Interview with R. S. Thomas

Michael March: For fifty years you have devoted yourself to poetry and religion. What have you seen, what have you felt, what has moved you the most in this life?

R. S. Thomas: The open air. I was never an academic. I don't despise scholarship, but it's not for me. The hours that I could have spent improving my mind, widening my knowledge have been spent in open air. I never want anything better than the natural world. I am guilty of what the scholastics would have called "the worship of created things". You are supposed to only worship God. But I have approached things through creative things, especially the beauty of the Earth.

MM: Has not the Earth become clouded over, even more so than in the past?

RST: Well, man is domesticating Earth. This is what I deplore. You know Yeats' turn about John O'Leary: "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. It's with John O'Leary in the grave." Romantic Wales is gone. Has it ever existed? Has Romantic Ireland ever existed? My young person's Romantic view - rather like Coleridge in his dejection - has been explored. I can see that there is no such thing for me any longer as a Romantic world; and this is why I turned to bird watching, because birds were the only creatures that I could be in contact with that have preserved their natural, traditional way of life, without being impinged on by the machine and commerce and all these other things.

MM: How do you envision a Romantic world populated by man? How would man behave in a such world?

RST: This is the artist's dilemma. To me, time is of the essence although I have wasted so much for it. Nevertheless, one needs time, and the Romantic view of life would be one in which man earned his livelihood with his hands, made his clothes, constructed his living quarters and lived a traditional life preserving a folk tradition. But that needs time. So unless you are going to have a male dominated society, whereby the woman does all these things and leaves the man free to pursue his own heart-life, whether in music or in painting or in literature, it's not possible- there isn't enough time.

MM: We return to time and I perceive that poetry is closely allied to time.

RST: Time, as I said in my poem last night, is a mercurial thing. if there is such a thing as a next world, one presumes that it will be a timeless world because time has a connection with memory and to be conscious of time is to be restless and unfulfilled, striving we look before and after and pine for what is not. I know that probably some of my sweetest moments have been when time has not existed you are on an island with the sea whispering around and the wind suddenly falls still and the sun breaks through and just for an eternal moment time ceases.

MM: Poetry has a slower metabolism than the business world, than the every-day world. One must take time to digest words, words which come from different periods of history. There's an archeology, an alchemy in words. To digest words is almost a forbidden act, because today one must be ruthlessly efficient, ruthlessly pursue business rather than to focus on time or try understanding our life and death

RST: I have felt for a very long time that we are paying for our conquest of space, by losing touch with time. Time is seemingly meaningless now. You think that with the machine doing so much for you that there would be more time. But the irony is that there is less time. I like to think that poetry is a mature art. In our English-speaking tradition you don't get much great poetry from young people. It needs time to mature and develop into a mature art. Nevertheless, in some strange way there have been people in the past who have died young and who have produced an enormous amount of poetry. I was talking about this once with a professor of English. I said that I tended to waste my time. I used bags of time. He said that probably knew instinctively that I was going to live a long time. Whereas these other people, like Keats, instinctively realized that they were going to live a short time.

MM: What is the place of poetry in our present civilization?

RST: I don't know if you can say that it's going to be decided at any one instant. We're obviously living at the end of a millennium. Presumably, we would like to think that things are in the crucible and that the new millennium brings forth new things. It would be cheering to think that this question is going to be decided in the coming century, but I think that the great battle for poetry is with the machine, as I have tried to say in some of my poetry. It's the de-humanization. The machine de-humanizes. And Wordsworth, as we know, said: "Thank to this human heart by which we live /Things that can move him deeper than tears/ All because of our human heart". Well, we're already becoming familiar with the possibility of an artificial heart. The whole thing seems to land you in nonsense.

MM: It used to be pig-headed, now it's pig-hearted. perhaps lion-hearted man will return us to another time, another place, through natural sex.

RST: We must turn everything in. We are too outward. We must turn it in. When I have a thought, I must turn it in. We're living in a superficial age, when everything is on the surface. And sex is one of the things which Twentieth-Century, Western man has become obsessed with, and the result is shallowness. I'd like to think that man was more passionate in the past. Some of the great works, especially in music, or like The Divine Comedy of Dante, these are works of passion. This is something that we have lost, as Frost would say, by being too 'out'. We're too outward.

MM: Sitting in Prague, in Central Europe, reading Milan Kundera's new novel ‘Slowness’, I have a longing to return to the coy sexuality of the Eighteenth Century. To return to the chase, the retrieve, the approach, a playful conversation which seems lost today.

RST: Yes, I hate the Eighteenth Century, speaking generally. I would go back to earlier periods, as I suggested, with Dante - My father was a sailor. I'd had leanings to the sea. Well, he'd been through the hard days of an apprentice in sailing ships, and he's seen what a hard life the sea could be. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than a full rigged ship, all sails set, sailing the sea. That's the Romantic picture. The realities are something different - Well, if you're going to praise, say, the Fourteenth Century, you also must remember that there was blood, there was violence, life was short, there was plague, starvation for many people, it must have been out of this tension - people's emotions and sensibilities become sharpened. I was the same thing in the war, during the last war. people living in London, or in some of the capitals of Europe - once there're under pressure their instincts and responses become sharpened. It is possible that a work of art is more likely to be born out of that situation.

