remnant As we go down, inalienable to our defeat. The Return Coming home was to that: The white house in the cool grass Membraned with shadow, the bright stretch Of stream that was its looking-glass; And smoke growing above the roof To a tall tree among whose boughs The first stars renewed their theme Of time and death and a man's vows. The Way of It With her fingers she turns paint into flowers, with her body flowers into a remembrance of herself. She is at work always, mending the garment of our marriage, foraging like a bird for something for us to eat. If there are thorns in my life, it is she who will press her breast to them and sing. Her words, when she would scold, are too sharp. She is busy after for hours rubbing smiles into the wounds. I saw her, when young, and spread the panoply of my feathers instinctively to engage her. She was not deceived, but accepted me as a girl will under a thin moon in love's absence as someone she could build a home with for her imagined child. Seventieth Birthday Made of tissue and H2O, and activated by cells firing - Ah, heart, the legend of your person! Did I invent it, and is it in being still? In the competition with other women your victory is assured. It is time, as Yeats said, is the caterpillar in the cheek's rose, the untiring witherer of your petals. You are drifting away from me on the whitening current of your hair. I lean far out from the bone's bough, knowing the hand I extend can save nothing of you but your love. Birthday Come to me a moment, stand, Ageing yet lovely still, At my side, let me tell you that, With the clouds massing for attack And the wind worrying the leaves From the branches and the blood seeping Thin and slow through the ventricles Of the heart, I regret less, Looking back on the poem's Weakness, the failure of the mind To be clever than of the heart To deserve you as you showed how. The Son It was your mother wanted you: you were already half-formed when I entered. But can I deny the hunger, the loneliness bringing me in from myself? And when you appeared before me, there was no repentance for what I had done, as there was shame in the doing it; compassion only for that which was too small to be called human. The unfolding of your hands was plant-like, your ear was the shell I thundered in; your cries. when they came, were those of a blind creature trodden upon: pain not yet become grief. Gifts From my father my strong heart, My weak stomach. From my mother the fear. From my sad country the shame. To my wife all I have Saving only the love That is not mine to give. To my one son the hunger. Song for Gwydion When I was a child and the soft flesh was forming Quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone, My father brought me trout from the green river From whose chill lips the water song had flown. Dull grew their eyes, the beautiful, blithe garland Of stipples faded, as light shocked the brain; They were the first sweet sacrifice I tasted, A young god, ignorant of the blood's stain. The Unborn Daughter On her unborn in the vast circle Concentric with our finite lives; On her unborn, her name uncurling Like a young fern within the mind; On her unclothed with flesh or beauty In the womb's darkness, I bestow The formal influence of the will, The wayward influence of the heart, Weaving upon her fluid bones The subtle fabric of her being, Hair, hands and eyes, the body's texture, Shot with the glory of the soul. Careers Fifty-two years, most of them taken in growing or in the illusion of it what does the mem- ory number as one's property? The broken elbow? the lost toy? The pain has vanished, but the soft flesh that suffered it is mine still. There is a house with a face mooning at the glass of windows. Those eyes - I look at not with them, but something of their melancholy I begin to lay claim to as my own. A boy in school his lessons are my lessons, his punishments I learn to deserve. I stand up in him, tall as I am now, but without per- spective. Distant objects are too distant, yet will arrive soon. How his words muddle me; how my deeds betray him. That is not our intention; but where I should be one with him, I am one now with another. Before I had time to complete myself, I let her share in the building. This that I am now - too many labourers. What is mine is not mine only: her love, her child wait for my slow signature. Son, from the mirror you hold to me I turn to recriminate. That likeness