A WELSH REVIVAL !

R .S. Thomas as a young cleric

Ronald Stuart Thomas (published as R. S. Thomas) was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the Anglicisation of Wales. He was the best known Welsh poet of his day. In 1955, John Betjeman, in his introduction to the first collection of Thomas’s poetry to be produced by a major publisher, Song at the Year's Turning, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after Betjeman himself was forgotten.
Professor M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience." He learnt the Welsh language at age 30, too late in life, he said, to be able to write poetry in it, and the sixties saw him working in a predominantly Welsh speaking community. In 1996 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lost out to Seamus Heaney.The Thomas family lived on a tiny income and lacked the comforts of modern life, largely by the poet's choice. One of the few household amenities the family ever owned, a vacuum cleaner, was rejected because Thomas decided it was too noisy. Although he may have taken some ideas to extreme lengths, Theodore Dalrymple has written, Thomas "was raising a deep and unanswered question: What is life for? Is it simply to consume more and more, and divert ourselves with ever more elaborate entertainments and gadgetry? What will this do to our souls?" He died in 2000 aged 87.

SUDDENLY

Suddenly after long silence

he has become voluble.

He addresses me from myriad

directions with the fluency

of water, the articulateness

of green leaves; and in the genes,

too, the components

of my existence. The rock,

so long speechless, is the library

of his poetry. He sings to me

in the chain-saw, writes

with the surgeon's hand

on the skin's parchment messages

of healing. The weather

is his mind's turbine

driving the earth's bulk round

and around on its remedial

journey. I have no need

to despair; as at

some second Pentecost

of a Gentile, I listen to the things

round me: weeds, stones, instruments,

the machine itself, all

speaking to me in the vernacular

of the purposes of One who is.

R. S .Thomas