The younger Thomas, a deeply spiritual man, married and became an Anglican priest. He was very proudly Welsh and wrote extraordinary poetry. He hated the cultural dilution the English visited on Wales by buying up country cottages as ‘holiday homes’ and putting the same cottages out of the financial reach of locals. He supported anti-British movements who burnt these same cottages to the ground!
Thomas saw the peasant Welsh farmer as the backbone of the country, and a lot of his poetry celebrates the harshness of their lives and their capacity to endure.
There is a deliberate harshness, a bleakness in this wintry verse which magnificently captures that Stoic fierceness that keeps men farming this difficult land when they might so easily abandon it all.
Independence and a sense of place creates a passion, a fierce love of the land in individuals, and, at the same time, a real contempt for those who, by sins of omission, by doing nothing, would destroy that bond.
I’ll say no more, except to offer this poem to you as a mere sampler of Thomas’s quality. He should have the Nobel Prize.
R.S. Thomas, ‘A Peasant’
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—-
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.