R S Thomas (poet)

@rsthomaspoet

famous Welsh poet in English language 1913-2000 “…catching this / one truth by surprise / that there is everything to look forward to…” #RSThomas #poetry #barddoniaeth 📍 yng Nghymru, wrth gwrs facebook.com/groups/RSThomas/ Not a Machine, nor Bot nor AI

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R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 3d

‘Harvest End’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) - From the Welsh of Caledfryn

Text of poem -

Harvest End.
(From the Welsh of Caledfryn)
The seasons fly; the flowers wither;
the leaves lie on the ground. Listen to the sad song of the reapers: Ripe corn', as over the sea the birds go.
Suddenly the year ends. The wind rages; everything in its path breaks. Dire weather; in front of a stick fire, fetched from
the forest, firm and infirm cower within doors.
The longest of lives too soon slips by.
Careers fold and with them good looks fade.
Spring's bloom is spent, summer is done, too.
With a rush we come to winter in the grave.

Diwedd y Cynhaeaf.
Tymhorau ehedant,
A blodau a wywant, A dail a orweddant Ar hyd y llawr;
Medelwyr a ganant, Ÿd aeddfed a gludant,
Adar ehedant
Dros y môr mawr.
Ar frys daw'r llym Aaea', Ei wynt a ysgythra,
Pob peth o'i flaen wyga, Daw'n dywydd du;
Wrth dân goleuedig
O friwydd o'r goedwig
Bydd sionc a methedig
Yn llechu'n tỷ.
Ar fyr yr ymlithra

Fel hyn yr oes hwya',

Fe dderfydd yr yrfa,

Gwywa'r hardd wedd;

Dy Wanwyn di ddarfu,

Mae d'Haf dithau i fyny,
Down toc i aeafu

I dy y bedd.

William Williams (Caledfryn)

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 6d

‘Gift’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Anrheg #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Gift.
Some ask the world and are diminished
in the receiving of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows me with sourceless light.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 10d

‘Roles’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Roles.
How old was he, when he asked who he was, and receiving no answer, asked who they were, who projected images of themselves on an unwilling audience. They named him, adding the preliminary politeness, endorsing a claim to gentility he did not
possess. The advance towards Christian terms was to an understanding of the significance of repentance, courtesy put under greater constraint; an effort to sustain the role they insisted that he had written.
Who reaches such straits flees
to the sanctuary of his mirror for re-assurance that he is still there, challenging the eyes to look back into his own and not at the third person over his shoulder.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 13d

‘Hebrews 12:29’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Hebrews 12:29.
If you had made it smaller we would have fallen off; larger and we would never have caught up with our clocks. Just right for us to know things are there without seeing them? Forgive us the contempt our lenses breed in us. To be brought near stars and microbes does us no good, chrysalises all, that pupate
idle thoughts. We have stared and stared, and not stared truth out, and your name has occurred on and off with its accompanying shadow. Who was it said: Fear not, when fear is an ingredient of our knowledge of you? The mistake we make, looking deep into the fire, is to confer features upon a presence that is not human; to expect love
from a kiss whose only property is to consume.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 14d

Elsi Eldridge, the celebrated artist and wife of poet-priest #RSThomas, was born #OnThisDay in 1909. Discover more at: meeldridge.com

The photo is a sepia-toned vintage portrait of a young woman with short, neatly styled hair parted in the middle. She is looking slightly downward and to the side with a calm, thoughtful expression. She is wearing a high-neck knitted sweater, a beaded necklace, and small earrings. The soft focus and aged coloring suggest the photograph dates from the early 20th century.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 17d

‘Fable’ 1986 - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Chwedl #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Fable.
Winged life - why respect it? A foretaste; heaven dwellers? But look what we do with what
we have - the smashed decibels, the razed cities, all
to the ticking of the unhatched egg in a Spartan temple.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 20d

