Walter Llywarch

By R. S. Thomas 1913–2000

I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,

Born in Wales of approved parents,

Well goitred, round in the bum,

Sure prey of the slow virus

Bred in quarries of grey rain.

Born in autumn at the right time

For hearing stories from the cracked lips

Of old folk dreaming of summer,

I piled them on to the bare hearth

Of my own fancy to make a blaze

To warm myself, but achieved only

The smoke’s acid that brings the smart

Of false tears into the eyes.

Months of fog, months of drizzle;

Thought wrapped in the grey cocoon

Of race, of place, awaiting the sun’s

Coming, but when the sun came,

Touching the hills with a hot hand,

Wings were spread only to fly

Round and round in a cramped cage

Or beat in vain at the sky’s window.

School in the week, on Sunday chapel:

Tales of a land fairer than this

Were not so tall, for others had proved it

Without the grave’s passport, they sent

The fruit home for ourselves to taste.

Walter Llywarch—the words were a name

On a lost letter that never came

For one who waited in the long queue

Of life that wound through a Welsh valley.

I took instead, as others had done

Before, a wife from the back pews

In chapel, rather to share the rain

Of winter evenings, than to intrude

On her pale body; and yet we lay

For warmth together and laughed to hear

Each new child’s cry of despair.

Source: The Poems of R. S. Thomas (1985)

Biography

Recognized as one of the leading poets of modern Wales, R. S. Thomas writes about the people of his country in a style that some critics have compared to that nation's harsh and rugged terrain. Using few of the common poetic devices, Thomas's work exhibits what Alan Brownjohn of the New Statesman calls a "cold, telling purity of language." James F. Knapp of Twentieth Century Literature explains that "the poetic world which . . .

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