you are at work upon - it hurts. Anniversary Nineteen years now Under the same roof Eating our bread, Using the same air; Sighing, if one sighs, Meeting the other's Words with a look That thaws suspicion. Nineteen years now Sharing life's table, And not to be first To call the meal long We balance it thoughtfully On the tip of the tongue, Careful to maintain The strict palate. Nineteen years now Keeping simple house, Opening the door To friend and stranger; Opening the womb Softly to let enter The one child With his huge hunger. Pension Love songs in old age have an edge to them like dry leaves. The tree we planted shakes in the wind. of time. Our thoughts are birds that sit in the boughs and remember; we call them down to the remains of poetry. We sit opposite one another at table, parrying our sharp looks with our blunt smiles Marriage I look up; you pass. I have to reconcile your existence and the meaning of it with what I read: kings and queens and their battles for power. You have your battle, too. I ask myself: Have I been on your side? Lovelier a dead queen than a live wife? History worships the fact but cannot remain neutral. Because there are no kings worthy of you; because poets better than I are not here to describe you; because time is always too short, you must go by now without mention, as unknown to the future as to the past, with one man's eyes resting on you in the interval of his concern. Two So you have to think of the bone hearth where love was kindled, of the size of the shadows so small a flame threw on the world's walls, with the heavens over them, lighting their vaster fires to no end. He took her hand sometimes and felt the will to be of the poetry he could not write. She measured him with her moist eye for the coat always too big. And time, the faceless collector of taxes, beat on their thin door, and they opened to him, looking beyond him, beyond the sediment of his myriad demands to the bright place, where their undaunted spirits were already walking. He and She When he came in, she was there. When she looked at him, he smiled. There were lights in time's wave breaking on an eternal shore. Seated at table - no need for the fracture of the room's silence; noiselessly they conversed. Thoughts mingling were lit up, gold particles in the mind's stream. Were there currents between them? Why, when he thought darkly, would the nerves play at her lips' brim? What was the heart's depth? There were fathoms in her, too, and sometimes he crossed them and landed and was not repulsed. Matrimony I said to her what Was in my heart, she What was not in hers. On such shaky Foundations we built One of love's shining Greenhouses to let fly In with our looks. Sarn Rhiw So we know she must have said something to him - What language, life? Ah, what language? Thousands of years later I inhabit a house whose stone is the language of its builders. Here by the sea they said little. But their message to the future was: Build well. In the fire of an evening I catch faces staring at me. In April, when light quickens and clouds thin, boneless presences flit through my room. Will they inherit me one day? What certainties have I to hand on like the punctuality with which, at the moon's rising, the bay breaks into a smile, as though meaning were not the difficulty at all? The Untamed My garden is the wild Sea of the grass. Her garden Shelters between walls. The tide could break in; I should be sorry for this. There is peace there of a kind, Though not the deep peace Of wild places. Her care For green life has enabled The weak things to grow. Despite my first love, I take sometimes her hand, Following strait paths Between flowers, the nostril Clogged with their thick scent. The old softness of lawns Persuading the slow foot Leads to defection: the silence Holds with its gloved hand The wild hawk of the mind. But not for long, windows, Opening in the trees Call the mind back To its true eyrie: I stoop Here only in play. Golden Wedding Cold hands meeting, the eyes aside - so vows are contracted in the tongue's absence. Gradually over fifty long years of held breath the heart has become warm A Marriage We met under a shower of bird-notes. Fifty years passed, love's moment in a world in servitude to time. She was young; I kissed with my eyes closed and opened them on her wrinkles. 