‘Apostrophe’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Collnod #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Apostrophe.
Improvisers, he thinks, making do with the gaps in their knowledge; thousands of years on the wrong track, consoling themselves with the view by the way.
Their lives are an experiment in deception; they increase their lenses to keep a receding future in sight. In arid museums they deplore the sluggishness of their ascent by a bone ladder to where they took off into space-time. They are orbited about an unstable centre, punishing their resources to remain in flight.
There are no journeys,
I tell them. Love turns
on its own axis, as do beauty and truth, and the wise are they who in every generation
remain still to assess their nearness to it by the magnitude of their shadow.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 24d

‘The Fly’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #yGleren #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

The Fly.
And the fly said: 'Nothing to do. May as well alight here.' No luck;
no poison. So man walked immune down avenues of vast promise, seeking perfection. The fly had it; filled in the time flying, embroidering space with the invisible meshwork of flight's thread; spun rainbows from light's spectrum. Man worked more purposely at his plans: immortality,
truth; killing the things would not be killed, like time, love, the one human, the other one of the fly's ilk.
What
is perfection? Anonymity's patent? A frame fitted for effortless success in conveying viruses to the curved nostril?

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· 27d

‘Coming’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #YnDod #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Coming.
To be crucified
again? To be made friends with for his jeans and beard?
Gods are not put to death
any more. Their lot now is with the ignored.
I think he still comes stealthily as of old,
invisible as a mutation, an echo of what the light said, when nobody attended; an impression
of eyes, quicker than
to be caught looking, but taken on trust like flowers in the dark country towards which we go.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jul 15

‘Aubade’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Aubade.
I awoke. There was dew, and the voice of time singing:
It is too late to begin, you are there already.
I went to the window
as to a peep-show: There she was all fly-wheels and pistons;
her smile invisible
as a laser. And, 'No,' I cried, 'No' turning away into the computed darkness where she was waiting
for me, with art's stone rolled aside from her belly to reveal the place poetry had lain with the silicon angels in attendance.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jul 12

‘Formula’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Fformiwla #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Formula.
And for the soul in its bone tent, refrigerating under the nuclear winter, no epitaph prepared
in our benumbed language other than the equation hanging half-mast like the afterbirth of thought: E = mc'.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jul 8

‘Bequest’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Becwêdd #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

BEQUEST.
Wanting peace we were misled by a dead nation's counsel to prepare for war. Thinking love would survive an instruction in violence we took ourselves back to a dark school, terrified ourselves with our own propaganda.
As Germans their nostrils with bad smells, we inoculated ourselves with the poison factories in our meadows. Our scientists had white coats, vestments these of a clandestine ritual.
Somewhere from under an old dustbin lid you will have emerged for the re-assembling of the species.
We have left you nothing but the consequences of our refusal to sit down by the still pool in the mind, waiting for the unknown visitant's quickening of its surface.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jul 5

‘Gallery’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Oriel #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

GALLERY.
The stillness of paintings!
Move stealthily so as not to disturb.
They are not asleep.
They keep watch on our taste. It is not they
are being looked at but we by faces which over the centuries
keep their repose. Such eyes they have as, steadily, while crowds come and
crowds go, burn on with art's crocus flame in their enamelled sockets.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jul 1

‘The Unvanquished’ - #RSThomas (Destinations, Celandine 1985) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

THE UNVANQUISHED.
And courage shall give way to despair and despair to suffering and suffering shall end in death. But you who are not free to choose what you suffer can choose your response. Farmers I knew, born to the ills of their kind, scrubbed bare by the weather, suffocating with phlegm; all their means gone to buy their consumptive son the profession his body could not sustain. Proudly they lived, watching the spirit, diamond-faceted, crumble to the small, hard, round, dry stone that humanity
chokes on. When they died, it was bravely, close up under the rain-hammered rafters, never complaining.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 28

‘Pardon’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

PARDON.
I began by praising the beetle, time's brooch on the earth's tunic.
I grew bolder. The slug's glair was pearly in the dawn's jeweller's shop.
I looked at the sky for approval:
Keep going. The fox was a bush
on fire, the ground holy,
littered though it was with the dove's ashes.
And homo sapiens, that cracked mirror, mending himself again and again like a pool?
Who threw the stone? I forgave him his surface in the name of the unseen troubler of his depths.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 24

