R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems

I recently read an amusing biography of the poet R. S. Thomas by Byron Rogers called The Man Who Went into the West. Together with his Uncollected Poems they make an interesting addition to the literature by and about Thomas, surely one of the most gifted poets of the last century.

R. S. Thomas died in September 2000 and I have always admired his poetry, an uncanny blend of bleak brilliance and sardonic wit at times tempered by his empathy for the harsh reality of the human condition when put to the ultimate test. His Uncollected Poems, edited by Tony Brown and Jason Davies is just what it says - a collection of poems culled from small magazines and limited print runs of collections that did not reach his main collections of which there are of course many.

The poems here reflect all of Thomas' preoccupations from those with what he thought of as 'Welshness' or 'Englishness' and the sad state of the Welsh nation and language to those that meditate upon God, man and 'the Machine', Thomas' shorthand for the domination of scientific technology over the spiritual and human.

Early poems here have familiar themes - Welsh farm life and characters such as Iago Prytherch make their appearance as well as Welsh places and even a poem wholly in Welsh called  Y Gwladwr meaning 'The Peasant' in the translation provided. These early poems are supple and strong like the hill farmers Thomas ministered to in his parishes though if Byron Rogers is correct, they themselves did not always appreciate finding their way into Thomas' poems. Here is an extract from The Peasant:

"Everyone now asks what will become
Of a world that turns away from God's sunlight
To look at the endless night,"

For Thomas, roots in the land keep the peasant-farmer "safe from the invincible sea/Of that darkness", a darkness without God which he questioned so often in his verse - sometimes finding there the "eternally new", sometimes an absence that simply refused an answer.

Of the later poems, some are concerned with language, some with the environment and some with what might be called 'presences' that for Thomas seem to hover at the threshold of thought and imagination such as in Coming of Age, a meditation on the loss of conscience that Thomas perceives in the contemporary outlook:

"The repentances are over.
The prodigals have nowhere to return
to. They are their own
fathers and forgave themselves
at their setting forth."

This kind of disassociation with both authentic self-hood and tradition is a constant concern of Thomas for whom modernity has created a society that vows "to acknowledge no vow" with all the incipient vacuity that follows.

Always exciting, never without provocation, even these uncollected poems may have found their way into the collections of a poet with a less stringent standard of perfection. Language, says Thomas in one late poem "has run its course" just as the computer "is unable to find God". Without faith, asserts the ageing but unfailing bard,

                      "there is only
the machine's repetitions,
parallel tramlines of prose
never to come together as praise."

And the vocation of the poet, if it is anything, is to celebrate and praise, a vocation from which Thomas never once wavered.

Centre image: St Hywyn's Church, Aberdaron.

The significance of Yeats

W. B. Yeats was no Catholic but he could not escape the influence of a Catholic culture on his boyhood upbringing nor on the how he saw the world, even when it was through the eyes of a strained Rosicrucianism or occult researches into the 'automatic writing' of his wife. His ability to enchant, to take us to the borders of Faerie remains, even after his political friendships and mystical wanderings are taken into account. For this reason he is one of my favourite poets.

When I was in my mid-twenties I took a trip to Ireland to visit Dublin and County Sligo where Yeats spent much of his early years under the influence of his Grandfather William Pollexfen. Dublin I barely recall; a city of dusty streets and buildings in mid-demolition and reconstruction amidst the pervasive smell of the Guinness factory at the water's edge. But Sligo is etched into my memory forever.

It is no wonder Yeats made it the setting of so many of his poems with its "haystack levelling winds", long empty strands and confabulation of folk tales and religious stories and influences. Sligo is very beautiful but also very wet. Staying for three weeks in the summer, we were treated to one day without rain and a constant wind buffeting the fields and cottage. Creevykeel where we stayed nestles quite close to Ben Bulben and is near to Drumcliff churchyard where Yeats is buried under that black headstone, so bleak and so final: Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!

