Dropped without Joy

On misanthropy and the poetry of R. S. Thomas

I’ve written about poetry before in ‘Lost Amphibia’s Emperies’ , ‘Good Causes Don’t Make Good Poems’, and ‘No Time to Spare’.

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    the dank hand
Of age was busy on the walls
Scrawling in blurred characters
Messages of hate and fear.
  (‘Depopulation of the Hills’)¹

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Part I. Gaunt, Bitter, and Bleak

R. S. Thomas is one of those poets who were never young, just as Oscar Wilde was never old. Wilde, though in fact he lived until the age of forty-six, is preserved for all posterity as the eternal and the eternally brilliant student: exuberant and cheeky and glib; the kind of young writer for whom the English invented their (deeply characteristic) phrase too clever by half. Thomas, on the other hand, died at the age of eighty-seven and (so far as his poetic persona is concerned) was born at the age of eighty-seven. He survives for posterity as a gaunt, bitter, bleak, and seemingly humourless old priest on a Welsh hillside.

That image seems accurate enough: it summarises most of what little happened to him during those eighty-seven years.² He was born in Cardiff in 1913; was ordained in the Church of Wales in 1936; and spent the rest of his life as a priest in the Welsh countryside. He wrote a lot, hated the modern world a lot, and thought a lot about God and common people.

He was, on the evidence of what little biographical information I have, the kind of priest your local village hopes it won’t get. Much of his spiritual life was spent, in effect, bemoaning other people’s lack of spiritual life, often at the same time as trying to figure out if he himself believed in God.

                    For me now
there is only the God-space
into which I send out
my probes.
          ('The New Mariner')

According to his son, most of his sermons were spent raging against the world in which he found himself: its emptiness, its meaninglessness, its technology. He lived in unheated houses (in North Wales!) and loathed, it seems, every sign of modernity that he could find: cars, fridges, vacuum cleaners, washing machines. (Anything, you might say, that might have actually improved the lives of the working people that he ministered to.)

He began to publish poetry a few years after his ordination, and a lot of that poetry—which is generally free in style and always wildly repetitive in content—concerns those working people: the ‘oafs and yokels’, the ‘wantoners of Wales’, whom he imagined, over and over again, with despair and with contempt:

                    stone blind
To the print's magic...
          ('The Airy Tomb')

He had nothing much in common with those people, or so he believed, other than his Welshness: and so Welshness became his abiding illusion. He learnt Welsh as an adult—writing his autobiography in that language—and converted to Welsh nationalism.

Judging by the poems, indeed, he seems to have believed in Wales far more intensely (and more often) than he believed in God. He refused to support Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, on the grounds that it wasn’t nationalistic enough (since it recognised the English parliament), and his hatred for the tourists and holidaymakers in his native country was, if possible, even greater than his hatred for his parishioners.

Though his talent was recognised and promoted early on by figures as well-known as John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis, he never (except on paper) entered anything that could be described as the literary world. Rather he stayed in isolation and stewed, growing—all too quickly—into the kind of gaunt, bitter, bleak poet addicted to describing almost everything using words like gaunt, bitter, and bleak.³ What human contact he had was sparse: he apparently rarely spoke to his first wife and interacted only when necessary with his congregation. According to his biographer:

He said once that there had been no personal influences on his life, no guiding schoolmaster or tutor—and little contact later with anyone who could be considered his peer. He took no newspapers, entertained no friends. He was the loneliest man I ever met.

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‘Life’s dark book…’

This, then, is how posterity preserves R. S. Thomas. The question is: should it preserve him? If the answer is yes, that yes must be qualified—though not, perhaps, for the most obvious reasons.

It doesn’t matter, for example, that he is sometimes good and sometimes bad (that is true of pretty much everyone). Nor, necessarily, does it matter that he is one of those poets able to be bad even when being good, as here, in the final stanza of his popular poem ‘On the Farm’:

And lastly there was the girl;
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life’s dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

Those who have read a lot of his poetry might remember that stanza, and then ask why. It is powerful (in an almost aggressive way) notwithstanding its flaws: the vagueness (‘some spell’), the easy images (‘life’s dark book’), the self-pity (‘The shrill sentence’). At the same time, it resembles almost all of his other poems: and this, perhaps, is a problem. Thomas’s single-mindedness was always verging on the monomaniacal, his lack of range almost comical.

Partly as a result of this, in the worst of his poems the overriding impression is of facility: the kind of facility which thinks that anything will do, which assumes that it cannot not be profound.

