So, what’s this about Baudelaire’s grave? The reference is to lines in ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, one of the poems in the nineteenth-century French poet’s collection ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’:

‘Fais que mon âme un jour sous l’Arbre de Science
Près de toi se repose…’

‘Grant that my soul one day, under the Tree of Science,
May rest near to you…’

On the face of it, it may seem odd that the Christian priest R.S.Thomas should invoke lines from a controversial poem in praise of Satan, but I think the point is that Thomas had a lifelong interest in reconciling science and religion, or at least in getting them to coexist, and saw Baudelaire as somewhat of a fellow-spirit in this regard.

‘since I sought and failed/to steal from it’. I find this modesty on the part of the poet a little irritating, and feel like saying ‘Oh, come on, man, you must know you’ve knocked out more good poems than a poet may reasonably expect in one lifetime’. But I guess it goes with Thomas’s somewhat dour outlook, and his discontent with his oeuvre was probably quite genuine.

‘wearing the green leaves of time’. I find the image in the last three lines beautiful, though I would be hard put to tease it out fully. I think the suggestion is one of the spirit of poetry as something platonic that does not in essence change over time and yet in each generation finds a new expression in the current actuality.

Prayer

Baudelaire’s grave
not too far
from the tree of science –
Mine, too,
since I sought and failed
to steal from it,
somewhere within sight
of the tree of poetry
that is eternity wearing
the green leaves of time.

R.S.Thomas