The louring hills and sweeping seascapes, cottages drenched in the memory of a people out of time and the rustling of the wind in the reeds beside the shore of strand or lake. The drear farms that came alive at the talk of insurgency and southerners making their way north in the wake of the 'troubles'. All that and the Celtic gods competing in the mind of a superstitious people who were once in love with God.

As I walked the empty strands and rain-swept hills, I read Yeats' poems. Those miraculous fragments of a world shot through with the supernatural, haunted with the presence of the other. Of that which lies just beyond the reach of human thought and imagination and which can only be captured, if at all, in mystical communion and prayer. But Yeats was no mystic in the sense of one who communes with the God of Jacob, Isaac and Abraham.

Yeats' power derives from another source, from the springs of an imagination formed by his own search for meaning beyond the sensible world. This was a search that drew upon Christian revelation but which treated it much as he treated all material for his imagination - as just that, material upon which his fertile mind could work until it found a pattern that gave a form to his deepest longings and desires.

These, ultimately, were and remain those of the heart. Yeats' early poetry is often that which appeals most to modern readers and this is perhaps the reason for his appeal. Where cerebral, he looses us in a world of arcane symbols that reach back into the world of the occult, one which intersects in myriad ways with Yeats' own private experience and perception. One which at times is hard to fathom.

But not in works like Down by the Salley Gardens, The Song of Wandering Aengus, He wishes for the Clothes of Heaven or  Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland. Yeats is at his best when he is most elemental or when he creates an imaginative tapestry into which he leads the reader as if into another world. These early poems that I have named come in the period up to the turn of the twentieth century when Yeats' vision was transfixed by a beauty that was tantalisingly just out of reach, that he found in myths and legends of the Celt, in echoes of the Catholic faith, in the diffuse pantheism of the East and in nature's perpetual call to its origins.

And of course, to the beauty of woman, of "cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes" that he hope would lead him "to build a perfect beauty in rhyme" (He tells of Perfect Beauty). Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of Yeats is his ability to remind us of the importance and presence of beauty in our midst. Beauty that is an antidote to the ugliness he saw in the burgeoning modernism of his time. An ugliness in contemporary life that lead him to the post-war lamentations of The Second Coming:

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats knew that intellectual beauty of the kind found in many of his poems, was a reflection of a real beauty whose origins lie beyond the borders of this world. A beauty that he sought in many places from Celtic myth to the occult practices of his later years. And beauty, Yeats also knew, both wounds and consoles because it recalls us to the transience and impermanence of mortality and the permanence of a Beauty for which we long and which is found in its completeness only in Christ. Lest we miss the point, his poems remind us that we must take care not to ignore its presence in our lives.

Images: Portrait of Yeats by Augustus John, Ben Bulben with Yeats epitaph.

J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Fall of King Arthur" and the holy realm of Logres

I am not a medievalist but was recently given a copy of The Fall of Arthur by J. R. R. Tolkien by my son. A long-time enthusiastic of Tolkien's work, this is verse that at times matches the doom-laden atmosphere of both The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin. Tolkien abandoned the poem some time in the mid 1930s probably due to the overwhelming pressures of other projects and his teaching load at Oxford. What he left, though unfinished, is both powerful and memorable.

Perhaps more than anything, Tolkien manages to conjure up a world of brooding and tragic passions that seem reflected in the very landscapes he describes - the eastern forests and tempest-torn skies of Europe where the warring Arthur goes to defend the ruin of the "Roman realm" and the fierce seas driving Arthur and his enemies towards the shores of "blessed Britain" through sweeping surf and waters that glitter with green and silver.

Here is a brief example from the description of the Eastern forests where Arthur takes his army, a forest called Mirkwood:

                          "Thus at last came they
to Mirkwood's margin   under mountain-shadows:
waste was behind them,   walls before them;
on the houseless hills   ever higher mounting
vast, unvanquished,   lay the veiled forest." (I.67-71)

Further in we see "lowering trees", "ravens croaking" and "ruinous rocks" swallowed by "sudden tempest". The sense of a world haunted by the almost physical presence of evil and darkness is very powerful throughout the poem, as if the passions stirred up among warring and discontent men were played out in creation among "shapes disastrous" and "fell shadows". Readers of both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion will recognise echoes of style and imagery in all of these phrases.

