Pietà and a Personal Passion in the Poems of R. S. Thomas.

Last year I found a first edition of Pietà, by R S Thomas, his seventh published volume, issued in 1966. It's a serious looking slim volume, wrapped in now slightly faded mauve, and black. The austere appearance and stark title image, anticipate rather exactly the mood and gravity of much of the book's contents. The font used in the upper case title, the tau cross T, and the segnaccento above the A, are hauntingly evocative of Roman crucifixion nails. The dust jacket was designed by M.E. Eldridge, whom Thomas married in 1937.

The lamentation of the Christ (Pietà) is one of the most strongly evocative images in Christian art. The Pieta is a visual representation of a son's love-compelled suffering and death, and a mother's love inconsolable in grief. The the two human forms, mother and son, are entangled in the anguish of loss, death and bereavement, draped together in a love both serene and defiant of the world doing its worst.

Two poems can helpfully be read together from this collection; the title poem 'Pietà', and 'In Church'. Both poems express the anguish and ambiguity of the poet's faith at a time of crisis in his life and vocation as poet, priest and theologian on the trail of the elusive presence and compelling attraction of his God. Both poems also intimate a shift in Thomas to a more theological form of reflection on the presence and absence of God in the context of both the Passion pf Christ and Thomas's personal inner crucifixion of soul. Out of his experience of God's nearness and distance, presence and absence, occasional intimation of divine acknowledgement and frequent disappointment of unexplained silence Thomas, torn between faith and doubt, wrote some of his most faith-interrogating poems. In both 'Pietà', and 'In Church' he explores the concept, and the theological and spiritual implicates, of "an untenanted cross." 

Pietà

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.

And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.

Pietà, the title poem locates the incarnate and crucified Christ beneath a dominant cross and lying helpless in his mother's arms, the cradle that first held him. The scene is as still as death. There are no explanatory glosses, but a foregrounding of the Cross which is personified and invested with feelings. The wood-worked cross, sharing that same sense of cosmic loss, aches for the body of the carpenter, the whole creation groaning and awaiting redemption. It is an astonishing juxtaposition of ideas. 

The Michelangelo Pieta most naturally comes to mind as the defining image of a mother's lamentation overflowing in tears for the world. I don't know if Thomas ever went to Rome to see it, but behind that masterpiece is a huge square, sharp-edged 'untenanted cross', in stark contrast to the softly flowing drapery, human formfulness, and intricate detailed intimacy of the mother cradling her dead child. (See image below)

The entire mystery of the Incarnation as the story of God in Christ, from cradle to cross, resides in this short second stanza. The suffering of the Christ is mirrored in the face of his mother, her arms a cradle, the lifeless body suspended in that time between the times, post crucifixion and pre-resurrection. The untenanted cross aches to hold the crucified, and the arms of the mother though full again as she cradles her son, ache with the weight of his body, and are themselves cruciform. The poignancy of the poet's softer words are made more acute by the way he hints backwards to the nativity, and a maid holding her first child, and in those same arms, the destiny of humanity.

At the end of the Pietà collection comes 'In Church.' I wrote about that poem a year or two ago and the post can be found using the link below. I simply want to draw attention here to its connection to the poem Pietà. Waiting in the empty church is Thomas, the priest. When everyone else has gone, he is listening, searching, hoping for some glimpse or whisper of presence, some inner assurance that the crucified God he serves, though hidden is present, and though silent speaks even in that silence. 

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

'Pieta' and 'In Church' are clear poetic intimations that the faith of the priest R S Thomas was in critical dialogue with a theology increasingly apophatic, expressed in negative terms because language breaks under the strain of expressing the inexpressible. Yet a theology rooted still in the central Christian narrative of the Incarnation and the Cross of the Redeemer, celebrated in Eucharist, and despite all evidence to the contrary, embodied incarnationally and ecclesially, though often obscured, in the lives of Christian communities such as those amongst whom he toiled and struggled. 

Thomas understood human suffering. He knew that it was more than physical pain, that the ache of grief was another kind of heart attack, no less life-changing and debilitating. He understood with a tenderness not often attributed to him, human frailty, and arms that, however aching, will cradle the child, and the dead Jesus, and in their desperate holding will express the indefinable limits of human joy and human sorrow and human love.

All this in two poems. But in their turn towards a more overt and persistent interrogation of what kind of God is to be discerned, discovered, and divined from that 'untenanted cross', they signal the poet's future quest and questions about the Divine in the poems to be written beyond that pivotal collection of 1966, Pietà.    

  https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/10/in-church-often-i-tryto-analyse-the-qualityof-its-silences-is-this-where-god-hidesfrom-my-searching-i-have-stopped-to-list.html