'We are turning towards the sun’s indifferent ray.'
          ('Spring Equinox')

It is also the kind of facility all too familiar to readers of all too much ‘free’ verse—and this, too, is a problem.

Though Thomas was quite capable—as all good poets are—of writing in ‘traditional’ forms if he wished to, most of the time, evidently, he didn’t wish to. Again, the results can be successful, as in the opening stanza of ‘Postscript’:

As life improved, their poems
Grew sadder and sadder. Was their oil
For the machine? It was
The vinegar in the poets’ cup.

At other times, they fall flat. His late poem ‘Threshold’, for example, ends with these lines:

                              I am alone
on the surface of a turning
planet. What to do but,

like Michelangelo’s Adam,
put my hand out into unknown
space, hoping
for the reciprocating touch?

As often with the weakest free verse, the line breaks here seem arbitrary: you could change all of them without changing the poem.⁴ At the same time, they seem to be the only thing distinguishing this as a poem at all. Put it back together, and it sounds like prose, which is another way of saying that it is prose. Furthermore, when put back together, it becomes more evident that it is not particularly good prose.

Again, it’s all too easy: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is far too famous an allusion not to be a cliché, and is, at any rate, inapt. (Look at the painting: Adam does not put his hand into ‘unknown space’.)

Furthermore, to call such language stale and second-rate, as Philip Larkin did, is an understatement: the phrase ‘alone on the surface of a turning planet’ is not worthy of such a considerable poet.⁵

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‘The lips’ slobber…’

Given how facile it is, this sort of weaker ‘free’ verse tends to be popular with teenagers, as indeed does a certain kind of language: the vocabulary—blunt and usually Germanic—that teenagers use on the (very frequent) occasions that they want to express abhorrence at the world: words like gnaw, squat, snot, gob, grip, lump, croak…

That all of these words relate to the body is crucial: such teenagers (not unlike some priests) tend to combine a prudish horror at bodily functions with a lack of actual acquaintance with other people’s bodies. Thomas, too—and we are getting closer to the biggest problem—is prone to using words of this sort, in a way which too often amounts to not much more than a kind of gratuitous vividness, the roll call of gross-out imagery that speaks only of revulsion:

Souls guttering in the grave’s draught
          ('Phraisee. Twentieth Century')

          the loud, unlovely rattle
Of mucus in the throat
          ('Valediction')

Of fungus that shall, thickening, swell
And choke you
          ('Priest and Peasant')

          their lips suppurate with
Their prayers
          (’The Island’)

          the thin dribble
Of his poetry dries on the rocks
          ('He')

To hear what the lips’ slobber intended
          ('Portrait')

I could go on.

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‘Messages of hate and fear…’

There are, of course, many indubitably successful poets who are guilty of similar flaws: of easy imagery (like Blake), or super-quirky language (like Berryman), or gross-out vocabulary (like Beckett). There are also more than a few who have written ‘freely’ with fairly arbitrary line breaks. Some of this stuff, perhaps, doesn’t matter.

The supposed ‘freedom’ of ‘free’ verse, for one thing, can give poets a kind of nakedness that can be oddly moving: as with Thomas’s uncharacteristically compassionate poem ‘The Word’. There, heartbreakingly, the speaker is challenged to say what life is and writes only the word lonely, knowing both that this answer is inadequate but also that it will resonate for many:

          And my hand moved
to erase it; but the voices
of all those waiting at life’s
window cried out loud: ‘It is true.’

Nor is Thomas’s repetitiveness necessarily an issue: his relentless grimness might, after all, seem apposite to his subject matter, the North Welsh landscapes

          huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
          ('A Welsh Testament')

Reading Thomas as he should be read (i.e. when miserable and alone, at 3 am), the reader is easily lulled into a kind of dream-state where most of his weaknesses end up looking like strengths, as in his extraordinary poem ‘Meet the Family’:

John All and his lean wife,
Whose forced complicity gave life
To each loathed foetus, stare from the walls,
Dead, not absent. The night falls.

In fact, the biggest problem in his poetry is something else—though something visible immediately in the stanza above. These expressions (‘forced complicity’, ‘loathed foetus’), and the assumptions underlying them, speak of disgust: of misanthropy.

