The Long Dialectic of Rain and Sunlight

Extract

Those of R. S. Thomas’ poems which can be called—if somewhat loosely—religious, are frequently variations of a dichotomy one term of which appears to have the poet’s qualified approval. And our confidence in the integrity of Thomas’ response to the complexity of his experience is sustained because, as we constantly discover, the preferred term in one variation of the dichotomy becomes the less favoured term in another. Sometimes, indeed, the less favoured term may even be identified with the overtly religious position. Nor are we required to share Thomas’ faith; he is neither insistent nor didactic and consequently there is no problem of distinguishing between the poet and the believer. Indeed, R.S.Thomas is not only immune to the virus of apologetic religiosity but he sustains a dialogue in which faith and unfaith are held in unresolved tension. If his world clearly differs from the one we are familiar with in Larkin’s Church Going it does so, not because it is fundamentally different, but because it is approached from a less familiar direction.

Curiously pehaps, since both are Anglicans, R.S.Thomas’ poetry is quite unlike Betjeman’s, and this is not simply a matter of technique, but has to do with attitudes, and especially their very different ideas about the importance of social artefacts. However much Betjeman deplores Slough’s bogus Tudor bars he delights in the bricky beauty of small towns—the area formerly castigated by Hopkins as ‘Oxford’s base and brickish skirt’ and in this—as in a good deal else, R.S.Thomas is closer to Hopkins. The mere physical threat is seen as having important spiritual implications, although for Thomas the pain is less acute, less fraught, and less creatively tuned to transmit the fleeting energy of living movement.