With its melodious free verse, this love poem's imagery extends beyond an individual woman to wider nature
Among the publications marking the centenary of RS Thomas's birth in 1913, especially interesting is an edition by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies of 138 rediscovered poems. Published recently by Bloodaxe, Uncollected Poems represents what the editors consider to be the best of the work that Thomas, by accident or design, omitted from his individual collections. For both general and specialist readers of this popular but confusingly prolific poet, the selection provides a welcome opportunity, to see him emerge in a clearer and slightly less familiar outline.
Previously scattered among little magazines, limited editions, etc, the chronologically ordered poems represent every stage of their author's career (except juvenilia) and sound all his major themes: religion, the land and nationalism, Daniel Corkery's triad of foci for emergent Irish consciousness are no less significant for this Welsh writer in English. So Iago Prytherch, the hill shepherd character partly inspired by Patrick Kavanagh's peasant-protagonist in "The Great Hunger", appears briefly in these pages, "wandering in the dew" and strangely exalted. The less stony aspects of Thomas and Wales manifest themselves elsewhere, for example in additions to the cache of love poems for Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, the English artist to whom Thomas was married for 51 years. "Luminary" is one of these.
Composed around 1980, it appeared in 2002 in a limited edition pamphlet of family poems, Ringless Fingers, published by the poet's son, Gwydion Thomas (Frangipani Press, Bangkapi, Thailand). Uncollected Poems includes two other fine pieces from this pamphlet.
"Luminary" is free verse at its most melodious. It begins with a spondee (two stressed syllables) asserting the ceremonious quality of the address to "My luminary". The tempo's now set for a slow relishing of vowels and consonants. "Luminary" itself is a word of complex sounds and meanings. Though it doesn't recur again, the rays of its four lovely syllables seem to envelop the whole poem. Usually a noun but also an adjective, its primary, metaphorical definition is "someone who enlightens or influences others". It also has a literal meaning, pertaining to light, and both senses are entwined here. Monosyllables contrast with such Latinate resonance: "star", "light", "noon", "sun" and "sky." Small, but spacious, these words extend the field of luminosity, and perhaps recall Wordsworth's Lucy, "Fair as a star when only one/Is shining in the sky." Then, with the sensuous "l" sound in a minor key, the word "lowers" descends like a cloud.
The "noon when there is no sun/and the sky lowers" is as much a state of mind as weather. Afternoon, for the contemplative orders, was traditionally the most difficult time of day, when slothful despondency (acedia) was most tempting. So, at this point in the poem, the illumination is drawn inward. The following apostrophe, to "My balance", is indicative. This luminary restores personal mental balance, inevitably threatened when loss of balance is a historical condition, and the world itself has "gone off/ joy's standard". Those two plain words, "balance" and "standard", with their connotations of exact measurement, give the abstract transcendence of "joy" an anchorage. The polyptoton ("joy", "joys") neatly illustrates the verbal balancing.
Thomas's use of caesura is always agile. "My light", "My balance" and "Yours the face" subvert the dead hand of the end-stop and ensure the flow of rhythmic energy from one short line to the next.
"Yours the face" introduces a stylistic bridge-passage, allowing the poem to modulate from apostrophe to reminiscence, from an abbreviated to a more expansive syntax. Each word of the short declaration is perfectly placed. As for the Elizabethan poets, love originates in the eyes. Recognition is followed by the wonderfully silent and graceful invitation: "Come, my eyes/ said…" The poem becomes an epithalamion, with a pre-lapsarian freshness shining through the little scene. "The morning/of a world" suggests a comparison of the couple to Adam and Eve in an Edenic first morning. Does the proximity of "world" and "dew" recall the "world of dew" trope which signals transience for the haiku poets? Perhaps, but only fleetingly.
The wedding ceremony might be a Druidic one. Foliage ("a green altar"), and birdsong create a sanctuary from the Church. The thrush officiates, as if in a folk poem. Characteristically, Thomas finds his sacred, unfettered space out of doors.
Anticlerical and anti-technological assertions echo one another in lines 18-20. The capitalisation reminds us that the Machine is, for Thomas, a satanic force. (His ideal Wales would be an Amish community, as far as technology is concerned.) "Stale" and "tarnish" may not strike the reader initially as very interesting or precise verbs; vows can be staled, of course, but these are "gossamer vows" – and how can they be tarnished? Perhaps the vows themselves are seen as bright objects in a fragile pastoral. The pre-emptive metaphor is clarified by its development, from gossamer to flint and platinum, the latter a metal particularly resistant to tarnishing by heat or chemicals.
The subject of the final, and longest, sentence is the speaker. The vows are his, mulled over in exalted solitude, found to have achieved triumphant durability over time. But what is finally emphasised is that the vows are still sensed as unoppressive, "lighter than platinum." And now, for the first time, the plural possessive pronoun, "ours", appears, and one and one make two. In another twist, the "ringless fingers" of the couple prove even the platinum rings imaginary. Their bare fingers demonstrate their concord. Marriage, for them, is unconnected to outward show. It's as if paganism and Puritanism themselves made a spiritual pact.
The imagery extends the poem's reach beyond an individual woman to wider nature. Again we might think of Patrick Kavanagh and the "triangular hill" so lovingly feminised in the poem "Innocence". Thomas places the encounter with his real bride-to-be in his own personally cherished rural space, one of those luminous greenwoods no less integral to the Welsh landscape than are its stony hills.
Luminary
My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers.
via Books: Poetry | guardian.co.uk
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