R.S. Thomas Quotes

You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.

— R.S. Thomas

“To all light things
I compared her: to
a snowflake, a feather”

— R.S. Thomas

“Children's Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
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

Welsh poet R. S. Thomas often complained of having to go out and "perform cultural exceses on Saxon territory," the term he used for reading his poems to English sudiences.

— R.S. Thomas

“I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding 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

“Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.”

— R.S. Thomas

“Confessions of an Anglo-Welshman For my own country's part Her lore and language I should have by heart. 'Twas she who raised me, Built me bone by bone Out of the teeming earth, the dreaming stone. Even at my christening it was she decreed Uprooted I should bleed. And yet for another's sake No wound deletes, No patriotism dulls The true and the beautiful Bequeathed to me by Blake, Shelley and Shakespeare and the ravished Keats. 1943”

— R.S. Thomas

“There is always
laughter out of the speeding
vehicles for the man
who is still, half-way though he be
in a better direction.”

— R.S. Thomas

“There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon”

— R.S. Thomas

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

— R.S. Thomas

“Sunlight 's a thing that needs a window Before it enter a dark room. Windows don't happen. So two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Noisily by them, glib with prose.”

— R.S. Thomas

“The silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind.”

— 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

“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

“I am alone on the surface of a turning planet.”

— R.S. Thomas

“I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens”

— R.S. Thomas

“The nearest we approach God ... is as creative beings. The poet , by echoing the primary imagination , recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them ... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action .”

— R.S. Thomas

“A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.”

— R.S. Thomas

“Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet.”

— R.S. Thomas

“The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there.”

— 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

“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

“I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.”

— R.S. Thomas

They left no books , Memorial to their lonely thought In grey parishes: rather they wrote On men's hearts and in the minds Of young children sublime words Too soon forgotten. God in his time Or out of time will correct this.

— R.S. Thomas

“I have nowhere to go. The swift satellites show The clock of my whole being is slow.”

— R.S. Thomas

I am a man now. Pass your hand over my brow. You can feel the place where the brains grow.

— R.S. Thomas

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

— R.S. Thomas

“We live in our own world , A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge.”

— R.S. Thomas

“Imaginative truth is the most immediate way of presenting ultimate reality to a human being ... ultimate reality is what we call God.”

— R.S. Thomas

“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

“The meaning is in the waiting,”

— 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

“The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always zero. It is ice in the veins. It's camera is an x-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.”

— 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

“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

“The darkness is the deepening shadow of your presence; the silence a process in the metabolism of the being of love .”

— R.S. Thomas

“It is too late to start For destinations not of the heart . I must stay here with my hurt.”

— R.S. Thomas

The deep spaces between stars , Fathomless as the cold shadow His mind cast.

— 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 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

“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

“Deliver me from the long drought of the mind . Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain.”

— 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

“Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand.”

— R.S. Thomas