What had been blue shadows on a longed for horizon, traced on an inherited background, were shown in time to contain this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river, where the rectory stood, plangent as a mahogany piano. The stream was a bright tuning-fork in the moonlight. The hay-fields ran with a dark current. The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit.
The Collected Late Poems opens with The Echoes Return Slow, a collection of autobiographical poems in which the poet's own life is source and resource for some of his most searing questions and searching observations.Sometimes Thomas writes a line, apparently incidental, an explanatory observation, only the reader hears it as an inner interrogation.
Always the questioning, spirituality in the interrogative mood, an intellectual grappling with the world that doesn't depend upon, indeed is impatient with, that favoured word of our own times, "closure". Indeed for Thomas the idea of the pilgrimage is defining, the journey is from here to there and from loneliness to companionship, and the important and life-giving disposition is movement towards rather than arrival, longing rather than terminus, opening up to more possibility rather than the lid snap of a complacent mind-flattening closure.
So in these autobiographical prose paragraphs and line poems, the poet looks to his future as an old man, by seeking clues in his past. These are deeply personal, private and guarded poems. They are suggestive rather than illustrative, oblique in their references but together a series of snapshots which capture more of Thomas and his quest and questions than any 24/7 cctv could ever record. This is, I think, why I find Thomas's poetry so satisfying and unsettling, so true and so real but not with easy truth or reality reduced to the bearable.
The poems above, in which he recalls his own early days post-ordination, are a study in pastoral frankness. There's an acknowledged sense of inadequacy and the confessed limits of any human being when faced with grieving parents, bereaved widows, hopeful marriages and all those faces on a Sunday reflecting the diversity and fragility of human hopes, struggles and sorrows.
The prose poem specifically locates the high calling to be Christ's priest to local context - "this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river..." A lesson in reality awaits every Christian minister of whatever denomination, in this poem of confessed inadequacy and almost embarrassed premonition of failure.
That closing line of the prose poem, moves seamlessly but unsparingly into the anticipated failures, disappointments and disillusions of ministry in a hard place.
"The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit."
The ignorance exposed is not about unfulfilled intellectual capacity. The hill folk amongst whom he served as priest, what did he know of them? How could he even learn how to get to know them? What did all his theology offer to people for whom the word "God" was, in the words of another theologian, "like the plunge of lead into fathomless waters."
And just when he thought he had communicated something of what he was about as priest, just when he thought he was being invited in, "the draught out of their empty places", chilled his core so that he took refuge in "the heavier clothing of my calling." But as he spoke of light and love, the message that validated gis calling, he did so into the "thickening shadows of their kitchens."
There is a profound sadness in this poem, born out of a calling being tested by loneliness. His inability to understand and be understood, the difficulties in communication between the educated priest and a largely uneducated but shrewd and knowing community, add to the isolation. This is not so much personal rejection as a near inevitable communication failure.
The ignorance that is exposed is his inherent inability to know first hand what these people's lives were like. He doesn't know how these 'peasant' folk could ever be helped to access his articulations of his faith, or he ever understand that their faith was found, not in words and ideas, sermons and liturgies, but in the hardness of their living, the daily grinding experience of getting through each day. How to survive, and finding God in the realities of that struggle was more crucial than their ability or willingness to grasp whatever it was the priest was on about. Light and love, at least as words and promises, are little consolation in the dark winter nights of the soul.
But these are late poems. In Thomas's first published collection, The Stones of the Field (1946), the poet theologian is looking closely at the peasant, to learn, to understand, and to acknowledge that in the trudge and drudge of working the land, there is a faithfulness, a faith, a finding of meaning for such a life, so that in the doing of it God may be found.
Consider this man in the field beneath
Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,
Without joy, without sorrow,
Without children, without wife,
Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow.
A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,
For his name also is written in the Book of Life.2
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