A Negative Arthur?

I have commented before about the way the figure of Arthur is available as an image of cultural continuity for writers in Wales, for instance the use of it made by David Jones. But if something can be used as a positive, it can also be used as a negative. Consider this early poem from R.S. Thomas:

A Welshman to Any Tourist

We’ve nothing to offer you, no deserts
Except the waste of thought
Forming from mind erosion;
No canyons where the pterodactyl’s wing
Casts a cold shadow.
The hills are fine of course,
Bearded with water to suggest age
And pocked with caverns,
One being Arthur’s dormitory;
He and his knights are the bright ore
That seams our history,
But shame has kept them late in bed.

There are a number of interesting things about this as a poem, the ambiguous phrase ‘waste of thought’, the imagery of the cold shadow of the pterodactyl’s wing , the metaphors employed in the references to Arthur. But the thing which is most striking about it from the outset (‘We’ve nothing …’) is its negativity. The general sense of absence is compounded by the stinging rebuke of the final line. Just at the point where it does strike a positive note (‘the bright ore’) the metaphor changes and the poem is brought to a devastating conclusion.

This is in line with many other statements by this poet about Wales, and indeed about his religion. He worshipped an ‘absent God’ and nailed questions to ‘an untenanted cross’. Theologically this is often explained by the absence of God defining the need for his presence. Could the same be said about national identity? If Arthur, the ‘once and future king’ can be adapted out of the legendary history of post-Roman Britain into a lost leader who has no grave because he only sleeps to rise again in the hour of need; and if such a story can survive the Middle Ages and persist, even if only as an ironic denial, is this in itself an affirmation of its potency?

Martins

Every year we have at least one pair of martins nesting in the eaves, sometimes two or three. The nests are a permanent feature of the gable. When the martins returned this year we saw them investigating last year's nests and thought a least one pair had taken up residence. Then it all went quiet and we wondered if they were there at all. Today, returning from a walk in the sand dunes to see the orchids, I walked around the side of the house and found the broken remains of two tiny white eggs that had obviously fallen from one of the nests. I celebrated this event, as I have in previous years, by revisiting the following poem by R S Thomas who captures luminously the feeling I have of playing host to these birds:

The Place

Summer is here.

Once more the house has its

Spray of martins, Prousts fountain

Of small birds, whose light shadows

Come and go in the sunshine

Of the lawn as thoughts do

In the mind. Watching them fly

Is my business, not as a man vowed

To science, who counts their returns

To the rafters, or sifts their droppings

For facts, recording the wave-length

Of their screaming; my method is so

To have them about myself

Through the hours of this brief

Season and to fill with their

Movement, that it is I that they build

In and bring up their young

To return to after the bitter

Migrations, knowing the site

Inviolate through its outward changes.

R.S. Thomas : Metaphor and Simile

R S Thomas

When R.S. Thomas makes one of the voices in his radio poem ‘The Minister’ utter the words “Oh but God is in the throat of a bird”, is he speaking metaphorically (the bird as the figurative voice of God in nature), analogically (the poet hears the bird and compares his appreciation of this natural sound to his yearning for God) or literally (he actually hears God speaking through the bird)? A silly question? Perhaps. Figurative language often crosses the boundaries of such categories as metaphor and simile (not to mention their respective sub-classes) and the poet could well be said to mean something of all three. But the question is worth asking if only to tease out both the porosities in usage and the integrity of definition in these tropes.

Here is a complete poem by R. S. Thomas:

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

The poem begins with a simile: “like a church” and continues with another: “like a cap in the hand”. The first is a straightforward comparison; the second seems to be stretching towards metaphor. But always the poem remains close to natural imagery. The moistening of the eye at first seems sentimental, but is then explained by the wind. In spite of the moor being like a church, the poem goes on to list various ways in which it is not like a church. By the final line the transition from simile to metaphor is complete. The elision of ‘as’ in “[as] generously as bread” seems to underline this.

This movement from simile to metaphor is often a movement from direct perception of nature to the transformation of this by the imagination. Before illustrating the point further it is worth noting several poems by Thomas (himself an Anglican priest) in which churches themselves feature. Typically, here, the poet confronts a God that does not make himself felt. The church is a far lonelier place than the moor. It is a “stone trap” for God than cannot contain him (‘The Empty Church’). In the poem ‘In Church’ he asks is it a place where “God hides from my searching?” The church walls are “the hard ribs / Of a body that our prayers have failed to animate”. Here the poet finds himself “nailing his questions / One by one to an untenanted cross”. An actual plain cross that he is looking at, or a metaphorically empty one? Well, both.

This is the dominant theme of many of the ‘empty church’ poems. Religion is a search for a presence which is defined by its absence:

…..for religion
Is like that. There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.

(The Belfry)

But the same poem hopes that prayers may be “… warm rain / That brings the sun and afterwards flowers”. The natural imagery is significant. In another poem, silent kneeling leads to a vision of

….. love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

(In a Country Church)

Here the startling image, combining natural and supernatural elements, seems to transcend the direct perception of nature (though he might be looking at a stained glass window or a gilded cross). This cross is tenanted, but its suffering body is metaphorically transformed by the natural image of fruit. Notice, too, that the balanced oppositions “dark … blazing”, “winter tree … fruit” are transformative, showing the process of the imaginative faculty.

These examples all come from fairly early in Thomas’s long career as a poet. Later his speculations about the nature and character of God became more metaphysical. But nature – or Nature – remained at the heart of his personal experience of divinity. In ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’ he stands “caged” while birds around him are free. He is “netted …in their shadows” as if, even beyond the bounds of the church, he also is caught in the trap for God that it sets. But then he proposes an escape:

Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life’s deciduous
tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.

For Thomas, like Coleridge, it is the imagination that creates God from natural imagery. Life’s tree is “deciduous”; what is sought is eternal. This seems to me a particular consequence of apprehending a remote God through nature. Its dominant mode is metaphor. Simile, and some other intermediate tropes such as metonymy, seems better suited to the expression of presence which might be felt by one who perceives gods as immanent in nature. But that is a discussion for another time.