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II. Two Kinds of Misanthropy

Thomas’s well-known poem ‘Country Child’ seems to me a representative example. It begins:

Dropped without joy from the gaunt womb he lies,
Maturing in his place against his parents’ ageing;
The slow scene unfolds before his luckless eyes
To the puckered window, where the cold storm’s raging,
Curtains the world, and the grey curlew cries,
Uttering a grief too sharp for the breast’s assuaging.

Suppose, for a moment, that we can accept the presence, again, of that vividness (gaunt, puckered, uttering), that facility (a grief too sharp), those fruity Saxon genitives (his parents’ ageing, the cold storm’s raging, the breast’s assuaging). Can we accept the tone, the feeling?

Almost all of the poems that Thomas wrote about his parishioners sound like this. The poet is overcome with the emptiness of other people’s lives; looking at them, he can barely see human beings at all. ‘Dropped without joy from the gaunt womb’… it could be a line in a teenage boy’s diary; and Thomas’s undeniable talent makes it all the worse. It reeks (to use another vivid Germanism) of misused power.

It is also—I think as a result of the feeling—badly written. Evidently, the poet does not mean that the womb itself was gaunt, since he has never seen a womb: he means the woman’s vagina. But how either the womb or the vagina of a woman giving birth could conceivably be described as ‘gaunt’ is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess how Thomas can possibly know that the birth of a child brings no joy to the empty lives of these pitiable poor: he has said far too much and not nearly enough. The ‘gaunt womb’ is not something that he has observed and is trying to recreate, and it is not even something he is trying to imagine: it is only a moan of misanthropy and misogyny, an unexamined horror at human bodies, and, especially, at women’s bodies.⁶ Equally clearly, the joylessness at this new birth is not the joylessness of the parents, or even of the child, but of the poet. The misanthropy, as well, is too easy, though misanthropy is only worth anything when it is difficult.

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‘Your heart that is dry…’

The most important thing to say about Thomas’s misanthropy is that it is all directed outward: for that reason it is, in a sense, fake, like sentimentality. A true hatred of human beings (which would be understandable) would include the hater, who is of their number; it would also include the consideration (and here Thomas’s rather incoherent Christian pessimism is relevant) that the world in which human beings find themselves is itself hateful, that it is nature that is guilty, and not they.

Leopardi, who understood this well, writes in his Zibaldone:

My philosophy… of its nature tends to cure and to extinguish that ill humour, that hatred—unsystematic but real hatred—which many people who are not philosophers, and who would not wish to be called or thought of as misanthropes, carry towards others…⁷

In spite of what some people imagine, pessimism and misanthropy, according to Leopardi, do not fit together. Pessimism involves the recognition of the limitless suffering of all human beings, and the recognition that that suffering is bad: and we think it bad because we do not hate them. Put simply, there is a kind of misanthropy which hates everybody and a kind of misanthropy which hates everybody else. Leopardi exemplifies the first kind; so (when he wasn’t being transcendentally stupid) does Schopenhauer; so does Beckett. Thomas exemplifies the second kind.

Compare him, for example, to Philip Larkin. Many people would wish to call (say) ‘The Old Fools’ a misanthropic poem, but, if it is, it is not misanthropic in the same way that Thomas is misanthropic. Larkin in that poem describes old people pissing themselves and drooling, living ‘Not here and now, but where all happened once’, not understanding how near to death they are:

Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines—
                    How can they ignore it?

Reading the poem carefully, though, are we really offended by this imagery (or by the title)? Do we not understand, as Larkin understands, the true roots of this disgust? We and the poet know what this is really about.

Thomas, on the other hand, could never have written such a poem, because the hatred is what a poem like ‘Country Child’ is really about. Such hatred is found—again, with monomaniacal repetitiveness—throughout his poetry:

You never heard of Kant, did you, Prytherch? 
          ('Green Categories')

Look at his eyes, that are colourless as rain 
          ('Man and Tree')

          the eyes
fuddled with coldness, have no skill to smile. 
          ('Peasant Greeting')

Your heart that is dry as a dead leaf 
          ('Lament for Prytherch')

          your body grows
Awry like an old thorn for lack
Of the soil’s depth 
          ('Priest and Peasant')

There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind. 
          ('A Peasant')

Again, I could go on. Thomas had neither the self-knowledge nor the humility to write a poem like Larkin’s; his hatred, instead, is directed at those (like his tedious recurring character Prytherch) who have not heard of Kant. ‘Dropped without joy from the gaunt womb’, then, is just a pompous way of saying: ‘O God, how these people disgust me!’