‘Song’ 1986 - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Cân #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

SONG.
Round and round; take my hand, dance at the grave's edge, dance like an angel on a pin's head - see you
after the explosion.
And I, an old stump cast up on time's shore ... Hush, the children will hear you. I fill
their stockings with coins that are the leaves
of a failed culture. Waiting under the mistletoe cluster I saw peace stand, and no-one willing to go up and kiss her for laughing at her old-fashioned clothes.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 21

‘Song at the Year's Turning’ - #RSThomas (Rupert Hart-Davis) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Song at the Year's Turning.
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble. The familiar ways Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart's flower withers at the root.
Bury it, then, in history's sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.
Love deceived him; what is there to say The mind brought you by a better way To this despair? Lost in the world's wood You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs The frost comes to barb your broken vows.
Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace In cold splendour robes this tortured place For strange marriage. Voices in the wind Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 17

‘Sarn Rhiw’ - #RSThomas (Destinations, Celandine 1985). This is where RS Thomas and his wife Elsi Eldridge lived in retirement.

Text of poem -

SARN RHIW.
So we know
she must have said something to him - What language, life? Oh, what language?
Thousands of years later
I inhabit a house whose stone is the language of its builders. Here
by the sea they said little.
But their message to the future was: Build well. In the fire of an evening I catch faces
staring at me. In April, when light quickens and clouds thin, boneless presences flit through my room.
Will they inherit me one day? What certainties have I to hand on like the punctuality
with which, at the moon's rising, the bay breaks
into a smile as though meaning were not the difficulty at all?

A peaceful coastal landscape viewed from a hillside. In the foreground is Sarn Rhiw, a rustic stone cottage surrounded by tall grass and trees, while below stretches the curved shoreline of Porth Neigwl and calm blue water. The scene is framed by leafy branches, with distant cliffs and hazy hills under a clear, sunny sky.

Sarn Rhiw, a whitewashed stone cottage, sits amid lush greenery and ferns, with a narrow stone path leading to a pale green door. The cottage has a weathered slate roof and stone chimneys, backed by dense trees under a bright blue, cloudless sky. The scene feels quiet, rustic, and secluded.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 14

‘West Coast’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

WEST COAST.
Here are men
who live at the edges
of vast space.
Light pours on them
and they lift their faces
to be washed by it like children. And their minds
are the minds of children,
shallow pools that the days
look into as they pass in the endless procession
that goes nowhere.
They are
spendthrifts of time, yet
always there is more of it
than they need for the tongue's clambering
up their one story.
Out in the fields,
against skies that are all
blood, they erect the scarecrow
of their kind, the crossed bones
with the flesh in tatters
upon them that have frightened away a lot more than the birds.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 10

‘Destinations’ - #RSThomas (Destinations, Celandine 1985) #Cyrchfannau #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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DESTINATIONS.
Travelling towards the light we were waylaid by darkness; a formless company detained us, saying everything, meaning nothing.
'It is a conspiracy, I said,
'of great age in revolt against reason, against all that would be ethereal in us.'
We looked at one another.
Was it the silence of agreement, or the vacuum between two minds not in contact? There is an ingredient
in thought that is its own hindrance. Had we come all that way to detect it? The voices combined urging us to put our trust
in the bone's wisdom. 'Remember' they charged us, 'the future for which you are bound is where you began.' Was there a counter
command? I listened as to a tideless sea on a remote star, and knew our direction was elsewhere; to the light, yes,
but not such as minerals deploy, to the brightness over an interior horizon, which is science transfiguring itself in love's mirror.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 7

‘He and She’ - #RSThomas (Destinations, Celandine 1985) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

$Text of poem - He And She. When he came in, she was there. When she looked at him, he smiled. There were lights in time's wave breaking on an eternal shore. Seated at table - no need for the fracture of the room's silence; noiselessly they conversed. Thoughts mingling were lit up, gold particles in the mind's stream. Were there currents between them? Why, when he thought darkly, would the nerves play at her lips' brim? What was the heart's depth? There were fathoms in her, too, and sometimes he crossed them and landed and was not repulsed. RS Thomas$

