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1913-2000 A Great Voice has left us Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man St. Julian and the Leper The Cat and the Sea Back to the Codex

Taliesin 1952 Pisces Carol Prayer The Coming The View From the Window The Interrogation

Poems

Taliesin 1952

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.

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.

I have been Glyn Dwr set in the vast night,
Scanning the stars for the propitious omen,
A leader of men, yet cursed by the crazed women
Mourning their dead under the same stars.

I have been Goronwy, forced from my own land
To taste the bitterness of the salt ocean;
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.
 
 

(NOTE:  Before Reading Thirteen Blackbirds below, you might consider reading Wallace Steven's, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Thomas' Piece is a fitting homage and companion.)

Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man

1.

It is calm.
It is as though
we lived in a garden
that had not yet arrived
at the knowledge of
good and evil.
But there is a man in it.

2
There will be
rain falling vertically
from an indifferent
sky.  There will stare out
from behind its
bars the face of the man
who is not enjoying it.
 

3.
Nothing higher
than a blackberry
bush.  As the sun comes up
fresh, what is the darkness
stretching from horizon
to horizon? It is the shadow
of the forked man.
 

4.
We have eaten
the blackberries and spat out
the seeds, but they lie
glittering like the eyes of a man.
 

5.
After we have stopped
singing, the garden is disturbed
by echoes, it is
the man whistling, expecting
everything to come to him.
 

6.
We wipe our beaks
on the branches
wasting the dawn's
jewellery to get rid
of the taste of a man.
 

7.
Nevertheless,
which is not the case
with a man, our
bills give us no trouble.
 

8.
Who said the
number was unlucky?
It was a man, who,
trying to pass us,
had his licence endorsed
thirteen times.
 

9.
In the cool
of the day the garden
seems given over
to blackbirds. Yet
we know also that somewhere
there is a man in hiding.

10.
To us there are
eggs and there are
Backbirds. But there is the man,
too, trying without feathers
to incubate a solution.
 

11.
We spread our
wings, reticulating
our air space. A man stands
nder us and worries
at his ability to do the same.
 

12.
When night comes
like a visitor
from outer space
we stop our ears
lest we should hear tell
of the man in the moon.
 

13.
Summer is
at an end. The migrants
depart. When they return
in spring to the garden,
will there be a man among them?
 

Prayer

Baudelaire's grave
not too far
from the tree of science.
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed
to steal from it,
somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity  wearing
the green leaves of time.

Carol

What is the Christmas without
snow?  We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity's
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

Pisces

Who said to the trout,
You shall die on Good Friday
To be food for a man
And his pretty lady?

It was I, said God,
Who formed the roses
In the delicate flesh
And the tooth that bruises.

The View from the Window

Like a painting it is set before one,
But less brittle, ageless; these colours
Are renewed daily with variations
Of light and distance that no painter
Achieves or suggests.  Then there is movement,
Change, as slowly the cloud bruises
Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps
A black mood; but gold at evening
To cheer the heart.  All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried; yet what eye,
Looking coolly, or, as we now,
through the tears' lenses, ever saw
This work and it was not finished?

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe.  Look he said.
The son looked.  Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour.  The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
                On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky.  many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs.  The son watched
Them.  Let me go there, he said.
 

Ruins

And this was a civilization
That came to nothing--he spurned with his toe
The slave-coloured dust.  We breathed it in
Thankfully, oxygen to our culture.

Somebody found a curved bone
In the ruins.  A kings probably,
He said.  Imperfect courtiers
We eyed it, the dropped kerchief of time.
 

The Hearth

In front of the fire
With you, the folk song
Of the wind in the chimney and the sparks'
Emboidery of the soot--eternity
Is here in this smakk room,
In intervals that our love
Widens; and outside
Of time, travellars
To a new Bethlehem, statesmen
And scientists with their hands full
Of the gifts that destroy,

St Julien and the Leper

Though all ran from him, he did not
Run, but awaited
Him with his arms
Out, his ears stopped
To his bell, his alarmed
Crying.  He lay down
With him there, sharing his sores'
Stench, the quarantinr
Of his soul; contaminating
imself with a kiss,
With the love that
Our science has disinfected.
 

The Cat and the Sea

It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes abnticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.

Here

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

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

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

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

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

I have no where to go
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow,

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

Don't Even think of stealing these poems and using them as your own, this man was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times.

Want More?

**Now More R.S. Thomas Online!**

Tim Haynes' Site Kinetica You can also jump to his R.S. Thomas Index His site contains the poems: The Prayer | Nuclear | Like That | Coda  The Way of It | Almost | Praise | Amen *****************************

ENTER KINETICA or R.S, Thomas Index

Additional Information
R.S. Thomas Books can be found at Amazon.com. They've got a much large selection
R.S. Thomas Bio.
Peter Finch's Page about R.S.Thomas.
Book of Criticism:  R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God.
Poems of R.S. Thomas
A course Being Taught on our boy R.S.
Web Excell Site on R.S. Thomas
Kinetica
Be Sure to Look for these books.

• No Truce with the Furies
• Laboratories of the Spirit
• Mass For Hard Times
• Counter Point
• What Makes A Welshmen.
• The Way of It
• Tares
• Selected Poems of R.S. Thomas
• Stones in the Field.
• Song at Years Turning
• The Minister
• R.S. Thomas: Poems 1960-1999

Unfortunately, many of these books are out of print, but they are all amazing books of poetry and Amazon has a good many. Try to get the poems. The Criticism is just starting to come out heavily of his works.
© R.S. Thomas

The works presented here are meant to introduce people to the work of R.S. Thomas and to encourage reading and interest into purchasing of Thomas's books and his work. This is an educational non-profit site. 

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