MM: What do you have against the Eighteenth Century?

RST: It's the Rationalist Century. I mean, Pope and Dryden, and people like that, are a disaster. They are academic fodder. All the professors and lectures love Pope and Dryden because somebody else has written about them so they can write about what somebody else has written about them. It was also the Rationalist Period. I don't know if I am getting my dates quite right - but Locke, and people like that, I dislike the whole approach.

MM: Skipping the revolution, do things change?

RST: How much is really new. How much is really new that matters. I mean, the aeroplane is new. The computer is new. I don't know of what importance they are. They are of no importance to me at all. I think that we'd be much better if the people of the world had never discovered each other. If they had lead their own lives - with large areas of water between them.

MM: What about politics?

RST: Party politics are eternal, of course. The Greek were concerned with politics a discipline, or a subject, an area of knowledge. The right construction of the State, the right management of the State, the good of the State and people as members of a State. And we gradually - we've been through dictatorships in countries like Germany and Russia and Italy and that sort of thing. We're also saddled with the myth of democracy. All these things are a mixture of personal ambition and greed and cleverness and the manipulation of language. Whereas truth is manipulable in the interests not the state, but rather either of the individual or the party. This is the "treason of the clerks" that Pindar sooke of - of which we've all opted out. If we feel, as I feel, we should fight the battle and not put up with this bunch of party politicians. But then each one of us has got his own axe to grind. I would have never written my poetry if I had chosen to fight on the political field.

MM: What was your reaction to the communist states?

RST: It's the question of pacifism. If you're a member of a small nation, as I am - the Welsh Nation has no real power, material power. So, the ultimate battle would have been a personal one. If Hitler had won and national Socialism had taken over, we would have had to stand and resist in Wales, but we wouldn't have resisted as a nation. Each one would have had to fight his own personal battle. And, of course, materially you lose every time. It's a matter of whether you can keep the spirit alive in such circumstances.

MM: Convenience is often more alive than bravery.

RST: I am very conscious of this as a member of the Welsh nation. Those of us who have the good of the Welsh Nation at heart - we want people to make the sacrifice. If we gain independence from England, life will become more expensive. You can't have these things unless you pay for them. You either pay for them with blood, which in the Welsh case is hardly possible, or you pay for them with money. In order to gain independence, it would cost the individual Welshman much more, because living along side a nation of 55 million, as the English are, it is true to say to some extent that Wales is subsidized by England. This is England's great boast. It's the fleshpots of Egypt, isn't it? When they led the children of Israel towards freedom, they regretted the time when they had the fleshpots. Many people in Wales would regret the time when they felt they were materially better off under England, then when they were living in a free Wales.

MM: Where is the crossover between materialism, spiritually and freedom? This seems pertinent with respect to present-day China.

RST: We're in the World of numbers - and I'm afraid, numerically. Simplistically speaking, a large part of the modern world's problem is population. We've just got far to many people in the world. The progressives, the materialistic, the scientists, they all say: "oh, we could feed many more people than we already have." Well alright, if it is possible - then you got the other problem of distribution. To my mind the best thing is to cut down. In a small country like Wales, I don't think that it would be necessary to cut down the population, as to re-distributed it. We're top heavy. We've got over half the population of Wales in the south, just in the old industrial belt. If they could be re-distributed, fine. But with countries like China, Russia, India, countries in South-East Asia, they just got far too many people.

MM: Why not achieve independence for Wales by promoting a Cultural Revolution in England? At least half people would starve to death.

RST: (laughter) One has to employ Draconian methods. But then, who's going to employ them?

MM: Our present government is doing this reverse - they're putting everyone in jail. But that's not a solution.

RST: They have no solution. The old Greek idea of nemesis is still applicable. You get rewarded in accordance with your polices, your way of thinking. I don't know how long it can be postponed, but the whole ethos of the West is heading towards nemesis.

MM: To where do you turn? Do you see poetry as a form of prayer?

RST: No, I see it as languaged-centred almost entirely. Every poet, I imagine, of any quality loves words. This is what he works with, just as a painter works with paint and texture, a musician works with notes - so a poet works with words. It's kind of on-going struggle, as to who is to be maser. You begin by being, more or less, dominated by the words. You gradually attain a certain master - then you realise it's a bit like touch-typing - you then reach a state when you can half be mastered and half dominate. Out of that subtle association, the better works of poetry are born. To have reached a stage of development when you can give yourself to the language and let it sort of carry along to see what it can do. And yet, all the while you've also got a hand on the reins to see that it doesn't run completely away with you.

MM: What stage is silence?

RST: Well, I can't really be silent. I was never any good at meditation. Even when I was at theological college, we were expected to meditate. One a week there was a certain period set aside for meditation. I can never meditate because my mind is not silent - it's full of words chasing each other. I'm fascinated by rhythms and the possibilities of words. You go chasing after new thoughts all the time. I would never set myself up as one of these sages sitting, contemplating his navel in complete silence.