PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/145654 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-11 and may be subject to change. WAITING THE RELIGIOUS POETRY OF RONALD STUART THOMAS WELSH PRIEST AND POET • M.J.J, van Buuren •• WAITING THE RELIGIOUS POETRY OF RONALD STUART THOMAS WELSH PRIEST AND POET Een wetenschappelijke proeve op het gebied van de Letteren. Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Katholieke Universiteit van Nijmegen, volgens besluit van het College van Decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 2 december 1993 te 3.30 uur precies door Martmus Johannes Joseph van Buuren geboren op 8 juni 1927 te 's Gravenhage. Promotores: Prof. Dr W.J.M. Bronzwaer Prof. Dr C.J. Waaijman ISBN 90-9006638-1 3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 ABBREVIATIONS 9 PART A. THE POET Chapter One: Ronald Stuart Thomas 13 Chapter Two: Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Poetry 27 Chapter Three: R.S.Thomas and the Christian Religious Tradition 38 PART B. THE POETRY Chapter Four: A Poetry of Religious Experience 55 Chapter Five: The Seeds of Godhead 77 Chapter Six: God's Disappointment with Man: Mythopoeic Poetry 100 Chapter Seven: Man's Disappointment with God 115 A Dazzling Darkness Chapter Eight: The Gates to The Presence 133 PARTC. POSTSCRIPT 159 BIBLIOGRAPHY 161 APPENDIX : R.S.THOMAS AT SEVENTY 172 CURRICULUM ГТАЕ 183 " Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." (Alfred Lord Tennyson: Ulysses) You have to imagine a waiting that is not impatient because it is timeless. (ECH 31) IN PIOUS MEMORY OF BISHOP THEODORE ZWARTKRUIS WHO FIRST INTRODUCED ME TO THE LANGUAGE OF R.S.THOMAS'S POETRY. INTRODUCTION The aim of this dissertation is to study and analyse the religious poetry written by Ronald Stuart Thomas, born in 1913 and a priest of the Anglican Church in Wales. The bulk of this poetry was published after 1967. My interest was raised when some critics dismissed his religious poetry as 'the sombre grumblings of an elderly man' and 'the sombre musings of a man wrestling with the idea of a distant God'. As soon as I became better acquainted with these religious poems, I felt that there was much more to them than what these formulations suggest. His religious poems tell the story of a man's quest for God. They are no more and no less than a frank and poetic report of the reflections and travelling notes describing his spiritual journey towards the God he recognizes everywhere in nature, whose existence is never for a single moment in doubt, but whose essence and 'name' are felt as beyond man's intellectual grasp. This is the common experience of all those, either inside or outside Christianity, in East or West, who have ever tried to go that very same way: the long journey towards the intimacy with the Ground of being (Tillich), which has been lost since Paradise. It is my aim to follow and describe the stages of the literary and spiritual trek of this 'God-haunted man'. In Chapter One R.S.Thomas's life is considered chronologically and psychologically, in order to uncover the roots from which the emotions and experiences of the poems spring. His love of nature and of solitude are found to be important character features. Attention is given to his discovery of what institutional religion meant to the majority of his flock, and to his subsequent disappointment at their indifference. The most unexpected change in his literary output took place about 1967 when there was a shift of focus in his poetry from Wales and matters of Welsh interest to the matter of God and His presence. In Chapter Two Thomas's literary roots are investigated. He is deeply conscious of his Welsh cultural heritage in the widest sense of the word. He taught himself the Welsh language but he never wrote poetry in Welsh. Fortunately there has, since the middle of the sixteenth century, been a strong tradition of Welsh religious writing in English. This tradition has provided a context for and has found a strong defender and promotor in this Welshman by desire and by vocation. Chapter Three traces, in Thomas's poetry, elements of the Christian tradition he has, as a priest, both represented and continued in his writing, in his work as a pastor and in his thinking. The chapter describes the Christian themes and allusions that are plentiful in his work. They originate both from Holy Scripture and from the daily practice of an Anglican vicar. Chapter Four concentrates on the general idea of religious poetry. From R.S.Thomas's prose writings in particular the view emerges that traditional Christian religion is gradually but steadily being eroded and vanishing. Modern protestant theology, working from two concepts, the 'coming of age' of mankind and the absolute transcendence of God, has - through the works of Barth, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer and Tillich - changed, if not completely rejected, the traditional 'theistic' God. R.S.Thomas has described how he 6 made this discovery entirely by himself. He wanted to write his poetry not for the traditional Christian reader, but rather for twentieth-century man who, in his view, has lost the sense of a personal God almost completely. For R.S.Thomas a new religion is about to take shape, in which the main emphasis will again be on the mystical side of faith. After all, mysticism is older than Christianity. For this 'new' religion, poetry is the only means of expression, because science has failed to bring Him any closer. Being a poet and a priest at the same time has not, at any moment, meant a serious personal conflict for the man who views both poetry and religion as based on the common principle of'metaphor'. Chapter Five recalls how Thomas discovered the immanence of God early in life and utterly delighted in it. As a young priest he once had a visionary experience of the world being created by the God of his youth. The seeds of Godhead, as he puts it, were everywhere. His love of nature and of solitude has been the life-long basis for his sense of the overwhelming presence of God in creation. This inspires him to go on a difficult spi­ ritual journey towards the Presence seeking intimacy with the God of beauty. The world speaks to him of God because the world is seen as a sacrament. The world was spoken by God when it was first created. The immanence of God, however, has His transcendence as its obverse side. The closer the poet tries to get intellectually, the faster God seems to him to disappear. The struggle for God is only beginning. The only God Thomas finds himself left with at the end of these endeavours is described in the poems that are dealt with in Chapter Six. The mythical God he evokes in the three volumes of poetry from the seventies is abhorrent. The chapter argues that this was R.S.Thomas's way of laying the antiquated theistic God to rest. Untenable myth is des­ troyed by absurd myth. His rational endeavours to understand who God is are drowned in darkness. Chapter Seven sketches how R.S.Thomas recognizes darkness as 'shadow', the obverse side of light. This is how he finds the way out of this seemingly unsolvable problem of the darkness surrounding God. He realizes that only stillness of the mind, and at a later stage even stillness of the senses, will make his style of praying radically different. After the stage of intellectual and emotional 'wrestling', culminating in the frustration of his unanswered prayers, he learns to understand that prayer means to make room, patiently and perseveringly, for the One who 'may' want to be with him. Finally, in Chapter Eight this preparatory process is defined as 'waiting-as-a-mode-of- prayer'. In a number of impressive poems Thomas describes the moment when the light of The Presence entered his soul at last. This is what I see as his life's spiritual journey. His poetry leads towards yet another and unexpected conclusion. This whole process, described here in subsequent chapters as a running story, is not a linear, a diachronic process, with a beginning and an end in time. It is a synchronic process at every moment, and is therefore always actual, but its stages alternate, depending on the circumstances. The spiritual journey, the progress itself, to­ wards the the mystical union with God renews itself all the time. It is - by nature - out of time, and belongs to the sphere of eternity. R.S.Thomas has quite deliberately and consistently written 'God-poetry' for those who 7 live in a 'residually Christian' society. This poetry offers and outlines, very tentatively, a post-Christian religion for a post-Christian generation. He has made a deliberate effort to prevent religion (and religious poetry) and the intelligence of the age from losing touch with each other. If Matthew Arnold predicted that poetry would one day replace religion, R.S.Thomas identifies the two: religion is poetry and poetry is religion.