In 1937 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Wales, where he served in small rural parishes until his retirement in 1978. When he met his wife Mildred, she had already earned a reputation as an artist; this stirred in him the desire to make his mark as a poet.
Much of his poetry is set on the harsh, bald Welsh hills where lone farmers scrape out a meagre existence, or in dark, empty churches where the poet wrestles with the silence of God. A.E. Dyson wrote of him in Critical Quarterly,
------"In Christian terms Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration,
------of the resurrection, of human holiness.... He is a poet of the
------Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness,
------and his theology of Jesus, in particular, seems strange against
------any known traditional norm."
His Collected Poems appeared in 1993, and his Collected Later Poems in 2004 — which gathers his last five volumes, including the posthumous book Residues.
Resurrection
Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us
how a stone has been rolled
from the mind, and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.
There are travellers upon the road
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough, and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack
of petrol, is crowned with flowers.
*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about R.S. Thomas: first post, second post, third post.
Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.
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