Over the years I have written a number of posts on the poems of R S Thomas. I've decided to gather them together and post them here regularly, though not daily throughout Lent 2023. I have found writing my response to some of Thomas's poems helps me clarify, or at least dig deeper into, some of the most profound poetry on specifically Christian faith, in its most interrogative mood.
Poetry is a gift with words that take us to places beyond words. When poetry is written as letters from a far country, they can become life-saving missives for those of us who must eventually travel there. When it comes to faith, God, sin, love, loss, suffering, hope, grief and much else that confirms our transience, poetry often brings clarification and consolation, providing description of what seemed to us indescribable.
The relations of poetry to theology, and of both to philosophy and science, have seldom been better configured than in the poems of R S Thomas. In a note on his poetry on my Facebook page I wrote:
"They are so sharp, combining theological precision with theological hesitation - for Thomas, faith is not certainty, and God is not to be encapsulated in our words nor reducible to our cleverly constructed concepts. But at the centre of these poems is the Cross, the question mark, worship offered through open lips and gritted teeth, and a man whose cantankerous complexity was the vehicle for some of the loveliest lines I know about love, and that great Love that "moves the sun and other stars."
During Lent I am reading through this volume of his later poems. The poems were likened by Denis Healey to Beethoven's later Quartets in their "fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death." For years now I have listened to Thomas give voice to profound uncertainty, hesitant faith, pessimism which stops this side of despair, the elusive miracle of human love which transcends the best of the human intellect to define, delimit or explain away. His exploration of the outer landscape gives him clues to the changing inner climates, the varied landscapes of the mind and the heart and the spirit - I'm not sure Thomas would bother much about the anomalies and theological perplexities of such a tripartite view of the inner life of any one of us. He could be acid and ascerbic about theologians too quick with their answers.
So if Lent is a time for deep thinking; for stripping away illusion to better see what is, or is not, real; for re-aligning the loves of our life so that they nourish rather than devour each other; for facing the failures of faith, confronting bad faith, recovering good faith in God, and in ourselves and our sisters and brothers; then I know few guides more qualified to lead the mind, the heart and the Spirit through Lent and towards Calvary and beyond to resurrection.
Throughout Lent I'll post some meditations on these late poems, these late Quartets of the Welsh composer who, like Beethoven, understood the De Profundis, and the Alleluia of those for whom faith comes hard, and is all the more cherished for that truth.
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