The View from the Window, R. S. Thomas
Like a painting it is set before one,
But less brittle, ageless; these colours
Are renewed daily with variations
Of light and distance that no painter
Achieves or suggests. Then there is movement,
Change, as slowly the cloud bruises
Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps
A black mood; but gold at evening
To cheer the heart. All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried; yet what eye,
Looking coolly, or, as we now,
through the tears' lenses, ever saw
This work and it was not finished?
R S Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945-1990, (London: Dent, 1993, page 81)
God the artist is ceaselessly at work, and the poet is reflecting on his worldview through the limited standpoint of a familiar window. Every time the poet looks the scene has changed, the colours renewed, and the work displaying a subtlety and technique beyond the reach of any human artist. There is, in this poem, a deeply reverential acknowledgement of the cost and unending discipline of the artist persevering in continued work on the same canvas. This tireless artist is painting not only the fluid, elusive landscape visible as topography under the sky, but with the same deft knowing of the subject, he is painting the changing movements of the inner landscape of the viewer / reader. "Cloud bruises/are healed by sunlight", "white snow" contrasts with a "black mood", and "sunset gold" brings cheer to a heart at times more aware of the bruise than the sunlight.
Creation as continuous, the world as an unfinished masterpiece, the constant expenditure of the Creator's energy and emotional investment, enables Thomas to convey the soul of this artist poured out on his work: "All through history / The great brush has not rested, / Nor the paint dried…". It isn't often that Thomas's readers are given such a clear and genuine articulation of the poet's sympathy for the work and works of God. But in this poem the juxtaposition of a constantly moving landscape and a continuously working painter evokes in the reader a sense of a work in progress, and the artist's commitment to bringing it to completion.
What I find intriguing in all this is the theological reticence of Thomas in dealing with creation and Creator. There is no creation by fiat, none of the "God spoke and it was so". The refrain of Genesis that God spoke, it was so, and it was good, is absent. Instead there is the presumed presence of the painter, working away every day, renewing colours, adjusting light and shadow.
And as the painter works, the viewer looking through the window, watches, and then there is a moment of vision, a fusion of outward scenery and inner feeling, as the painter's deft touches, over the years of watching, build up the colours of light and shadow, on landscape and soul.
"All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried…
The Creator Artist is at work, and the view through the window is of a work in process, with as yet no deadline for completion. The artist is fully engaged, continuously working away at it, "all through history", bringing towards completion a vision that is dynamic not static, a work of artistic self expenditure that is, quite literally, his life's work.
This poem has made me wonder, along with other aspects of Thomas's theological poetics, whether he read the Process philosophical theologians of the 1960's and 70's (e.g. Whitehead and Hartshorne). Their emphases on God's involvement in the fate of the world, God as one who interpenetrates and animates all that exists (panentheism), the world as held within God creative purposes, and God as the lure of Divine Love, preferring persuasion to coercion, acting in the vulnerability of love rather than inscrutable sovereign power, shaping all that is towards future consummation and fulfilment.
Such a God risks the act of creating creatures with freedom, placing them in a world that is contingent and made for such creaturely freedom, creativity and potential, a world and universe where things can and do go badly wrong. Much of the central concerns of Process theism is hinted at in the image of the artist persisting towards perfection with no guaranteed outcome, such as is woven through 'The View from the Window.'
Thomas finishes with a question that opens up the entire range of human emotion, from cool detachment to tearful wonder. To human eyes the work is finished; yet look again and the artist is still at work, building up the texture, adjusting tone and colour, recalling the words of Jesus about the unrelenting demands of God's work: "As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me." (John 9.4)
So the artist works ceaselessly and patiently. God works, and waits, with all eternity to work in. "The activity of creating includes the passivity of waiting….of waiting upon one's workmanship to see what emerges from it." (W H Vanstone, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, (London, DLT,1977, p.33.) The God portrayed here is solicitous, patient, persistent, invested in the outcome, restlessly intentional in actualising potential by giving fullest expression to his vision.
It is a hallmark of Thomas's spirituality that the pressing questions of human existence, our varied and oscillating experiences of faith, and our incessant longing for beauty, truth and goodness, set up a force field of tensions that an earlier, simpler age might have called hunger for God.
"The tears' lenses" is a phrase of studied ambiguity – like the changing landscape of sunlight and shadow, now bright then dark, Looking at the view from the window, through our tears they refract as a rainbow spectrum, tears of sorrow or joy, wonder or regret, or ultimately trustful surrender. This is R S Thomas the priest poet at his most poignant.
"These colours are renewed daily". In writing those words, I wonder if Thomas was alluding to the one sunlit verse in the bruised clouds that brood over the Book of Lamentations 3.22-23:
"Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness."
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