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· Jun 3

‘A Poet’ - #RSThomas (Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan 1986) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

A POET.
Disgust tempered by an exquisite charity, wrapping life's claws in purest linen - this man has history to supper, eats with a supreme tact from the courses offered to him.
Waiting at table
are the twin graces, patience and truth, with the candles' irises in soft clusters flowering on thin stalks:
Where did he come from?
Pupating against the time he was needed, he emerged with wings furled, unrecognised by the pundits; has spread them now elegantly to dazzle, curtains drawn with a new nonchalance between barbarism and ourselves.
Patron without condescension of the art, he teaches flight's true purpose, which is, sensitive but not too blinded by some inner radiance, to be in delicatest orbit about it.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 31

‘The Other’ - #RSThomas (Later Poems 1972–1982, Macmillan 1983) #YrArall #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

The Other.
They did it to me.
I preferred dead, lying in the mind's mortuary.
Come out, they shouted; with a screech of steel I jumped into the world smiling my cogged smile, breaking with iron hand the hands they extended.
They rose in revolt;
I cropped them like tall grass; munched on the cud of nations. A little oil, I begged in conspiracy with disaster. Ice
in your veins, the poet taunted; the life in you ticking away; your breath poison. I took him apart verse by verse, turning on him my x-ray eyes to expose the emptiness of his interiors. In houses with no hearth he huddles against me now, mortgaging his dwindling techniques for the amenities I offer.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 27

‘Prayer’ - #RSThomas (Later Poems 1972–1982, Macmillan 1983) #Gweddi #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

PRAYER.
Baudelaire's grave not too far
from the tree of science.
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed to steal from it,
somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 24

For Pentecost here’s RS Thomas’ antidote to his own perception of God as elusive/hidden/absent: ‘Suddenly’ (1983) - #RSThomas (Later Poems, 1972–1982 Macmillan London 1983)

Text of poem -

Suddenly.
Suddenly after long silence he has become voluble.
He addresses me from a 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 (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 20

‘Asides’ - #RSThomas (Later Poems 1972–1982, Macmillan 1983) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

ASIDES.
Between the closing of an eye and its opening centuries
of bone cold, a millenium of them.
Beneath all that monumental ice what art epochs, what religion?
Are those eye-lashes rigid with tears of possible compassion, icicles fringing the resigned lids?
The anthropomorphisms of time!
The lineaments he might have confessed to are elsewhere. What has ubiquity to do with form? Ah, planetary truth, inexorable in teaching everything that can be taught
but our mirrors their manners.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 17

Tickets are now on sale! RS Thomas & ME Eldridge Poetry & Arts Festival in Aberdaron 18th-21st June 2026 Theme: "Abercuawg - Paradise or Utopia?” Rowan Williams, Jason Walford-Davies, Clare E Potter, & more. Info: rsthomaspoetry.co.uk/2025-program... Tickets: rsthomaspoetry.co.uk/booking-info...

Taflen Gymraeg ar gyfer yr ŵyl

Welsh flyer for the festival

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 17

In Search of Abercuawg. Article in today's Western Mail on the Poetry and Arts Festival next month, organised by the #RSThomas and ME Eldridge Society.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 17

‘As Though’ - #RSThomas (Later Poems 1972–1982, Macmillan 1983)

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AS THOUGH.
As though there were no time like the present and that vanishing. As though Sirius were not light years away and the universe endlessly old. As though there were not in the earth's acres room for a thousand like him and as many bosoms, whiter than mine, for him to lay his head on. Love me, he said, holding his two hands out like a beggar so I could drop my child in them, one more creature to grow up in a world that goes tirelessly round, trying to understand what distances are.

R S Thomas (poet)@rsthomaspoet· May 16

Diolch, thank you, unfortunately there’s a mistake in the version you’ve used: it should read: “that had *the* treasure in it” - this changes the meaning and rhythm of the phrase. Here’s the correct version… ‘The Bright Field’ - #RSThomas (Laboratories of the Spirit, Macmillan)