Farm Hand
There was something you couldn’t find
An answer to. The question perhaps
Was ill-phrased. Day by day
You went out into the same fields
Expecting – what?
Millions of seeds,
Exploding in the usual way,
Greened your world. All about you
Life, that was too big to be lived
By the one flower, the one bird,
Put on its innumerable forms
That silenced you, even as they prompted
The huge query.
You kept hoping
Perhaps, for some trick of the light
To fix in an eternal moment
Of meaningfulness the separate shapes
That teemed there? I have seen you kneeling
In the wet furrows, as though you prayed,
Through the long silences, to the earth mother
For testimony. I have seen you raising
Your brute face as to a presence
In the bleak sky…
Is it from without
The answer is to come? I get no nearer
Seeking with as much patience within.1
For most of his working life my dad worked as a farm hand. Actually he took considerable pride in claiming his real job title – he was a dairyman, in charge of the cows, the milk production and supplemented that with work in the fields as required.
I have an early memory of sitting at the side of the field2 watching him plough with one of the two magnificent Clydesdale horses on the farm, and later memories of tractors and the advent of the very machinery R. S. Thomas viewed with incurable suspicion.
This poem resonates at a quite personal level for me. When Thomas describes the daily rounds in the same fields, surrounded by teeming life, I know quite exactly what he means about agriculture in the 50's and 60's. There were birds everywhere; roadsides and hedges riotous with colour, and wildflower seeds exploding in their millions to colour and green the world.
As a boy growing up on a farm, living in a tied cottage, my dad a farm hand who had one weekend off a month, and who rose early enough to have the cows brought from field or byre and the milk ready for collection by 8.00 am, I recognise the heroism of such faithfulness to the rhythms of his life. As an older lad I knelt in furrows with him, thinning turnips, planting potatoes, jute sacks tied around our knees to make the kneeling less painful.
So this poem by Thomas, written about a farm worker by a clergyman, is now being read by a Baptist minister whose dad was a farm worker. Day by day dad "went out into the same fields expecting — what?"
My love of our Scottish countryside, knowledge of birds and flowers and trees took seed and grew from an entire childhood with "Life all around me that was too big to be lived by the one flower, the one bird" – or for that matter, too big to be lived by this one growing mind and body of the person I was to become, and am still becoming.
Which raises the questions Thomas himself raises. What is the meaning of all this teeming life? Why does life "in all its innumerable forms" prompt the "huge query" of the meaning, purpose and end of existence? It takes a particular poetic genius to raise the core question of existentialism through the medium of a farm hand observed kneeling in wet furrows and "raising your brute face as to a presence in the bleak sky."
The primal urgency of the question of life's meaning is transposed to the lower key of apparent drudgery in the same fields, the recurring cycle of seasons, the weathered face, an "as though" kind of prayer, and a labourer's hunger for all of this to make more sense than the labour itself.
You kept hoping
Perhaps, for some trick of the light
To fix in an eternal moment
Of meaningfulness the separate shapes
That teemed there?
The nightmare of the existentialist is life that is absurd, an existence that has no meaningful end. Every moment is a moment of decision, and to live any kind of life demands authentic presence to what is. To live a life that is human, and therefore, "perhaps", of worth in itself, requires personal commitment to authentic being, an engagement with our own existence, both seeking and making meaning by who we are and the way we live. The poignant question of the country western singer has its own quaint existentialist slant, "Is this all there is?"
There are clues to the poet's compassion and fellow feeling for this farm hand, all the way through the poem. He knows the question may be "ill-phrased," but lack of sophisticated vocabulary isn't needed to feel the "huge query" and feel after its answer. The farm hand "kept hoping", the perseverance of the agricultural saint. "I have seen you kneeling in the wet furrows, as though you prayed," – it isn't difficult to imagine a priest's pastoral sympathy, and imagination in those words. And refusing to foist a false spirituality on a farm hand at his job, hence the qualification "as though" he prayed.
Yet again, the characteristic presence of the question mark, strategically placed to guide the direction of thought towards the interrogative mood – both of the sentence itself, and within the reader's own thought forms. "Is it from without the answer is to come?"
"I get no nearer,
Seeking with as much patience within.
The priest's concession in the last sentence is an example of both pastoral realism and ruthless personal honesty, both of them essential dispositions towards a mature spirituality that makes possible that other kind of perseverance of the saints – "ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened…" (Matthew 7.7)
"There was something you couldn't find an answer to."
The words are as true of the priest as of the farm hand. And the 'something' that eludes every attempted answer arises in the poem from a lyrical picture of fecundity and colour and energy emanating from the surrounding life in its innumerable forms. Such mystery silences, even as it prompts the "huge query" of life's meaning, purpose and end. As often in Thomas, the poem finishes with implied longing, and perhaps the acknowledgement that patient seeking is its own form of prayer, as is kneeling in the wet furrows where seeds are sown and eventually harvest gathered.
- R. S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems.(Eds.) Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, Bloodaxe, 2013, page 79.
- I'm sitting on mum's knee, over at the hedge behind the horse!
