Experimenting with an Amen

by R.S. Thomas

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 1986

About the author

Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000) (otherwise stylised as R.S. Thomas) was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales.

Reviews

[Raoul G]

In this collection one can find some of Thomas's later poems and in my opinion a slight shift in his style can be detected. Many of the poems are written in a simpler language compared to his older poems. The themes that he writes about have not changed all that much. He is pondering over faith, the divine and the way these are affected by technological advance:

"Now it is all clinical light
pouring into the interstices
where mystery could linger
questioning credentials of the divine
fossil, sterilising our thought
for its launching into its own outer space."

His doubting is visible in some of the poems and he talks about his belief in God being "here a moment, then not here". But his doubt is not limited only to God but also extends to science and technological advance in general: "As the sun went down the lights came on in a million laboratories, as the scientists attempted to turn the heart's darkness into intellectual day." It's almost as if he is saying that some concerns of the heart cannot be addressed by pure reason. This also explains why he is watching the decrease of faith almost with mourning and is asking the important question what the new source of meaning could be in a post-god world:

"What power shall minister to us
at the closure of the century,
of the millennia? The god,
who was Janus-faced, is eclipsed
totally by our planet, by the shadow
cast on him by contemporary
mind. Shall we continue worshipping
that mind for its halo,
its light the mirage of its radiation?"

[Rebecca]

'Dear friend unknown,/why send me your poems?/We are brothers, I admit;/but they are no good./I see why you wrote them,/but why send them? Why not/bury them, as a cat its faeces?'

R.S. Thomas, here with the sick poetry burns.

Not my favoured vein of poetry (that sort of semi-transcendental, religious/rural blend), but I can appreciate a master at work.