'Come.' said death, choosing her as his partner for the last dance. And she, who in life had done everything with a bird's grace, opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than a feather. Together All my life I was face to face with her, at meal-times, by the fire, even in the ultimate intimacies of the bed. You could have asked, then, for information about her? There was a room apart she kept herself in, teasing me by leading me to its glass door, only to confront me with my reflection. I learned from her even so. Walking her shore I found things cast up from her depths that spoke to me of another order, worshipper as I was of untamed nature. She fetched her treasures from art's storehouse: pieces of old lace, delicate as frost; china from a forgotten period; a purse more valuable than anything it could contain. Coming in from the fields with my offering of flowers I found her garden had forestalled me in providing civilities for my desk. ' Tell me about life' I would say, 'you who were its messenger in the delivery of our child'. Her eyes had a fine shame, remembering her privacy being invaded from further off than she expected. 'Do you think death is the end?' frivolously I would ask her. I recall now the swiftness of its arrival wrenching her lip down, and how the upper remained firm, reticent as the bud that is the precursor of the flower. Comparisons To all light things I compared her; to a snowflake, a feather. I remember she rested at the dance on my arm, as a bird on its nest lest eggs break, lest she lean too heavily on our love. Snow melts, feathers are blown away; I have let her ashes down in me like an anchor. In Memoriam: M.E.E. The rock says: 'Hold hard'. The fly ignores it. Here, gone, the raised wings a rainbow. She, too: here, gone. I know when, but where? Eckhart, you mock me. Between no- where and anywhere what difference? Her name echoes the silence she and her brush kept. Immortality, perhaps, is having one's name said over and over? I let the inscription do it for me. She explored all of the spectrum in a fly's wing. The days, polishing an old lamp, summon for me her genie. Others will come to this stone where, so timeless the lichen, so delicate its brush strokes, it will be as though with all windows in her ashen studio she is at work for ever. 1. Photograph R.S.Thomas 1914 2. Photograph R.S.Thomas 1916 3. Photograph M.E.Eldridge 1912 4. Ap Huw's Testament Poetry for Supper 1958 5. I Young and Old 1972 6. M.E.Eldridge R.S.Thomas. Pencil Drawing 1939 7. Autobiography Uncollected. Wave No.7 1973 8. Sorry The Bread of Truth 1963 9. Relations Young and Old 1972 10. The Boy's Tale The Bread of Truth 1963 11. The Survivors The Bread of Truth 1963 12. M.E. Eldridge Buoys at Holyhead. Panel from Mural at Gobowen Orthopaedic Hospital 1950 13. Salt Later Poems 1983 14. M.E.Eldridge Coracles on the Towy 1947 15. The Father Dies ms. 1978 16. Sailors' Hospital Not That He Brought Flowers 1968 17. Album Frequencies 1978 18.P Photograph M.E.Eldridge 1934 19. July 5th 1940 ms. 1940 20. Luminary ms. 1980 21. Manafon Residues 2002 22. The Return Song At The Year's Turning 1955 23. Photograph The Rectory Manafon 1950 24. M.E.Eldridge Morning Glory. Watercolour 1954 25. The Way of It The Way of It 1977 26. Seventieth Birthday Between Here and Now 1981 27. Cariad ms. 1970 28. Birthday ms. Echoes Return Slow 1984 29. Gifts Pieta 1966 30. Photograph R.S.Thomas and Gwydion 1945 31. The Son Laboratories of The Spirit 1975 32. Song For Gwydion An Acre Of Land 1952 33. The Unborn Daughter An Acre Of Land 1952 34. Careers Not That He Brought Flowers 1968 35. Photograph Gwydion 1966 36. Anniversary Tares 1961 37. Pension Uncollected. Encounter 1977 38. Marriage Laboratories Of The Spirit 1975 39. Two The Way Of It 1977 40. He And She Destinations 1985 41. Matrimony Residues 2002 42. Sarn Rhiw Destinations 1985 43. M.E.Eldridge Sarn. Watercolour. In My Garden 1986 44. The Untamed The Bread Of Truth 1963 45. Photograph M.E.Eldridge in Sarn Garden 1980 46. Golden Wedding Residues 2002 47. M.E.Eldridge R.S.T. and M.E.E. 1989 48. A Marriage Mass For Hard Times 1992 49. Together Residues 2002 50. Comparisons Residues 2002 51. In Memoriam M.E.E Residues 2002 52. M.E. Eldridge Against The Years. Watercolour 1970 An Acre Of Land Montgomeryshire Printing Company. Newtown 1952 Song At The Years Turning Rupert Hart Davis. London 1955 Poetry For Supper Rupert Hart Davis. London 1958 Tares Rupert Hart Davis. London 1961 The Bread Of Truth Rupert Hart Davis. London 1963 Not That He Brought Flowers