Sonnet 31

The Shakespeare's Sonnet's page comments on Sonnet 31:
"On thinking of his friend, all sorrow for former loves vanishes. Now he supposes that this is because the parts of all the former lovers, and his share in them, is diverted and migrated into the heart of his beloved. Therefore there is no loss at all, for all is stored up within that one gentle heart, and his former love for others was but a prelude to the love he now feels for the youth, and the accumulated devotion he felt for them is now transferred to his beloved's heart."

But the Christian might also read this as about finding all those one loved who have indeed died in God, the Beloved:

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead;
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I lov'd, I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

Sonnet 29

I'm slowly reading through Shakey's sonnets. This one caught my eye from a spirituality point of view: how do I secure my self-worth in relation to others, if not by finding myself valued by God?

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Gift

Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me

only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.

(RS Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945-1990)

RS at Easter III

The final in our series of R S Thomas poems over Easter is ‘The Kingdom’. Here he holds over the conclusion of each sentence deliberately disrupting the reading of each line. The effect is to underline the paradox of the Christian life: we await the coming of the Kingdom, dreaming of it, but not yet seeing it fully...

To my mind it’s one of his finest poems and often reminds me what faith is all for…


The Kingdom

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

Taken from RS Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990.

RS at Easter II

The second in the series of RS Thomas poems over Easter is ‘Aftermath’. Thomas often alights on the image of ‘the machine’ as a malevolent description for a fallen world denuded of compassion. Here, at Easter, an innocent – the child – delivers the goodnews that even the machine (a car wreck?) is redeemed.

Aftermath

Easter. The grave clothes of winter
are still here, but the sepulchre
is empty. A messenger
from the tomb tells us how a stone has been rolled
from the mind and a tree lightens
the darkness with its blossom.

There are travellers on the roads
who have heard music blown
from a bare bough and a child
tells us how the accident
of last year, a machine stranded
beside the way for lack of
petrol, is covered with flowers.

R. S. Thomas, 1997.

Taken from “6 poems (1997)”, a signed limited edition produced for the Stratford upon Avon poetry festival. (With thanks to Ian James)

RS at Easter

For the next four weeks of the Easter break I’m using for the chaplaincy newsletter some poems by RS Thomas, an old curmudgeon of a Welsh priest, sadly dead, whose austere spirituality occasionally glints with real insight.

This week a poem about the Incarnation – God’s ‘coming’ to us in ‘a scorched land of fierce colour’.

Look out for the typical blending of evolution and religious myth (the serpent / river / slime complex) and the nod towards mysticism (Julian of Norwich’s vision of creation as a nutshell in a hand), alongside stark images of human suffering, culminating with just the hint of ultimate hope…

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

Taken from RS Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945-1990

The Page Turner

Just been to see The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de Pages). Precise, cold, revenge served as nouvelle cuisine. A perfect study of 'an eye for an eye'. Guardian review here.