The Columbia History of British Poetry (160 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 618
R. P. Draper, 1989), Barbara Hardy distinguishes between R. S. Thomas's occasionally strained relation to Wales and Dylan Thomas's relaxation into "a deep sense of region." Certainly a bitter nuance in R. S. Thomas's poetry represents Welsh nonconformist culture as materialistic, hypocritical, and puritanical.
There is a mismatch between his "prototypical" hill farmer Iago Prytherch ("something frightening in the vacancy of his mind"), and the ''bright hill" that symbolizes the nation. This may be both the prejudice of an Anglican priest and the disappointed romanticism of a newcomer to rural Wales. Dylan Thomas, on the other hand, was happy to call himself "a border case," and his deepest imaginative topography roots him in Anglo-Welsh Swansea: an "ugly lovely" sea town, English-speaking but close to the Welsh language and to the countryside (Ann Jones's farm at Fernhill). His poetry is also rooted in the nonconformism that R. S. Thomas views from an Anglican distance. Dylan Thomas's highly wrought rhetoric mediates the Bible through the
hwyl
and hellfire of evangelical preaching, for instance in "The Crucifixion":
This was the crucifixion on the mountain,
Time's nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept:
The world's my wound, God's Mary in her grief,
Bent like three trees and bird-papped in her shift,
With pins for tear-drops is the long wound's woman.
Thomas's poetry is itself crucified by dualisms of life and death, body and soul, sex and sin, world and wound. Insofar as these dualisms are intrinsic to Thomas's Welsh religious identity, they complicate his relations to Wales and to cultural borders. His unease abroad, cloaked by excessive alcohol and excessive eloquence, partook of unease at home.
Karl Shapiro in
In Defense of Ignorance
(1955) argues that "Like D. H. Lawrence [Thomas] is always hurling himself back into childhood and the childhood of the world." Thus his more truly "relaxed" Welsh poems are Edenic reconstructions"Fern Hill," "Poem in October"written in the mid-1940s. These poems wonderfully but wistfully restore a primal universe in which human beings, animals, birds, plants, "the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide"locality and cosmos, then and now, male and female, word and thing, word and wordhave not undergone separation and differentiation:
 
Page 619
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
     Through the parables
         Of sun light
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the twice-told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
                                                                ("Poem in October")
Throughout Thomas's poetry, prolonged noun phrases suspend time and history.
Shapiro's remark that Thomas "said everything he had to say: it had little to do with wars and cities and art galleries" parallels the conclusion of Patrick Kavanagh's "Innocence" (1951):
I do not know what age I am,
I am no mortal age;
I know nothing of women,
Nothing of cities,
I cannot die
Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.
Once again what Kavanagh called "that childhood country" is counterposed to an urban, historical, fluid world beyond some defensive psychic perimeter. (By now this seems virtually a collective Celtic narrative, testifying to more than merely personal experience.) While Kavanagh's poetry does not resolve various dualisms encountered elsewhere, it dramatizes them in terms that generate fresh aesthetic possibilities. Kavanagh was that rare thing in this centurya poet with very little secondary education. He worked the "stony grey soil" of Inniskeen in County Monaghan until he left for Dublin in 1939, "the worst mistake of my life." Kavanagh began as a naive poet, a believer in the poet as visionary, able to see farming tasks in the fight of his poetic vocation, overimpressed by stale Romantic diction. The early poem "Ploughman" ends:
I find a star-lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God.
Then, in 1942, Kavanagh published one of the most remarkable long poems of the twentieth century,
The Great Hunger
a poem that sav-
 
Page 620
ages the pastoral idioms propagated by English Romanticism, the Irish literary revival, the Irish Free State (which idealized a blend of piety and agriculture), and even his own early poetry:
There
is the source from which all cultures rise,
And all religions.
There
is the pool in which the poet dips
And the musician.
Without the peasant base civilisation must die,
Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer's singing is useless.
A strong influence on R. S. Thomas's Prytherch poems,
The Great Hunger
anatomizes the sexual and spiritual inhibitions of Patrick Maguire, paralyzed by "Religion, the fields and the fear of the Lord." The Irish Catholic version of puritanism produces a structural irony whereby Maguire's life stands still from cradle to grave, while the seasons, the natural world, and the cycle of the farming year wheel on: "The cows and horses breed, / And the potato seed," but Maguire can only open "his trousers wide over the ashes / And [dream] himself to lewd sleepiness." That Maguire is tied by "the wind-toughened navel-cord" to farm, family, and community makes the poem an extraordinary cross between documentary and psychodrama, reportage and symbol, lyric and epic:
Life dried in the veins of these women and men:
The grey and grief and unlove,
The bones in the backs of their hands,
And the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.
Kavanagh's great antipastoral outcry"The hungry fiend / Screams the apocalypse of clay / In every corner of this land"has both literary and political resonance. His motif of clay in the mouth, "a speechless muse," implies how the poem itself speaks not only for unarticulated rural experience but for deep repressions in Irish culture: the poet-narrator and the silent Maguire divide up a split psyche.
The Great Hunger
was censored by the state, ostensibly because it mentions masturbation, but perhaps also because of the contradictions it exposes in Catholic theology and Nationalist ideology.
Kavanagh disliked the brand of Irishness enshrined in revival literature, and considered that Yeats's Protestantism made him "a doubtful Irishman"; but he also objected to the totalizing Nationalist myth of Ireland. In "Nationalism and Literature" (reprinted in
Collected Pruse
,

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