Rupert Hart Davis. London 1968 Young And Old Chatto and Windus.London 1972 Laboratories Of The Spirit MacMillan. London 1975 The Way Of It. Ceolfrith Press. Sunderland 1977 Frequencies MacMillan. London 1978 Between Here And Now MacMillan. London 1981 Later Poems MacMillan. London 1983 Destinations Celandine Press. Shipston 1985 In My Garden Medici Society. London 1986 Mass For Hard Times Bloodaxe. Newcastle upon Tyne 1992 Residues Bloodaxe. Tarset 2002 Realised at Senavilla Bangkapi by Gwydion Thomas and Kunjana Thomas for Rhodri's Birthday January 2002 Ten Copies on Japanese papers Five Ordinary copies Mulberry Paper Wrappers this copy number the frangipani press c. Rhodri Thomas 2002 posted by thomas | 8:25 AM Saturday, October 12, 2002 I am not Dante Your volume to hand posted by thomas | 3:26 AM Tuesday, September 17, 2002 SORRY......we are off for whenever....we have some heartrending medical problems with the Babe...which are getting worse.....so.cannot really find the space for this for a while posted by thomas | 10:52 AM Sunday, September 08, 2002 Today's variorum tip: The original version of The Minister has : "He never listened to the moor's Silence speaking to the slow Silence within...".. This was first changed to "He never listened to the moor's/Music calling to the hushed/Music within and finally to.. "the hill's/ Music..." As you know extant substantive alterations to texts are unusual. posted by thomas | 7:57 PM Saturday, September 07, 2002 THE SHAME OF CRAIG RAINE and some other nice things..including lots of pictures!! posted by thomas | 7:10 AM Thursday, September 05, 2002 Here is a QUESTION for all you scholars about to turn in for another long instructional haul......... WHAt does............"the brimmed rabbit" MEAN?? And I wont tell you in which poem to FIND IT This brought on by my friend Peter who said: You could launch a hundred websites and weblogs on phrases from RS!! So we started with The Brimmed Rabbit which sounds sort of a cross between Beachcomber and a Fulham Road Pub, but also with poachers overtones. (Someone in Ynys Mon wrote a book about poachers and quoted that poem... I mean: Turning aside, never meeting In the still lanes Then...the strict palate..green aisles...green categories... the incorrigible cuckoo .. inaudible screaming .. brushed eyes...sharptooth (no orthodontists should apply) atreeundressing....thewayofit...greatwaters... (www.greywater(s) appears to be an effluvient treatment process ...love's mirror ... love's lookingglass ...the lit bush.....and then we came to The Bright Field and lo and behold there IS a weblog called that! themos100's Xanga Site and it is nice to find someone over the age of thirtysomething also writing these things!...and if you trawl around there..yes he was reading RS. posted by thomas | 6:43 AM Monday, September 02, 2002 Kevin Perryman BABEL Verlag has kindly (and at vast expense-what is the problem with EU postal services?) sent me copies of Das Helle Feld, Frieze and Laubbaum Sprache. I am slowly building another set of books. I should probably try and replace RS's library too-the contents of which I am probably the only person who can remember! Somewhere in it there is a copy of Dock Leaves with a list of books 'to buy', and on the cover of a proof copy of SATYT there was a booklist too. Maybe Peter has them? In later life he was very averse to buying books, preferring the lottery of Gwynedd's mobile library. Though he did take during the 'CND' years to gooing to the library in Penlan street. I think he hardly ever bought a book in Bangor, though he did go to the bookshop...see this quote from a letter dated Monday 23rd (1988?):.. Thank you for your letter.....I was in Bangor a week ago. The impression I got from Galloways was that, apart from Faber perhaps, they don't re-order.The last time I was there-many months ago-there was 1 copy of Tomlinson's 'Collected Poems'. Since someone was foolish enough to buy that, the niche is now empty.The same applies to the one or two Bloodaxe that they had............ posted by thomas | 10:47 PM The Vicar will now lead us In prayer. Where to, Lord, who have put Yourself so close we Have nowhere to go to Find you. Take our hand, Indeed! You have no hand To hold us by, no voice To address us. All your thoughts Are closed to us and your ways Strange. Our missiles return Empty; the microscope proves You are not. If I should speak To them, Lord, how will they hear You