Quotes from R.S. Thomas

You have to imagine a waiting that is not impatient because it is timeless.

I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying on to a receeding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

To all light things I compared her: to a snowflake, a feather

Children's Song We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge. And though you probe and pry With analytic eye, And eavesdrop all our talk With an amused look, You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven.

There are cries in the dark at night As owls answer the moon

No Through Road All in vain, I will cease now My long absorption with the plough, With the tame and the wild creatures And man united with the earth. I have failed after many seasons To bring truth to birth, And nature's simple equations In the mind's precincts do not apply. But where to turn? Earth endures After the passing, necessary shame Of winter, and the old lie Of green places beckons me still From the new world, ugly and evil, That men pry for in truth's name.

Seated at table - no need for the fracture of the room's silence; noiselessly they conversed.

I can't speak my own language - Iesu, All those good words; And I outside them.

... the silenceHolds with its gloved handThe wild hawk of the mind.