Ronald Stuart Thomas published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican Clergyman, noted for his nationalism and spirituality.

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• The nearest we approach God…is as creative beings. The poet, by echoing the primary imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.
  • The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (1963), p. 8

• Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province ... A poet must be able to claim ... freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry ... And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. ... My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.
  • "R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet" (BBC TV, 2 April 1972)

• Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being ... ultimate reality is what we call God.
  • "R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet" (BBC TV, 2 April 1972)

• On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one."
  But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."
  • Neb [No-one] (1985)

• You have to imagine
  a waiting that is not impatient
  because it is timeless.
  • "The Echoes Return Slow" in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)

• Let despair be known
  as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
  have its springs, too, brimming,
  disarming him; discovering somewhere
  among his fissures deposits of mercy
  where trust may take root and grow.
  • "Tidal" in Mass for Hard Times (1992), p. 43

• Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
  • Selected Prose (1995), p. 131

• I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
  • "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen." in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

• I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. ... So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God ... so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.
  • "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen." in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

• True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. ... I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs ... are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.
  • "R. S. Thomas in conversation with Molly Price-Owen." in The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)

Poetry For Supper (1958)

• "Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
  Before it enter a dark room.
  Windows don't happen."
  So two old poets,
  Hunched at their beer in the low haze
  Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
  Noisily by them, glib with prose.
  • "Poetry For Supper"

• They left no books,
  Memorial to their lonely thought
  In grey parishes: rather they wrote
  On men's hearts and in the minds
  Of young children sublime words
  Too soon forgotten. God in his time
  Or out of time will correct this.
  • "The Country Clergy"

• It seems wrong that out of this bird,
  Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
  Places about it, there yet should come
  Such rich music, as though the notes’
  Ore were changed to a rare metal
  At one touch of that bright bill.
  • "A Blackbird Singing"

• A slow singer, but loading each phrase
  With history’s overtones, love, joy
  And grief learned by his dark tribe
  In other orchards and passed on
  Instinctively as they are now,
  But fresh always with new tears.
  • "A Blackbird Singing"

Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

Song at the Year's Turning : Poems, 1942-1954

• He arose, pacing the floor
  Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem
  Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure
  The long torture of delayed birth.
  • "A Person From Porlock"

• Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
  And saw love in a dark crown
  Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
  Golden with fruit of a man's body.
  • "In a Country Church"

• I have been all men known to history,
  Wondering at the world and at time passing;
  I have seen evil, and the light blessing
  Innocent love under a spring sky.
  • "Taliesin 1952"

• I have been Merlin wandering in the woods
  Of a far country, where the winds waken
  Unnatural voices, my mind broken
  By a sudden acquaintance with man’s rage.
  • "Taliesin 1952"

• I have known exile and a wild passion
  Of longing changing to a cold ache.
  King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
  Knowing the body’s sweetness, the mind’s treason;
  Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
  Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart’s need.
  • "Taliesin 1952"

• We live in our own world,
  A world that is too small
  For you to stoop and enter
  Even on hands and knees,
  The adult subterfuge.
  • "Children’s Song"

• You cannot find the centre
  Where we dance, where we play,
  Where life is still asleep
  Under the closed flower,
  Under the smooth shell
  Of eggs in the cupped nest
  That mock the faded blue
  Of your remoter heaven.
  • "Children’s Song"

Tares (1961)

• All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
  I spoke a tongue that was passed on
  To me in the place I happened to be,
  A place huddled between grey walls
  Of cloud for at least half the year.
  My word for heaven was not yours.
  The word for hell had a sharp edge
  Put on it by the hand of the wind
  Honing, honing with a shrill sound
  Day and night. Nothing that Glyn Dwr
  Knew was armour against the rain's
  Missiles. What was descent from him?
  • "A Welsh Testament"

• Even God had a Welsh name:
  He spoke to him in the old language;
  He was to have a peculiar care
  For the Welsh people. History showed us
  He was too big to be nailed to the wall
  Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
  Between the boards of a black book.
  • "A Welsh Testament"

