His one great regret was that he found it impossible to write poetry in his adopted Welsh language .. or at least, not good poetry .
His one great failing was that he would go around correcting the "wrong" Welsh of his parishioners ...that is a cardinal sin. There's a bit of a pun there, becasue as you might have guessed from the reference to "parishioners" he was a vicar ... and a very very unusual one!
The day he retired as a vicar, he walked down to the Aberdaron shore followed by a motley crew of parishioners and burnt his cassock right there on the beach!
How I would have loved to meet him! He must have been not too far away when I lived in the Bangor area ....
Although he couldn't write poetry in Welsh, he could write prose ... his remarkable ( O yes!) autobiography is called Neb ( nobody) and is strangely, unusually and enthrallingly written in the third person !
Here's a tribute to him ....
Here's his obituary ...
R S Thomas
Riddled with contradictions, he charted the decline of modern life and his native Wales in bleak poetry, tinged with faint sunlight.
He was the strangest bundle of contradictions. This was the poet who wrote, of country clergymen, that they were "Toppled into the same graves/ With oafs and yokels," but was a country clergyman himself, the oafs and yokels the ancestors of his own parishioners. "I suppose that did shock the bourgeoisie," said RS Thomas, who has died aged 87.A poem started, "Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales/ With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females/ How I have hated you ..." - and the man who wrote that was such an extreme nationalist he could not support Plaid Cymru because it recognised the English parliament.
If he was a puzzle to his English-reading public, just think how much more so he was to his own countrymen, for this was a Holyhead man, the product of the town's schools, who spoke the English language without the trace of a Welsh accent - spoke it, in fact, with all the coldness and weariness of its own ruling class. For almost half a century, he was married to an English woman, and when I asked him once if she had not objected to his banging on about her race, he said, "Amor vincit omnia." His son went to an English boarding school.
He was in Who's Who, but, at one point, that would have told you more about the private lives of the old Soviet leaders. There was a name, "THOMAS, Ronald Stuart", followed by the reason for its inclusion - "poet" - but, after that, just a list of church livings and of books, also an address, for he was a vicar, after all. But there was no record of parents, marriage, fatherhood, not even a date of birth.
In old age, he relented and supplied most of these, even throwing in his Queen's medal for poetry but, unlike the gardening, fishing, motoring princes of his church, never did add "recreations". There was only one, birdwatching, and this was there in the poems - just as everything else was there in the poems.
It is the dilemma of the lyric poet that his material is his own life, his commodity intimacy. So Thomas Hardy, in old age, sent up a smokescreen against future biographers by guardedly writing an autobiography, which he then got his wife to publish after his death under her own name. RS Thomas wrote his in Welsh, and called it Neb - nobody.
There was mischief in this, for the answers his admirers sought were in a language they could not understand. But it also reflected the bitterness which danced attendance on him as he grew old, that he had learnt his native language too late in life to write poetry in it. "All those words, and me outside them."
To adapt what someone said of de Gaulle, Thomas had one illusion, Wales, and one hate, the Welsh, who had been born into a tradition they neglected, and which he, like a tramp at Christmas, was doomed to stand outside. 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.
It was partly the loneliness of the country priest, cut off by his cloth and learning, but a lot more was deliberate. He felt so cut off from the modern world, with its cult of personality, that, in the autobiography, he referred to himself throughout in the third person - as "the boy", "RS", "the rector" - as though watching himself, often with startled interest, from space. He could take this sense of distance to hair-raising lengths, as when, asked whether he felt lonely after the death of his wife, he said he sometimes felt lonely when she was alive. It is one thing to encounter bleak honesty in the poems, but quite another to encounter it in conversation.
"It was difficult to talk to Mr Thomas," a reporter wrote disgruntledly. "He makes it almost obsessively clear that he does not suffer fools, or foolish things, easily."
He would not have recognised the self-portrait of the autobiography, of a figure encased in innocence, who accommodated the ambitions and needs of others. Thomas's mother, a domineering and possessive woman, thought the priesthood a safe career; he became a priest. His wife wanted a child ("the possibility of this had not entered his mind") - and the child was, born, "with his huge hunger," wrote the poet who could also start a poem, "Dear parents/ I forgive you my life."
He was a sea captain's son, read Latin at University College, Bangor, where he also played rugby - the forbidding initials stemmed from the team lists, which contained more than one Thomas - was ordained, and married the painter Elsi Eldridge, then an art teacher at Oswestry high school. They had one son, Gwydion, a lecturer in education, who never learnt Welsh, unlike his father, who did so at the age of 30.
