Through the Looking Glass: R. S. Thomas's The Echoes Return Slow as Poetic Autobiography

Abstract

As of 1993, R. S. Thomas has published 28 collections of poetry, including his 548-page Collected Poems 1945-1990, which has been called greatest publishing event in Anglo-Welsh poetry since Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems came out in 1952 - some would say since Anglo-Welsh poetry was ever published at all (Conran 15). corpus of Thomas's work has commonly been divided into three periods: an early period (1946-55) dominated by explorations of the east Wales hill country and its small-holding farmers; a middle period (1955-72) in which his interest in the Welsh landscape and peasant farmers merges with expressions of his developing nationalist convictions; and a later period (1972 to the present), which turns from Wales as a physical, cultural, and political entity to address metaphysical questions concerning the relationship between God and human beings, and between the self and the spirit, in a materialistic, self-destructive world. While the arrangement of dominant themes into distinct periods provides a means of encapsulating decades of literary production, it also tends to mask the complexities of individual poems and obscure the variety of connections among poems. Poems treating the dominant themes of nature, nationalism, and religion in fact sustain the entirety of Thomas's work, intertwining, transforming, repeating, and merging throughout the collections published to date. Referring to these characteristics of Thomas's poetry, poet and critic Anthony Conran observes that One of the difficulties of talking about R. S. Thomas is the way his work seems to progress in great irregular spirals: each of his books may have pieces that refer back, in style, material or attitude, over several volumes or even to the very beginnings of his poetry. It may also have poems in it which seem totally new, but which have to wait their development two or three volumes in the future. (Cost 234) While Conran does not mention W. B. Yeats in this analysis, a Yeatsian attention to relationships among poems - within a single collection and among collections - clearly informs Thomas's construction of his poetic canon and shapes our understanding of his poetic autobiography.(1) In investigating this poetic autobiography, I will primarily treat Echoes Return Slow, a collection published in 1988, when Thomas was 76 years old. As Thomas's only overtly and wholly autobiographical collection, Echoes Return Slow deliberately draws to itself and revises his previous life and work, looking backward from his present consciousness and knowledge, and forward to his final years of life and productivity. At the same time, the collection is a sustained prose-and-poem sequence with a movement and unity of its own. If Thomas's Collected Poems functions as a looking glass or mirror, presenting a life the life of the poet(2) - distinct from but reflective of Thomas's lived life, then Echoes Return Slow might be described as a mirror reflecting that mirror.(3) I want to explore one facet of the multifaceted Life of the Poet contained in these poems: Thomas's understanding of how and why he writes poetry. Within this area, I want specifically to examine his conception of poetry as the transformation of spiritual wounds, his requirement for brutal honesty in poetry, and his capacity for poetic renewal. Echoes Return Slow is the only volume of Thomas's to combine prose and poetry: 60 prose passages and 60 poems are arranged on facing pages, none is titled, none is longer than a single page. In an interview with Planet, Thomas acknowledges the influence of Geoffrey Hill's semiautobiographical prose sequence, Mercian Hymns, on the form of Echoes Return Slow. I was partially influenced by Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, but did not want to imitate him with a prose sequence. Partly I had in mind Coleridge's gloss on the verses in The Ancient Mariner. It was a kind of counterpointing. (50)(4) While suggestive of entries from a memoir in their visual impact and direct, chronological treatment of life experiences, the prose passages on the left-hand pages are less like memoir entries and more like poetry in being highly wrought; carrying a weight of metaphoric, sometimes disjunctive content; and demonstrating careful attention to sound patterns and rhythm. …