The Fall of Arthur is powerful verse capturing the last days of King Arthur returning from Eastern wars to defend his kingdom against the treachery of Mordred. Throughout the poem we are taken inside the loss of both Guinevere and Lancelot to a love that proves only tragic and divisive for themselves and the "kindly Christendom" for which Arthur longs on his return. The tragedy and unfolding darkness however, is at times shot though with glimpses of the Christian splendour that Arthur had come home to defend.

Here we will find "dragon-prowed" ships bringing death and destruction, the "wolf" Mordred whose lust drives him to hunt the runaway Guinivere even to the "walls of Wales" and darkness haunting both sea and land as war simmers on the shores of the "holy realm" of Logres. But here also we will find the "holy crown" of King Arthur coming back to reclaim his kingdom with both might of arms but also a deep devotion to the Catholic faith, and specifically to the Virgin and Child, an image of which is emblazoned on his sails:

"at last returning   to his lost kingdom.
On his shrouds there shone   sheen with silver
A white lady   in holy arms
a babe bearing   born of maiden.
Sun shone through them.   The sea sparkled." (IV.126-129)

Men, says the narrator "marked it well" and "Mordred knew it". In an egalitarian age, this remarkable devotion to all that is tender, beautiful and life-giving seems out of place amidst the cry and hue of war. But Tolkien knew, I think, that the two are far from incompatible.

Tolkien's wonderful verse reminds us that we need to rediscover the purity of devotion and the love of all that is truly holy and good in our time. But equally, we need to rediscover a willingness to defend it, even at great personal cost.

Images: The Fall of Arthur, King Arthur with Virgin on Shield (14th C.), Madonna and Child by Ansano di Pietro di Mencio (15th C.).

Harps of Birkenau: The Auschwitz Poems

I recently took a school trip out to Berlin and Krakow during which we visited among many places the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps. The visit came after being in Berlin and seeing the Jewish Museum, Oscar Schindler's factory and the Berlin Wall and was in many respects the main visit of the trip. I have taught some of the literature of the holocaust before but whilst at Auschwitz came across an anthology called The Auschwitz Poems, edited by Adam A. Zych.

It seems incredible after visiting the camp and seeing close-up how the extermination of a whole race was planned and implemented that amidst the terror and anguish of this time, many poems were written in the camp as well as after the camp was liberated. Some of these are by former inmates, relatives or visitors.

It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the mystery of iniquity in a place like Auschwitz, nor to reel at its radical nature. Walking the site, the horror that unfolded there can be difficult to grasp. It was a hot day on our visit and I began to feel distinctly light-headed as a result of both the heat and the experience. But the poems in this anthology are, if anything, a testament to the ability of life to ultimately triumph over death as we believe as Christians that it does. They are a testament so often to the human spirit's desire for transcendence even amidst the most terrible of circumstances:

"Creative writing in concentration camps, gulags, and prisons revealed that even in the most difficult conditions one could and must remain a human being - a creative being - and not the helpless convict condemned to scorn and annihilation." (Adam A. Zych, Introduction)

Many voices are represented her, including those of the famous such as Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell. But the less well-known or even unknown also predominate here such as Shelli Jankowski-Smith whose poem The Death of Maximilian Kolbe I especially like. We were able to visit Kolbe's last cell in the basement of the notorious Cell Block 11, also known in the camp as the 'Death Block'. Photography is forbidden there and all that adorns Kolbe's cell are two large candles and a wreath on the wall.

Saint Maximilian Kolbe's story perhaps more than anything illustrates that evil does not have the last word. That in the last analysis, evil is only defeated by love. Father Kolbe's exchange of his life for that of another prisoner reminds us that standing against and overcoming evil is costly; in the face of the most radical evil, Kolbe understood that only the most radical love could meet and overcome it. By modelling Christ's love in and through his death, Father Kolbe gave hope to hundreds of prisoners. Says the ending of Janowski-Smith's poem:

"There is, at least, no solitude in the grave. The communion
of saints is always with us. We walk
in the ashes of saints, we breath the dust of martyrs."

