R. S. Thomas: Music, Man… Machine

who is R.s. thomas?

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was one of the most significant Welsh poets of the 20th century, a complex figure whose verse explored the tensions between faith and doubt, beauty and hardship, the Welsh landscape and its people.

Born Ronald Stuart Thomas in Cardiff, he grew up speaking English but later embraced the Welsh language with fervor. After studying at University College of North Wales, he was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1936, serving in a succession of rural Welsh parishes that would become the landscape of much of his poetry.

Thomas gained recognition for his uncompromising portraits of Welsh hill farmers in collections like "Song at the Year's Turning" (1955) and "Poetry for Supper" (1958). His stark, unsentimental depictions of rural life avoided romanticism, presenting instead the harsh realities of agrarian life.

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Central to Thomas's work was his vision of two opposing poles in human experience. On one side stood the world of machines, industry, and commodification that he fiercely resisted. In his celebrated poem "Cynddylan on a Tractor," he portrays a farmer transformed by technology, now "part of the machine...his nerves of metal and his blood oil". For Thomas, modernization and mechinisation represented not progress but spiritual impoverishment, a severing of authentic human connection to place and tradition.

On the opposite pole stood the natural world, which Thomas viewed as the true pathway to spiritual awakening. His nature poems, often set in the Welsh countryside or along the seashore, reveal his belief that communion with the natural world could ultimately lead to encounter with the divine, however fleeting or obscure. In "Sea-Watching," he compares waiting for divine revelation to staring at the ocean for rare birds: "Ah, but a rare bird is rare. It is when one is not looking, at times when one is not there...that it comes." This patient vigilance in natural settings became his metaphor for the spiritual life - a patient waiting for glimpses of transcendence.

As his career progressed, Thomas's work turned increasingly toward theological, sometimes existential questions, wrestling with the silence of God in the modern world. His poetry became a chronicle of this tension between mechanistic emptiness and natural plenitude, between divine absence and presence. For Thomas, the Machine represented all that separated humanity from authentic being, while nature offered the possibility, however tenuous, of reunion with the sacred.

Thomas's legacy rests in his unflinching examination of the human condition through spare, precise language that avoided ornament yet achieved remarkable emotional intensity. His poetry continues to resonate with readers for its honesty, spiritual depth, and enduring exploration of what it means to search for meaning in an increasingly mechanized, commodified world where the divine often seems distant but the natural world still offers glimpses of transcendence.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and received numerous awards, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

This Guardian interview near the end of this life encapsulates his thought. Also worth watching is this moving interview with Gruff Rhys Jones where Thomas also reads one of his most cherished poems Children's Song.

Poems to explore (a small selection!)

A Peasant

Welsh Landscape

Cynddylan on a Tractor

Sea-Watching

Children's Song

The Bright Field

The Moon in Lleyn

A Marriage