R. S. Thomas Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

Why, then, are my hands red
with the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was mislead?

R. S. Thomas
To live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky

R. S. Thomas
Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.

R. S. Thomas
Ah, what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am left 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?

R. S. Thomas
I have been Merlin wandering in the woods
Of a far country, where the winds waken
Unnatural voices, my mind broken
By a sudden acquaintance with man's rage.

R. S. Thomas
The silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind.

R. S. Thomas
Any form of orthodoxy is just not part of a poet's province … A poet must be able to claim … freedom to follow the vision of poetry, the imaginative vision of poetry … And in any case, poetry is religion, religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet, the New Testament is metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. … My work as a poet has to deal with the presentation of imaginative truth.

R. S. Thomas
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
There stood the ladies from the council houses:
Blue eyes and Birmingham yellow
Hair, and the ritual murder of vowels.

R. S. Thomas
Even God had a Welsh name:
He spoke to him in the old language;
He was to have a peculiar care
For the Welsh people. History showed us
He was too big to be nailed to the wall
Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
Between the boards of a black book.

R. S. Thomas
Art is recuperation
from time. I lie back
convalescing upon the prospect
of a harvest already at hand.

R. S. Thomas
God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find.

R. S. Thomas
In the darkness…the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

R. S. Thomas
I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.
King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body's sweetness, the mind's treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart's need.

R. S. Thomas
I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.

R. S. Thomas
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics…
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

R. S. Thomas
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
Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.

R. S. Thomas
Somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

R. S. Thomas
I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

R. S. Thomas
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R. S. Thomas
Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind's failure to explain itself?

R. S. Thomas
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

R. S. Thomas
The ousel singing in the woods of Cilgwri,
Tirelessly as a stream over the mossed stones,
Is not so old as the toad of Cors Fochno
Who feels the cold skin sagging round his bones.

R. S. Thomas
She is young. Have I the right
Even to name her? Child,
It is not love I offer
Your quick limbs, your eyes;
Only the barren homage
Of an old man whom time
Crucifies.

R. S. Thomas