And the blood of martyrs, as Tertullian once wrote, is the seed of the Church. I will only mention one other voice here for now, the voice of Zofia Grochowalska-Abramovich who is sometimes referred to 'the poet of Auschwitz'. Her story is a fascinating one and is taken up here by Cherie Braun along with one of Abramovich's poems, the beautiful The Fragrance of Lindens.

Zofia Grochowalska-Abramovich, a Polish Christian working for the resistance spent four years in Ravensbruck and Auschwitz and when the allies were coming, buried her poems in a jar at Auschwitz. This, according to Braun was later recovered by another camp inmate. Any literary activity in the camps was forbidden which is perhaps why some of her work appears fragmentary, like this from a haunting piece called The Harps of Birkenau:

"Smoke floats, thick foul smoke...
People burn people here.

And on luminous poles
stretched wires shine.
These are the harps of Brzezinka,
harps of Birkenau."

Brzezinka means 'birch forest' but also refers to a small Polish village about two miles from Auschwitz. Its double meaning suggests both the human destruction at Auschwitz but also the use of the forest to hide the instruments of extermination, the gas chambers and the crematoria.

Here, the harp - instrument of praise in the Psalms but also of lamentation - is equated with imprisonment and suffering and with the wire fences surrounding the camp. More specifically we might see an identification with the suffering in exile of the Jews in Psalm 137 who hung up their harps by the River Babylon in grief at their captivity.

Despite this, Grochowalska-Abramovich did not hang up her harp, but wrote in protest at the inhuman suffering she witnessed around her. Like many others in this anthology, her words are both memorable and important as a testament of hope to the ability of the person to retain their freedom even when everything has apparently been taken away.

Images: Book cover to "The Auschwitz Poems", Inscription on one of four tombstones at Birkenau for all the dead of Auschwitz; Saint Maximilian Kolbe; Crematorium through birches, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Morning eastward springs: The funeral of Stratford Caldecott

This week I attended the funeral of the Catholic writer Stratford Caldecott at the Oratory in Oxford (see Kathy Schiffer's brief obituary here). I had met Stratford only twice - both times at conferences organised by the G. K. Chesterton Institute in Oxford - but had also corresponded by email with him several times about writing and publishing. My daughter Emily had the privilege of staying with his family in Oxford for a month while she studied to teach English as a Foreign Language there.

Stratford's funeral was the most beautiful I have attended, rich in the beauty and hope of the Catholic Tradition and set to the beautiful Requiem by Gabriel Fauré performed live in the Oratory itself. Stratford embodied the call of the Second Vatican Council to proclaim the mystery of salvation and restore all things in Christ. He will be deeply missed and his passing will leave a profound impression on the Catholic intellectual landscape of this country.

The Oxford Oratory was of course where Gerard Manley Hopkins worked as a curate from 1878 before moving to Manchester. Hopkins' poetry was in many ways my first encounter with verse outside of the poets I was taught at school such as D. H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. In 1877, Hopkins wrote "God's Grandeur" later published by Robert Bridges with other poems of this period such as "As kingfishers catch fire".

The last lines of this poem bring to mind the hope of light from darkness witnessed by Stratford's funeral:

"And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

The hope of eternal life to which Hopkins witnessed as a priest and of which Stratford wrote so often. Whilst in Oxford, we also revisited the University Church of St Mary the Virgin where C. S. Lewis preached his famous sermon The Weight of Glory in which he says of the hope of glory that awaits us as Christians:

"We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning star...At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure...Some day, God willing, we shall get in."

Stratford's funeral was such as day, for like Hopkins he knew that,

   "Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
   To the Father through the features of men's faces."
       (from As kingfishers catch fire)

May he behold "white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King).

Requiescat in pace, Stratford.

A list of Stratford Caldecott's books can be found here.