Waiting at Life's Window

Reciter 4: R. S. Thomas's 'The Word'

This is the fourth in a series of audio recordings and short essays (max. 500 words, excluding the text of the poems) from my reciter. They appear fortnightly.

I wrote about R. S. Thomas at greater length here—and I was flattered beyond belief that one of its readers was Isabel Chenot, who wrote a poem partly inspired by it ‘for Alexander’.

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A statue of one Eleanor Rigby, in Liverpool.

Perhaps fittingly for a clergyman in twentieth-century Britain, R. S. Thomas, when he recited his poetry, often gave the impression of one talking into the void, as though he was not really expecting anyone to listen to him.

His reading of ‘Welsh Testament’, the poem that first threw him into my life years ago, is a perfect instance of that: the stony echoes irresistibly suggest a sermon, and his tone here is as austere as he was—or, at any rate, as his poetic persona was.

Having read the poem before clicking on the audio, I had naturally been expecting a Welsh accent, and instead heard the icy, vaguely sarcastic cadences of the English ruling class (listen to how he pronounces the word ‘matter’), cadences which seem to belie, or at least complicate, his all-too-easy nationalism.

The speaker here seems to be the poet himself: the man with the ‘high cheek-bones’, ‘knee-deep / in ewes and wethers’, playing his ‘drab role’. At the same time, it cannot be him, since in fact it is the language he is writing in, rather than the one he is writing about, which is his native tongue: his ‘word for heaven’ was the same word as that of the complacent visitors he is apparently addressing.

‘Welsh Testament’ (for me) is one of his greatest poems, and here that iciness seems fitting. It suits the poem’s eerie sense of inevitability and self-imprisonment; it suits his thoroughly complicated feelings towards Wales; and it suits the beautiful and almost daemonic defiance contained in the last stanza.

Not all of Thomas’s poems, however, want such coldness. The poem I have chosen to read here, ‘The Word’, certainly doesn’t: it is beyond heartbreaking; it expresses a sentiment which is desperate but not cold; a sentiment plenty of people feel, but are afraid to express.

That sentiment is not particularly clever, and neither is the poem. As is sometimes the case with Philip Larkin, ‘The Word’ seems to be locked in a kind of rebellion against poetry itself. It is ‘the god’ that commands Thomas to write these things; given the choice, he would rather not have to do so.

Differently from Larkin, however, the rebellion in Thomas’s case is reflected in the form itself, which in a less effective poem might seem almost lazy. It is practically written in prose: the line-breaks seem arbitrary (I’ve had it by heart since I first read it, and can never remember where they are); the imagery seems sterile; and the conclusion is excruciatingly, nakedly personal. Here, on the brink of the abyss, the poet can no longer distinguish between his own life and Life.

He knows this, which is why he half-wants to erase his own words. Yet he lets them stand. His tone is so tender that you almost don’t notice the same defiance here as that which ends ‘Welsh Testament’. I was here. I felt this way. Perhaps somebody, somewhere, is reading this and feeling the same thing.

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The Word

A pen appeared, and the god said:
‘Write what it is to be
man.’ And my hand hovered
long over the bare page,

until there, like footprints
of the lost traveller, letters
took shape on the page’s
blankness, and I spelled out

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

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