The relationship between Thomas and his country was a strange one. It began and ended in Holyhead, so what lay between was an odyssey - from Chirk, his first curacy, on the border, to Manafon, a border parish, to another in mid-Wales, and to the last, at Aberdaron, at the western edge of Wales. This should have been a progression into the heart of Welshness, only it wasn't; there was much black comedy about the odyssey.
Those who knew only the public figure of his later years, with his bitter pronoucements on English incomers - "the cantankerous clergyman," "the fiery poet-priest" - would have been startled to meet him in his beginnings, the curate trudging dutifully towards his weekly lesson with a copy of Welsh Made Easy under his arm. But then, there was also comedy about the later years, when, in the Welsh heartland, he met English pensioners in their holiday homes ("an Elsan culture/ Threatens us"). It was this which produced the public figure, when the press picked up the chance remark that he could understand the motives of those who burnt down these cottages.
There were many interviews then, and many photographs of a wild, gaunt face against the sky, or scowling over the half-door of the 16th-century cottage to which he had retired. Controversy surfaced again when he was nominated for the Nobel prize in his 82nd year, for it had been largely forgotten that this ogre was also the finest living lyric poet, ironically, in the English language.
Acclaim came late. Thomas was 42 when Rupert Hart-Davis brought out Song At The Year's Turning, before which there had been just one book, printed at his own expense, and a few poems in magazines. John Betjeman contributed a preface, in which he wrote, "The name which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of RS Thomas."
There were some generous reviews, Kingsley Amis calling him "one of the best half-dozen poets now writing in English," and, by the time Selected Poems appeared 20 years later, an anonymous reviewer in the TLS was starting to use words like "major poetry". Suddenly, nobody was making the old charge, that Thomas was a "limited" poet.
Yet it was easy to see why it had been made. He wrote about the hill farmers he had met in his first parish, a people and a way of life very few of his readers would have encountered. He wrote about religious faith, when, for many, this would have held only an historical interest. He attacked modern life, modern technology, the English encroaching into Wales and the Welsh responsible for the decay of their own culture and language.
There is no comfort in any of these poems. "Too far for you to see/ The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot/ Gnawing the skin from the small bones./ The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,/ Arranged romantically in the usual manner/ On a bleak background of bald stone." The hill farmer, at one moment a cosmic symbol of endurance is also greedy, joyless, physically repugnant.
There is no comfort in the religious poetry either, and no answers. One, called Earth, begins: "What made us think/ It was yours? Because it was signed/ With your blood, God of battles?" Yet there is a grim compassion for the hill farmer, and there is the odd abrupt burst of lyricism, when the poet is caught off-guard by the beauty of the natural world.
But the tone is inevitably the bleak, ruthlessly honest note Thomas now made his own. There is also a hardness about his rhythms, and a clarity about his words and images ("Who put the crease in your soul, Davies?") that preserved him from the misanthropy and the ranting into which some of his attitudes could have betrayed him.
Later, he added God to his dramatis personae, a cold figure indifferent to His creation, and there were small collections with titles like H'm, in which the main emotions seemed to be weariness and disgust. "Just souring old age," said Thomas. "My mother used to ask my father, 'Haven't you a good word to say about anybody?' He thought for a long time and said 'No'."
But it was an industrious disgust, for he wrote on and on, and it was startling to be reminded of just how many small collections there had been when the Collected Poems appeared, a volume of 500 pages, of near-Victorian dimensions. In old age, the poems were increasingly abstract, God increasingly absent - though much addressed - so the bursts of lyricism were winter sunlight. This is on the death of his wife:
(This is me interrupting here... This poem is called " A Marriage" ... whoever would have thought that someone repeatedly labelled as a curmudgeon could have written this ? )
We met
under a shower
of bird-notes
Fifty years passed
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
"Come," said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.
I met him when I was 17. He suggested we have tea in a hotel on the seafront at Aberystwyth, but in summer there are many clerical collars in Aberystwyth. A fat man in specs passed, and I hoped it would not be him, then a cheerful chap with a pipe, and I hoped it would not be him either. But then a third man came, a tall, lean athletic man bent against the wind - and it was the face of the poems.
When I wrote about it later, I used adjectives like "hard" and "severe", and had the phrase "almost predatory". By return of post came a letter from Thomas, in which he signed himself "Nimrod". That sense of humour, faint and dry, and so baffling to the young, was the strangest of all his contradictions.
He is survived by his son and his second wife, Elisabeth Vernon.
The Rev Ronald Stuart Thomas, priest and poet, born March 29 1913; died September 25 2000
Let's cheer ourselves up now with Plant Duw ... Nerth dy Draed ....