Betwixt and Between

Abstract

At the end of Chapter 6, I called attention to the poems in R. S. Thomas’s work which contain the deepest religious insights. These are made up of two poems in Song at the Year’s Turning, one poem in Poetry for Supper, four poems in Pietà, and nine poems in H’m, the insights reaching maturity in this last volume. In the early volumes The Stones of the Field and An Acre of Land, it was the challenge to religious sense which dominated. And in volumes interspersed among these I have mentioned, in The Minister, Tares, The Bread of Truth and Not that he Brought Flowers, questions, difficulties and doubts reassert themselves. The struggle between belief and rebellion, between warring conceptions of God in H’m continues in Laboratories of the Spirit. The objections to certain ways of talking of God are expressed with an increased savagery, but in the poems ‘somewhere’, ‘The Moon in Lleyn’, ‘The Flower’, ‘Hill Christmas’, ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Farming Peter’, ‘The Bright Field’, ‘Llananno’, ’sea-Watching’ and ‘Alive’, there is a return to the religious insights found in H’m. Yet, the poems which express difficulties for religion are just as powerful in Laboratories of the Spirit as those which express insights and, for many readers, they will no doubt make the greater impression. The volume The Way of It expresses these tensions too, but without the same measure of intensity.