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‘You will forgive me…’

How did Thomas end up with this kind of misanthropy? One answer can be found by listening to him reciting his own poetry (which he did brilliantly and rather frighteningly). Nary a trace of that stereotypical ‘Welsh lilt’, but rather the voice and accent of an old-style English civil servant, with all of the frigidity that that implies.

Living in his isolated North Welsh villages, he was separated by class and by education from everybody around him. The lines he writes about an old woman in ‘Ninetieth Birthday’ he could have written for almost anyone:

Yet no bridge joins her own
World with yours…

Or look at these, from ‘A Priest to His People’ (and in particular the wild presumption of the first line):

You will forgive me, then, my initial hatred,
My first intolerance of your uncouth ways,
You who are indifferent to all that I can offer,
Caring not whether I blame or praise.

Again, the agèd poet sounds adolescent: ‘all that I can offer’, indeed. He concludes with the observation that these awful people might have some value for him, at least in so far as they can

…affront, bewilder, yet compel my gaze.

The problem with all of this is that it is chosen, as a lack of empathy usually is. Towards the end of the title essay in The Empathy Exams, the American writer Leslie Jamison concludes that:

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us… it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

Thomas hated other people too much ever to extend himself, and his lack of attention to reality (again, see the gaunt womb) was the result. The hostility was chosen, as was the isolation. He was as successful as any poet could hope to be, talented, admired, at one point (apparently) a contender for the Nobel Prize. He could have got away from the life and the people he hated at any time—but he didn’t. Rather, he saw in them the subject matter for a sort of poetry, props in a dull Welsh drama about meaninglessness and death.

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‘I was in prison…’

In the end, it is probably for all of these reasons, problems included, that Thomas survives, and should survive, for posterity. A male poet so isolated that he cannot look at other people except as caricatures seems appropriate for the age of the lonely boy in his parents’ basement. Any of us who have been similarly isolated should be warned not to fall into his trap: if you are miserable and alone and surrounded by ‘oafs and yokels’, it might be your fault, rather than theirs; and if you make an effort you might find out that they, too, have something to say.

In the best of Thomas’s poetry, there are flickers of understanding of this: that his lonely resentment was, in its way, a kind of comfort or self-protection. Facility—and hatred of other people is nothing if not facile—is a continual temptation, as, for lonely and unhappy people, is Thomas’s poetry. In spite of it all, I go back to that poetry—but always with caution and scepticism.

In the wonderful poem ‘A Welsh Testament’, the speaker (who it is hard not to identify with the poet) imagines what he would say to tourists who admire his rustic purity. It ends with cold sarcasm, with facility, and above all with a misery that is almost defiant in its settledness, as misery tends to be when we choose it:

                    I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning in the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?

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1. All of the poems by R. S. Thomas quoted in this essay (with one exception) come from the Kindle edition of his Collected Poems: 1945-1990.

2. Most of this biographical information comes from Byron Rogers in The Guardian, Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal, and Poetry Foundation.

3. In the Collected Poems which I am working with, you find, for example: ‘the gaunt sky’, ‘the gaunt womb’, ‘that gaunt wilderness’, ‘the gaunt boughs’, ‘the gaunt kitchen’, ‘its gaunt question’, ‘their gaunt houses’, ‘its gaunt solution’, and ‘standing up grey, Gaunt’. You can do the same thing for bitter (nineteen appearances) and bleak (eleven).

4. Indeed, I have already changed the line breaks: the original looks like this.

5. Larkin in Further Requirements (p. 194):

‘There is no doubt that Mr Thomas is the kind of poet one would like to be good, because he avoids a great many ways of being bad, but I find in this collection little sense of inner organization that gives a poem cohesion, and his images and metaphors are too often repetitive and second-rate (‘black ink of the heart’s well’, ‘the easier rhythms of the heart’, ‘the mind’s darkness’, ‘the mind’s acid’).

6. See, for some other examples, the ‘sweaty females’ of ‘A Priest to His People’ or ‘the bright menstrual blood’ in ‘Song at the Year’s Turning’.

7. Rough translation from Zibaldone (#4428) (p. 2985):

La mia filosofia… di sua natura tende a sanare, a spegnere quel mal umore, quell’odio, non sistematico, ma pur vero odio, che tanti e tanti, i quali non sono filosofi, e non vorrebbono esser chiamati nè creduti misantropi, portano però cordialmente a’ loro simili…