• Yet men sought us despite this.
  My high cheek-bones, my length of skull
  Drew them as to a rare portrait
  By a dead master. I saw them stare
  From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep
  In ewes and wethers. I saw them stand
  By the thorn hedges, watching me string
  The far flocks on a shrill whistle.
  And always there was their eyes; strong
  Pressure on me: You are Welsh, they said;
  Speak to us so; keep your fields free
  Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar
  Of hot tractors; we must have peace
  And quietness.
  • "A Welsh Testament"

• Is a museum
  Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper
  Of the heart's relics, blowing the dust
  In my own eyes? I am a man;
  I never wanted the drab role
  Life assigned me, an actor playing
  To the past's audience upon a stage
  Of earth and stone; the absurd label
  Of birth, of race hanging askew
  About my shoulders. I was in prison
  Until you came; your voice was a key
  Turning in the enormous lock
  Of hopelessness. Did the door open
  To let me out or yourselves in?
  • "A Welsh Testament"

• I am a man now.
  Pass your hand over my brow.
  You can feel the place where the brains grow.
  • "Here"

• I am like a tree,
  From my top boughs I can see
  The footprints that led up to me.
  • "Here"

• There is blood in my veins
  That has run clear of the stain
  Contracted in so many loins.
  • "Here"

• Why, then, are my hands red
  with the blood of so many dead?
  Is this where I was mislead?
  • "Here"

• Why are my hands this way
  That they will not do as i say?
  Does no God hear when I pray?
  • "Here"

• I have nowhere to go.
  The swift satellites show
  The clock of my whole being is slow.
  • "Here"

• It is too late to start
  For destinations not of the heart.
  I must stay here with my hurt.
  • "Here"

The Bread of Truth (1963)

• The deep spaces between stars,
  Fathomless as the cold shadow
  His mind cast.
  • "Wallace Stevens", p. 25

Pietá (1966)

• She is young. Have I the right
  Even to name her? Child,
  It is not love I offer
  Your quick limbs, your eyes;
  Only the barren homage
  Of an old man whom time
  Crucifies.
  • "The Dance"

Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

• Deliver me from the long drought
  of the mind. Let leaves
  from the deciduous Cross
  fall on us, washing
  us clean, turning our autumn
  to gold by the affluence of their fountain.
  • "Prayer", p. 10

• It is alive. It is you,
  God. Looking out I can see
  no death. The earth moves, the
  sea moves, the wind goes
  on its exuberant
  journeys. Many creatures
  reflect you, the flowers
  your color, the tides the precision
  of your calculations. There
  is nothing too ample
  for you to overflow, nothing
  so small that your workmanship
  is not revealed.
  • "Alive", p. 51

• The darkness
  is the deepening shadow
  of your presence; the silence a
  process in the metabolism
  of the being of love.
  • "Alive", p. 51

• Life is not hurrying
  on to a receding future, nor hankering after
  an imagined past. It is the turning
  aside like Moses to the miracle
  of the lit bush, to a brightness
  that seemed as transitory as your youth
  once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
  • "The Bright Field", p. 60

Frequencies (1978)

• Sometimes a strange light
  shines, purer than the moon,
  casting no shadow, that is
  the halo upon the bones
  of the pioneers who died for truth.
  • Groping", p. 12

• There was a larger pattern
  we worked at: they on a big
  loom, I with a small needle.
  • "In Context", p.13

• A power guided my hand. If an invisible company
  waited to see what I would do,
  I in my own way asked for
  direction, so we should journey together
  a little nearer the accomplishment
  of the design.
  • "In Context"

• It was not
  I who lived, but life rather
  that lived me.
  • "In Context"

• Is there a place
  here for the spirit? Is there time
  on this brief platform for anything
  other than mind's failure to explain itself?
  • "Balance", p. 49

Between Here and Now (1981)

• Art is recuperation
  from time. I lie back
  convalescing upon the prospect
  of a harvest already at hand.
  • "Pissaro: Kitchen Garden, Trees in Bloom", p. 41

• In the silence
  that is his chosen medium
  of communication and telling
  others about it
  in words. Is there no way
  not to be the sport
  of reason?
  • "The New Mariner", p. 99

• I had looked forward
  to old age as a time
  of quietness, a time to draw
  my horizons about me,
  to watch memories ripening
  in the sunlight of a walled garden.
  But there is the void
  over my head and the distance
  within that the tireless signals
  come from. And astronaut
  on impossible journeys
  to the far side of the self
  I return with messages
  I cannot decipher.
  • "The New Mariner", p. 99

• Ah, what balance is needed at
  the edges of such an abyss.
  I am left alone on the surface
  of a turning planet. What

  to do but, like Michelangelo’s
  Adam, put my hand
  out into unknown space,
  hoping for the reciprocating touch?

