Uncollected Poems

By R. S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales's greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive -poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems -published to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth -brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas's career -from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and previously uncollected Iago Prytherch poems, to other poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included in Uncollected Poems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370644

Book preview

R.S. THOMAS

UNCOLLECTED POEMS

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales’s greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive – poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions.  

Uncollected Poems – published to mark the centenary of Thomas’s birth – brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years’ research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas’s career – from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and previously uncollected Iago Prytherch poems, to other poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years.

R.S. Thomas’s Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945–1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems 1988–2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas’s work access to much new and fascinating material.

COVER PHOTOGRAPHS

R.S. Thomas: left, 1979; right, 1956 (Gwent Jones); above, family outing, 1960s

NOTES ON THE EDITORS

Professor Tony Brown teaches in the School of English at Bangor University. He is the editor of The Collected Stories of Glyn Jones (University of Wales Press, 1999) and was the founder-editor of the journal Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays (1995–2007). His numerous publications in the field of Welsh writing in English include many essays on the work of R.S. Thomas, and his R.S. Thomas in the Writers of Wales series (University of Wales Press, 2006; new ed. 2013) was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize, 2007.

Dr Jason Walford Davies is Senior Lecturer in the School of Welsh at Bangor University. He is the editor and translator of Thomas’s Welsh-language autobiographical writings, R.S. Thomas: Autobiographies (Dent, 1997) and the author of a monograph on the poet's indebtedness to the Welsh-language literary tradition, Gororau’r Iaith [The Marches of Language] (University of Wales Press, 2003), which was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Prize, 2004. His edition of Thomas’s correspondence with poet and critic Raymond Garlick (Gomer Press) appeared in 2009.

Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies are the Co-Directors of the R.S. Thomas Study Centre, the major archive of R.S. Thomas material, published and unpublished, at Bangor University.

R.S. Thomas

UNCOLLECTED POEMS

EDITED BY

TONY BROWN &

JASON WALFORD DAVIES

I

Nancy, Sara ac Alys

a

Meinir, Mari a Rhys

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As will be evident, tracking down poems from often obscure and sometimes short-lived journals, then the checking and re-checking of texts and publication details, has been a long process. In this time-consuming hunt for poetic needles in literary haystacks we have received invaluable assistance from numerous fellow readers of R.S. Thomas. In particular we are indebted to the indispensable bibliography of R.S. Thomas’s published poems up to 1979 which was compiled by Sandra Anstey as part of her doctoral dissertation at Swansea University; we are also grateful to her for sending us some subsequent uncollected poems. In addition we very gratefully acknowledge the help, in various forms, which we received from John Freeman, Huw Ceiriog Jones, Morag Law, Kevin Perryman, Anne Price-Owen, Andrew Rudd, Meic Stephens, Graham Thomas, M. Wynn Thomas, Jeff Towns, Damian Walford Davies, Daniel Westover and Michael Whitworth.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Bat

‘I never thought’

July 5 1940

Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman

Gideon Pugh

Llanddewi Brefi

Song

Lines for Taliesin

Three Countries

Welsh Shepherd

Y Gwladwr

The Peasant [tr. Jason Walford Davies]

The Two Sisters

Auguries

Darlington

No Answer

Peasant Girl Weeping

Original Sin

Proportions

Somersby Brook

A Welsh Ballad Singer

Commission

Farm Wives

Growing Up

Midnight on the Farm

Not So

Question

Indoors

The Meeting

Hiker

Brochure

Exile

Frontiers

Work To Do

Yesterday’s Farm

Half-past Five

Two Versions of a Theme

An Old Flame

Images

The Reader

The Return

The Need

Song

Thoughts by the Sea

Aye, aye –

The Grave

Old Man

Shame

Some Place

Symbols

The Wisdom of Eliaser

Ynys Enlli

The Bank Clerk

Farm-hand

Nobodies

Somebody

Vocation

Chat

Dimensions

Now

Autobiography

Inferno

Sonata in X

Hamlet

Richard Hughes

Where?

The Climber

Dedication

Pension

The Source

Staying

Coming of Age

Progressions

Appointments

Cancellation

Codex

Coming True

Converse

General X

Quest

Sister Non

Stop Press

Excursion

Grass Platforms

The New Noah

Predicaments

The Tree

The Big Preachers

Cybi and Seiriol

Feminine Gender

Poets’ Meeting

Repertory

The Undying

The Cry

Caught

The View from Europe

A Wish

A1

Epilogue

Gwallter Mechain

Insularities

Cymru (Wales)

Wings

Process

Sick Child

Born Lost

The Lesson

Plas yn Rhiw

A Species

Abaty Cwm Hir

Calling

Elders

Filming

The Gallery

In Memory of James and Frances Williams

Oil

Story

Tourney

The Hummingbird Never Came

Pharpar

Blackbird

Diary

Dreams

Everywhere

Island Boatman

Talk

‘Waiting for the tale to begin’

Birthday

The Father Dies

Luminary

The Hill

In Memory of Ted Hughes

‘The computer is unable’

‘Easter. I approach’

‘One drop of blood’

‘A bird’s prayer’

‘Language has run its course’

The Orphan

Pact

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

No sooner had we started on the long process that has culminated in the present volume than, as ever, we discovered that R.S. Thomas was ahead of us with a cautionary note: ‘Poems we threw up / too far back are not / to return to’ (‘Predicaments’, 1981). However, when we began to study Thomas’s uncollected poems – that is, those published in magazines, newspapers, journals, pamphlets etc., but not included in any of his collections – it immediately became apparent that there were in fact a significant number of poems from ‘far back’ that were indeed well worth ‘returning to’. In fact, there existed a substantial body of work, from all stages of the poet’s sixty-year career, that deserved to be reclaimed and brought to readers’ attention. Uncollected Poems is a selection of what we consider to be the best of these ‘lost’ poems (a full list of the poems we have been able to identify is included in a bibliography at the end of the volume). While our main criterion in making a selection has been the quality of the poetry, we have also included poems which have particular autobiographical significance or which reveal aspects of Thomas’s thematic and stylistic development. The poems are thus arranged in chronological order (and in alphabetical order within individual years). One of the effects of this arrangement, for instance, is to highlight the strikingly rapid evolution of Thomas’s poetic style and the achievement of his distinctive voice in the years immediately following Spindrift, his first, unpublished, collection from the late 1930s. This arrangement, moreover, serves to emphasise the remarkable fertility

Reviews for Uncollected Poems

[michael_godfrey-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thank God that that which was un- became collected, published, shared (and gifted!). Few writers have so touched, so conveyed the disappearing God.