R. S. Thomas’s “Amen”

Abstract

R. S. Thomas’s 1986 collection, Experimenting with an Amen,¹ begins with the intriguing word “and”; the poem “Formula” commences “And for the soul/in its bone tent … ” (1). If the latter phrase reminds us of Sylvia Plath’s valedictory “hood of bone”,² the first word evokes the overall struggle of Thomas’s career to date — the expression of the physical and spiritual bleakness of rural Wales, the search for a valid language to enable the “speech” of the present and the wrestling with the “spectre of spirit”³ which haunts the money-machine world of postmodernity. The collection, as the poem, constitutes a late (if not last)⁴ addendum to and recapitulation of all that Thomas’s unique parish placement and vision has had to say about where we all are now. The poem tentatively posits the terrors of nuclear winter, inexpressible in the “benumbed” words of an exclusionary, scientistic discourse where “E=mc²” is meaningful yet lethal and the term “soul”, for instance, must play off a marginalised language game to attain any resonance in a “half-mast” realm of equations and Death Instinct. This short poem constitutes one kind of epitaph for humankind in a single, halting eight-line sentence. It is, itself, a formulaic, verbal code defining “Beyond the Limits”⁵ in a scenario that exploits war game ultimate descriptions, yet is also relevant in terms of computer predictions of peace-time technological “over-shoot” as the “North” zone: “in-satiate cormorant, / Consuming means, soon preys upon itself”.⁶