Forest Dwellers

By R. S. Thomas 1913–2000

Men who have hardly uncurled

from their posture in the

womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not

in prayer, but in contemplation

of the earth they came from,

that suckled them on the brown

milk that builds bone not brain.

Who called them forth to walk

in the green light, their thoughts

on darkness? Their women,

who are not Madonnas, have babes

at the breast with the wise,

time-ridden faces of the Christ

child in a painting by a Florentine

master. The warriors prepare poison

with love’s care for the Sebastians

of their arrows. They have no

God, but follow the contradictions

of a ritual that says

life must die that life

may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.

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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