  • "Threshold", p. 110

Later Poems (1983)

• somewhere within sight
  of the tree of poetry
  that is eternity wearing
  the green leaves of time.
  • "Prayer" in Later Poems (1983)

• What was the shell doing,
  on the shore? An ear endlessly
  drinking?
  What? Sound? Silence?
  Which came first?
  Listen.
  • "Questions"

No Truce with the Furies (1995)

• I turn now
  not to the Bible
  but to Wallace Stevens
  • "Homage to Wallace Stevens"

• Blessings, Stevens;
  I stand with my back to grammar
  At an altar you never aspired
  to, celebrating the sacrament
  of the imagination whose high-priest
  notwithstanding you are.
  • "Homage to Wallace Stevens"

• All art is anonymous.
  • "Anybody's Alphabet"

Quotes about Thomas

• His example reduces most modern verse to footling whimsy.
  • Kingsley Amis, in 1956, as quoted in A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English (1983)

• I am not notably frivolous, but whenever I read R. S. Thomas’s poetry, or his biography, I cannot help but reflect that, like the majority of mankind, I have spent most of my life chasing false gods.
  • Theodore Dalrymple, in "A Man Out of Time : A life of poet R. S. Thomas entertains and illumines" in City Journal (6 November 2006)

• Thomas is not a Wordsworthian poet, and his “nature” is not Wordsworth’s; it is history, rather than divinity, which he responds to most, in the bleak beauty of Wales. In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness ... He is a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.
  • A. E. Dyson, in Yeats, Eliot, and R.S. Thomas : Riding the Echo (1981), p. 296

• Thomas has been famously plain-spoken — within the prevailing unclearess. Every poem represents an act of will with which he tries to beat a path, to habituate the microbe, to define its Christian antecedents. It is a painstaking effort: he must find a language that is exact, spare, solid, disciplined yet resonant.
  • John Pikoulis and Martin Roberts, in "R.S. Thomas's Existential Agony" in Poetrywales, Vol. 29, No. 1 (July 1993)

• A recurrent theme in his poetry is that of God as a kind of joker — benign and malign by bewilderingly unpredictable turns. ... Improving our understanding of temporal existence by distortion is exactly what, Thomas came to feel, the Surrealists did. That he saw their work as approximating that of the subtlest theologians is clear from the fine poem about Kierkegaard he included in his final volume, No Truce with the Furies, where Thomas's favorite theological thinker is characterized as "the first / of the Surrealists, picturing / our condition with the draughtsmanship / of a Dali".
  • M. Wynn Thomas in "The fantastic side of God : R. S. Thomas and Jorge Luis Borges" in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature (January 2008)

• Thomas offers a “sustained critique” not of Romanticism, but of a world that has “eroded away”— a world that has abandoned Romantic imagination. ... Thomas intends to resist the anti-romantic Modern spirit. Moreover, as he struggles with his personal faith, the poet’s Romantic imagination defines his attempts to commune with God.
  • Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)

• In nature, it is divinity, rather than history, which Thomas responds to most. ... Thomas finds the God of nature elusive, but when He reveals Himself, he does so through the natural world. God’s reflection, His shadow, and His echo exist in the Welsh hills. His influence there is both a presence and an absence (and, at times, an absence that is like a presence).
  • Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)

• Thomas continues to believe that somewhere beyond God’s metaphoric manifestations, somewhere beyond the questions and sufferings, there is an actual God — inexplicably, even intentionally absent — but real, and one day He may permanently end "the long drought of the mind."
  • Daniel Westover, in "A God of Grass and Pen : R.S. Thomas and the Romantic Imagination" in North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (Summer 2003)