breathing, as I do myself? posted by thomas | 10:04 PM Thursday, August 29, 2002 (Nice) Reta Carden from Mayville NY has sent the copy of H'm. She is nice because she was so patient while UK banks worked out how to send a few dollars to NY. And even more patient while PayPal tried to work out whether it could possibly allow you to open PayPal from a Thai ISP!! Of course, as is the way with booksellers , it turns out not to be the first edition but the US first edition. However since I don't think anyone ever thought there was such a thing it is not without interest. It is the UK sheets with a MacMillan/St Martin's Press title page. It has a Library of Congress Number 72-79154 and a dustjacket with a $4.95 price tag and St.Martin's on the spine. The boards are brown with H'M and ST.MARTIN'S in caps! Was the UK edition not in gray boards? John Harris (A Bibliographical Guide to Twenty-Four Modern Anglo-Welsh Writers UWP 1994) does not say; and my copy is not here. But then he does not mention this ed. There was a David Godine edition of Laboratories of the Spirit. I now wonder if there was a US edition of Frequencies? I also wonder if MacMillan did not do something peculiar like split the edition between US and UK sheets. It was the first MacMillan book-thanks to Kevin Crossley Holland. I have not seen a secondhand copy in more than 10 years. Even the paperback is uncommon. The hardback is by far the scarcest of the 'normal' editions post SATYT 1955. Why? Frequencies and LOS are common books. While on this--the other book I have never seen is the Japanese edition of SATYT. RS never had a copy. From H'm -Not printed in Collected Poems -is this: PARRY You say the word 'God'. I cancel It with a smile. You make a smile proof That God is. I try A new gambit. Look, I say, the wide air- Empty. You listen To it as one hearing The God breathe. Shout, then, I cry: waken The unseen sleeper; let Him come forth, history Yearns for him. You smile Now in your turn, Putting a finger To my lips, not cancelling My cry, pardoning it Under the green tree Where history nailed him. posted by thomas | 9:52 PM Wednesday, August 28, 2002 HEINZ MEMORIAL BIRTHDAY Ap Huw's Testament There are four verses to put down For the four people in my life, Father, mother, wife And the one child. Let me begin With her of the immaculate brow My wife; she loves me. I know how. My mother gave me the breast's milk Generously, but grew mean after, Envying me my detached laughter. My father was a passionate man, Wrecked after leaving the sea In her love's shallows. He grieves in me. What shall I say of my boy, Tall, fair? He is young yet; Keep his feet free of the world's net. The Son It was your mother wanted you: you were already half-formed when I entered. But can I deny the hunger, the loneliness bringing me in from myself? And when you appeared before me, there was no repentance for what I had done, as there was shame in the doing it; compassion only for that which was too small to be called human. The unfolding of your hands was plant-like, your ear was the shell I thundered in; your cries. when they came, were those of a blind creature trodden upon: pain not yet become grief. Birthday Come to me a moment, stand, Ageing yet lovely still, At my side, let me tell you that, With the clouds massing for attack And the wind worrying the leaves From the branches and the blood seeping Thin and slow through the ventricles Of the heart, I regret less, Looking back on the poem's Weakness, the failure of the mind To be clever than of the heart To deserve you as you showed how. posted by thomas | 6:55 PM Luminary My luminary. my morning and evening star. My light at noon when there is no sun and the sky lowers. My balance of joy in a world that has gone off joy's standard. Yours the face that young I recognised as though I had known you of old. Come, my eyes said, out into the morning of a world whose dew waits for your footprint. Before a green altar with the thrush for priest I took those gossamer vows that neither the Church could stale nor the Machine tarnish, that with the years have grown hard as flint, lighter than platinum on our ringless fingers. posted by thomas | 6:39 PM Sunday, August 25, 2002 Ancestors/genealogy now links. Inaccurate typing on my part, of course. But you can still go to antony maitland's site and search it for R.S.Thomas. posted by thomas | 10:07 AM |
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