At times R S Thomas reads as much like a Zen master, as a Welsh Anglican priest. His resistance to certainty, and reluctance to make dogmatic faith claims, betray a mind restlessly, at times angrily, interrogative. He came to a faith intuitively hesitant in his recognition of a Reality detected if at all, by hints, half-heard intimations and those unattended moments when truth invites attention. Distilled into this brief poem, are serious playfulness, unsentimental wistfulness, resilient hopefulness, and a capacity to make the uncertainty of 'maybe' sound like a promise, but not to be taken for granted. Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well", transposed to the minor less confident key of "Maybe…, after all…, all shall be well".
*
I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That's all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough
I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That's all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough
R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems,1988-2000 (Bloodaxe, 2004), page 131.
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