In 1989 I walked into Waterstone's in Aberdeen and headed for the poetry section. There it was. The paperback edition of The Echoes Return Slow. I'd been reading R S Thomas for some time and found him to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the paths of the Lord."
It isn't all that far fetched to compare RST to John the Baptist. Thomas shows the same righteous anger, zeal for justice founded on peace, and determined passion about a God most clearly seen on the cross. Some of RST's best poetry has as the cantus firmus, "Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." The Welsh priest, no less than the Judean prophet, spoke uncomfortable truth to comfortable power, raged on behalf of a God too easily taken for granted, and had his times when he had to ask if the One he followed, believed in, wrestled with, really was the Promised One.
The God who inhabits Thomas's poetry is recognisably biblical, the God whose coming is in fire, judgement and apocalyptic warning. Much of The Echoes Return Slow is autobiographical, not only the chronology and circumstances of the poet's life, but the experiences of love and loneliness, faith and questioning, and in particular his experience of ambiguity and even ambivalence, about the awe inducing mystery of God.
There isn't a sentimental line in all his poetry so far as I know. The God who is present can be oppressively present, or painfully absent; the Creator's prerogatives over nature are usurped by human science and technology at humanity's peril; the countryside, the sea and coast, the mountains, all provide a theological landscape where God hides, and can be found only, and if at all, on God's say so.
The Echoes Return Slow is a strangely beautiful book. On the left page is a prose poem, its theme echoed in verse on the right page. The book progresses from his birth, through his growing up, marriage, priesthood, and into those later years. He would live twelve years after Echoes was published, and three more volumes would follow. Those who love the poetry of R S Thomas have their favourite volume – I would cheat and claim his Collected Poems were my favourites, but if I had to choose from around 25 published volumes I'd go for Experimenting with an Amen (1986) and Echoes.
I find it hard to quote bits of Thomas's poems. They are complete statements, and fragments distort, obscure or miss the point of the whole. So I quote two poems in which the priest poet, late in life, is still seeking and sometimes finding, and sometimes being found.
There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
……………………………………..
The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.
The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.
……………………………………………
The blurb on the back of Echoes is written by someone who 'gets' R S Thomas. It was from a review written for The Listener (How I miss that weekly tonic for the mind).
"One of the few living poets whose language one feels emerges from a genuinely silent and attentive waiting on meaning…he gives us the best religious poetry we are likely to get."
Waiting on Meaning; now there's a ready made title for a monograph on Thomas's faith, spirituality and poetry!
In 1976 Amos N Wilder published a brilliant and seminal book on the relationship between poetry and theology. The title was Theopoetic. Theology and the Religious Imagination. It explores the relationship between poetic language and theological language. The search for words adequate to the ineffable will inevitably frustrate. The crafting of images even approximate to the writer's experience of God requires imaginative reverence, disciplined restraint, and the courageous risk of being misunderstood. Patience with the limits of language, persistence in fashioning words with capax dei, and urgency of soul in seeking to know and be known by the God who is nevertheless worshipped, that requires a lifelong willingness to "wait on meaning."
(The two poems are found in The Echoes Return Slow, R S Thomas, (London: Papermac, 1988) pages 79 and 83.
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