by Professor Tony Brown
February 2024
My visit to Sarum in July 2023 had its origins in R.S. Thomas’s own country, when James Woodward and I met at a conference on the poet in Aberdaron, RS’s final parish, at the far tip of the Llŷn Peninsula in north Wales. While I am always delighted to talk about R.S. Thomas’s poetry, as I began to prepare my talk I was conscious of the long distance, not just geographically but culturally, from the harsh Welsh moorland and untamed seascapes of R.S. Thomas’s poetry to the settled tranquility of the cathedral close at Salisbury.
In his first parish at Manafon, in mid-Wales, R.S. Thomas, young, newly-ordained and brought up in a rather prim, bourgeois environment, was confronted by an agricultural community which he described later as world of ‘muck and blood and hardness’; his parishioners were hard-working, taciturn labourers and farmers, a people whom he found were more concerned with the prices at the fat-stock market than the state of their souls. It is out of the struggle to preach Christ’s message in such challenging circumstances that RS’s early poetry, in the 1950s and 1960s, was born, his struggle with ‘Iago Prytherch’ and his fellow rural labourers, who spent their days ‘churning the crude earth’ (‘A Peasant’).
Inevitably the young priest found himself questioning the nature of his calling, even of his own beliefs. Indeed, R.S. Thomas’s poetry is, throughout his long career, a poetry of questioning and of spiritual exploration.
It was this exploration which I wanted to talk about at Sarum. Despite having lectured on RS’s poetry in various corners of Europe and America, I must confess that I found myself a little unsure of what to expect from those coming to RS, not just a priest but a proud Welshman, in the shadow of an English cathedral. (He was rather irreverent when it came to church organisation and hierarchy; he certainly wasn’t big on cathedrals…) In the event I could not have expected a warmer welcome, from the moment my wife and I stepped through the door at Sarum and then from those who had come to the course, many of whom had demonstrated their interest by the very distance they had come for the day–from the Midlands, from the West Country, from Sussex, from London–and from their willingness to engage in discussion. I suspect that a few present were more familiar with RS’s poetry of the Welsh hills, the earlier work and the subject of my first talk, the poems that tend to get into anthologies and school syllabuses. But it seemed when, in the second talk, we looked at RS’s later poetry, the work of the mid-1970s onwards, the group became even more profoundly engaged. This is a poetry of spiritual search, of the striving to find God. For me it is a poetry of our times because of RS’s doubt and uncertainty, born of his struggle, in the impersonal world of consumerism and technology to understand the nature of God and to find a way to communicate with God or, to use RS’s term, ‘Ultimate Reality’. For RS, finally, the approach is through waiting–hence the title of the day– a mode of spiritual openness and meditation: ‘the meaning is in the waiting’ (Kneeling).
This seemed to strike resonant chords in the experience of many of those present. For me one of the measures of the success of an event like the one at Sarum is the question sessions. I needn’t have been anxious. The questions and discussion took us deeper into the poems than I had had time, and perhaps capacity, to achieve in the talks: questions and comments which found new angles of approach and indeed gave me new material for thought. Which is what always makes any sort of teaching rewarding. And discussion went on, over lunch, through the afternoon session which I gave on some of RS’s unpublished mss poems, and beyond. The atmosphere was warm, open, friendly and reflective. It was a good day.
Professor Tony Brown is Co-Director of the R.S. Thomas Research Centre at Bangor University, which houses an archive of R.S. Thomas’s manuscripts and is visited by scholars from continental europe, the USA and beyond. (tonybrown6716@gmail.com).
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