The poetry of R.S. Thomas - R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004 by Chris Arthur

R. S. Thomas: Identity, Environment, and Deity. Christopher Morgan. Manchester University Press. [pounds sterling]40.00. 209 pages. ISBN 0-7190-6248-9.

On the occasion of R. S. Thomas's death in September 2000, the then Archbishop of Wales (now Archbishop of Canterbury), Rowan Williams, said of him: 'In religious circles he has been as influential as T. S. Eliot'. Christopher Morgan offers an excellent introduction to the powerful and complex religiousness that underlies Thomas's work. 'More than any other recent poet', Mr. Morgan asserts, he 'reinvigorates the genre of English-language religious poetry, reshaping it to reflect contemporary spiritual experience'. Accurately characterising such experience necessitates moving beyond purely Christian terminology. In choosing to parse his subject's work using Identity, Environment and Deity, Christopher Morgan not only highlights three key aspects of Thomas's oeuvre, but also puts his finger on some fundamental currents in contemporary spirituality.

Too often seen as an unremittingly severe presence, Thomas's verse saturated with the bleakness of the hard lives he chronicled, Mr. Morgan makes a convincing case for adopting a perspective which sees beyond the grimness of many of R. S. Thomas's poems to a more positive, if often elusive, vision. One of the book's strengths is how it reveals something of the architecture of this vision, making clear how it depends on the movement of the poet's mind between interior and exterior landscapes; between a sense of God's absence and presence; between awareness of nature's beauty and the cruelty evident in so many of its processes: between local settings and universal subjects.

Christopher Morgan provides some illuminating points of comparison. Situating Thomas's preoccupations by reference to Montaigne and Seamus Heaney is particularly effective. This technique of elucidation by comparison--which also takes in Charles Olson, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens and others--may stimulate readers to consider parallels and contrasts of their own. Given Robinson Jeffers's pain-filled verses, one wonders if he might be a poet worth setting beside Thomas. Certainly the title of William Everson's study of Jeffers as a religious figure, The Excesses of God (1988), has a striking resonance with elements of Thomas's theology. Consider, for example, the stark picture Thomas paints in 'Rough' (from his 1975 collection, Laboratories of the Spirit):

                       God looked at the eagle that looked at
                       the wolf that watched the jack-rabbit
                       cropping the grass, green and curling
                       as God's beard. He stepped back;
                       it was perfect, a self-regulating machine
                       of blood and faeces.

R. S. Thomas was a priest for over forty years. But his sense of God owes more to the raw energies of Celtic spirituality and nature mysticism than to the genteel precepts of conventional Anglicanism.

This is a lucidly written, well-researched study that bears the authority not just of the academic specialist who has pored over the texts, but of someone who has been moved by the spare beauty of Thomas's words and the depth of insight they convey. Mr. Morgan uses his well chosen thematic framework to good effect, providing a critical triangulation through which Thomas's writing slips into new and revealing focus (showing, for instance, how 'a daring linguistic transfusion' came about with the poet's engagement--particularly in his later work--with scientific thinking).

According to Randall Jarrell, 'a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great'. Reading R. S. Thomas one has the sense of someone who has stood out in all weathers and been struck repeatedly by a numinous voltage, charged unpredictably with wonderment at nature's beauty and disgust at its horrors. Christopher Morgan has done an excellent job of conducting Thomas's lightning through the grid of his scholarship, connecting readers to the electrifying words of this undoubtedly great poet.