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R. S. Thomas Quotes
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Hate takes a long time
To grow in, and mine
Has increased from birth;
…I find
This hate's for my own kind…
R. S. Thomas
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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
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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
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True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. … I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.
R. S. Thomas
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But what to do? Doctors in verse
Being scarce now, most poets
Are their own patients, compelled to treat
Themselves first, their complaint being
Peculiar always.
R. S. Thomas
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It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.
R. S. Thomas
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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
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It is alive. It is you,
God. Looking out I can see
no death. The earth moves, the
sea moves, the wind goes
on its exuberant
journeys. Many creatures
reflect you, the flowers
your color, the tides the precision
of your calculations. There
is nothing too ample
for you to overflow, nothing
so small that your workmanship
is not revealed.
R. S. Thomas
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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
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Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as i say?
Does no God hear when I pray?
R. S. Thomas
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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
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A power guided my hand. If an invisible company
waited to see what I would do,
I in my own way asked for
direction, so we should journey together
a little nearer the accomplishment
of the design.
R. S. Thomas
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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
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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
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You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.
R. S. Thomas
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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
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It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me.
R. S. Thomas
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All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
I spoke a tongue that was passed on
To me in the place I happened to be,
A place huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
My word for heaven was not yours.
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a shrill sound
Day and night. Nothing that Glyn Dwr
Knew was armour against the rain's
Missiles. What was descent from him?
R. S. Thomas
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Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.
R. S. Thomas
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The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.
R. S. Thomas
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I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens
R. S. Thomas
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
R. S. Thomas
Born:
March 29, 1913
Died:
September 25, 2000
(aged 87)
Bio:
Ronald Stuart Thomas, published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales.
Most used words:
poetry
time
god
man
silence
hand
mind
eyes
life
poet
shadow
love
place
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