Rev Ronald Stuart (R.S.) Thomas, who died on September 25th aged 87, was the strangest bundle of contradictions. This was the poet who wrote, of country clergymen, that they were Toppled into the same graves/ With oafs and yokels, but was a country clergyman himself, the oafs and yokels the ancestors of his own parishioners. "I suppose that did shock the bourgeoisie," he said.
Men of the hills, wantoners, men of Wales/ With your sheep and your pigs and your ponies, your sweaty females/ How I have hated you . . . begins a poem written by the man who was such an extreme nationalist he could not support Plaid Cymru because it recognised the English parliament.
If he was a puzzle to his English-reading public, how much more so was he to his own countrymen, for this was a Holyhead man, the product of the town's schools, who spoke the English language without the trace of a Welsh accent - spoke it, in fact, with all the coldness and weariness of its own ruling class. For almost half-a-century, he was married to an English woman, and when asked if she did not object to his ranting on about her race, replied, "Amor vincit omnia - love conquers all." His son, Gwydion, went to an English boarding school.
It is the dilemma of the lyric poet that his material is his own life, his commodity, intimacy. So R.S. Thomas wrote his autobiography in Welsh, and called it Neb - nobody. There was mischief in this, for the answers his admirers sought were in a language they could not understand. But it also reflected the bitterness which danced attendance on him as he grew old, that he had learnt his native language too late in life to write poetry in it. "All those words, and me outside them."
To adapt what someone said of Charles de Gaulle, R.S. Thomas had one illusion, Wales, and one hate, the Welsh, who had been born into a tradition they neglected, and which he, like a tramp at Christmas, was doomed to stand outside. He said once that there had been no personal influences in his life and little contact later with anyone who could be considered his peer. He bought no newspapers and entertained no friends.
It was partly the loneliness of the country priest, cut off by his cloth and learning, but a lot more was deliberate. He felt so cut off from the modern world, with its cult of personality, that, in the autobiography, he referred to himself throughout in the third person - as "the boy", "RS", "the rector".
He could take this sense of distance to hair-raising lengths, as when, asked whether he felt lonely after the death of his wife, he said he sometimes felt lonely when she was alive.
He would not have recognised the self-portrait of the autobiography, of a figure encased in innocence, who accommodated the ambitions and needs of others. R.S. Thomas's mother, a domineering and possessive woman, thought the priesthood a safe career; he became a priest. His wife wanted a child - and the child was born, "with his huge hunger", wrote the poet who could also start a poem, Dear parents/ I forgive you my life.
He was a sea captain's son, studied Latin at University College, Bangor, was ordained, and married the painter Elsi Eldridge, then an art teacher at Oswestry High School. They had one son, Gwydion, a lecturer in education, who never learnt Welsh, unlike his father, who did so at the age of 30.
The relationship between R.S. Thomas and his country was a strange one. It began and ended in Holyhead, so what lay between was an odyssey - from Chirk, his first curacy, on the border, to Manafon, a border parish, to another in mid-Wales, and to the last, at Aberdaron, at the western edge of Wales. This should have been a progression into the heart of Welshness, only it wasn't; there was much black comedy about the odyssey.
Those who knew only the public figure of his later years, with his bitter pronouncements on English incomers would have been startled to meet him in his beginnings, the curate trudging dutifully towards his weekly lesson with a copy of Welsh Made Easy under his arm. But then, there was also comedy about the later years, when, in the Welsh heartland, he met English pensioners in their holiday homes (an Elsan culture/ Threatens us). It was this which produced the public figure, when the press picked up the chance remark that he could understand the motives of those who burnt down these cottages.
There were many interviews then, and many photographs of a wild, gaunt face against the sky, or scowling over the half-door of the 16th-century cottage to which he had retired.
Controversy surfaced again when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in his 82nd year, for it had been largely forgotten that R.S. Thomas was also regarded by many as the finest living lyric poet, ironically, in the English language. Acclaim came late. R.S. Thomas was 42 when Rupert Hart-Davis brought out Song at the Year's Turning, before which there had been just one book, printed at his own expense, and a few poems in magazines. John Betjeman contributed a preface, in which he wrote: "The name which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas."
He wrote about religious faith. He attacked modern life, modern technology, the English encroaching into Wales and the Welsh responsible for the decay of their culture and language. There is no comfort in any of these poems.
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones.
The sheep are grazing at Bwlchy-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.
The hill farmer, at one moment a cosmic symbol of endurance is also greedy, joyless, physically repugnant.
There is no comfort in the religious poetry either, and no answers. One, called Earth, begins:
What made us think
It was yours? Because it was signed
With your blood, God of battles? Yet there is a grim compassion for the hill farmer, and there is the odd abrupt burst of lyricism, when the poet is caught off-guard by the beauty of the natural world. There is also a hardness about his rhythms, and a clarity about his words and images (Who put the crease in your soul, Davies . . .) that preserved him from the misanthropy and the ranting into which some of his attitudes could have betrayed him.
Later, he added God to his dramatis personae, a cold figure indifferent to His creation, and there were small collections with titles like H'm, in which the main emotions seemed to be weariness and disgust. "Just souring old age," said R.S. Thomas. "My mother used to ask my father, `Haven't you a good word to say about anybody?' He thought for a long time and said `No'."
But it was an industrious disgust, for he wrote on and on. A reminder of just how many small collections there had been came when the Collected Poems 1945- 1990 was published - a volume of 500 pages, of near-Victorian dimensions.
In old age, the poems were increasingly abstract, God increasingly absent - though much addressed - so the bursts of lyricism were winter sunlight. On the death of his wife he wrote:
We met under a shower of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed, love's moment in a world in servitude to time.
She was young; I kissed with my eyes closed and opened them on her wrinkles.
`Come,' said death, choosing her as his partner for the last dance.
And she, who in life had done everything with a bird's grace, opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than a feather.
R.S. Thomas is survived by his second wife, Elisabeth (Vernon) whom he married in 1996, and son Gwydion.
Rev Ronald Stuart (R.S.) Thomas: born 1913; died, September 2000