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“He arose, pacing the floor
Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem
Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure
The long torture of delayed birth.”

R.S. Thomas

"A Person From Porlock"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

“Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.”

R.S. Thomas

"Homage to Wallace Stevens"
No Truce with the Furies (1995)

“We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.”

R.S. Thomas

"Children’s Song"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

“A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.”

R.S. Thomas

"A Blackbird Singing"
Poetry For Supper (1958)

“Verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty”

R.S. Thomas

"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)

“Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.”

R.S. Thomas

"In a Country Church"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

“There was a larger pattern
we worked at: they on a big
loom, I with a small needle.”

R.S. Thomas

"In Context", p. 13
Frequencies (1978)

“Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being … ultimate reality is what we call God.”

R.S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas : Priest and Poet, BBC TV (2 April 1972)

“I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.”

R.S. Thomas

"The New Mariner", p. 99
Between Here and Now (1981)

“In the silence
that is his chosen medium
of communication and telling
others about it
in words. Is there no way
not to be the sport
of reason?”

R.S. Thomas

"The New Mariner", p. 99
Between Here and Now (1981)

“It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.”

R.S. Thomas

"A Blackbird Singing"
Poetry For Supper (1958)

“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.”

R.S. Thomas

"Taliesin 1952"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

“Sometimes a strange light
shines, purer than the moon,
casting no shadow, that is
the halo upon the bones
of the pioneers who died for truth.”

R.S. Thomas

"Groping", p. 12
Frequencies (1978)

“Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.”

R.S. Thomas

"The Bright Field", p. 60
Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

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

R.S. Thomas

"Here"
Tares (1961)

“I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and
falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without
light
and companionless. And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.”

R.S. Thomas

"The Other" in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)

“Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor… the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.”

R.S. Thomas

Selected Prose (1995), p. 131