Like many of R.S.Thomas’s poems, this one is somewhat bleak and perhaps a little extreme, in, for example, the idea that nothing written in a poet’s twenties will cause the poet anything but shame later on. Keats and Wilfred Owen died at twenty-five, Keith Douglas at twenty-four, and while I am all for standards, to suggest that they, had they lived, would of necessity come to disown even their better efforts seems to me to be setting the bar a little high. But of course, the poem could be intended to be read as a soliloquy in which the poet is specifically addressing his younger self, in which case fair enough.

Either way, from a professional point of view I find it a very interesting poem, and I much admire its reticent and self-critical spirit, and its implied willingness to destroy work that does not come up to scratch. I know that some poets keep everything they ever write: drafts, variants, even rejects. I find this slightly horrifying. We have no duty to supply grist to the academic mills. Squeeze, scrap, burn, kill, say I. Did any poet ever regret destroying a poem? I doubt it. If there’s really something wanting to be said it will come back sooner or later in another and perhaps truer form. But did any poet ever regret not destroying a poem? I suspect that the Elysian fields are full of poets wandering about, oblivious of the asphodel, and muttering to themselves: ‘Crass incompetence… what on earth was I thinking of…’ My personal practice from time to time is to burn my accumulated rejects in the garden at midnight under a full moon, then cover the ashes with three spadefuls of earth. My wife says she sometimes wonders what she married. I don’t understand this at all. Some people turn into werewolves; I just like to be thorough.

Anyway, over to R.S.Thomas…

To A Young Poet

For the first twenty years you are still growing,
Bodily, that is: as a poet, of course,
You are not born yet. It’s the next ten
You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking
For your brash courtship of the muse.
You will take seriously those first affairs
With young poems, but no attachments
Formed then but come to shame you,
When love has changed to a grave service
Of a cold queen.

From forty on
You learn from the sharp cuts and jags
Of poems that have come to pieces
In your crude hands how to assemble
With more skill the arbitrary parts
Of ode or sonnet, while time fosters
A new impulse to conceal your wounds
From her and from a bold public,
Given to pry.

You are old now
As years reckon, but in that slower
World of the poet you are just coming
To sad manhood, knowing the smile
On her proud face is not for you.

R.S.Thomas

If you think that Scots Gaelic poetry is all about misty corries and wild sea-voyages and laments for fallen chieftains – and of course it is, in part, all those things – then the poetry of Sorley Maclean (or to give him his proper Gaelic name, Somhairle MacGillEain) may come as a bit of a surprise, being quite edgy and modern, concerned with his difficulties in love and experiences in war. In a way Sorley (1911-1996) is an odd case, since he managed to acquire an international reputation as a poet despite writing in what is now, sadly, very much a minority language, and one little known outside Scotland, or indeed even within it: a tongue that for most is enchantingly but irredeemably alien. So, given the relatively small number of readers able to engage properly with the original texts, I think that a good deal of that reputation has had to be taken on trust. True, Sorley provided his own English translations of his poems, which are functional but to my mind read a little awkwardly. Really it would be surprising if this were not the case: there are of course many examples of poets able to write competent verse in more than one language, but real poetry? Offhand I can’t think of any: the head may speak many languages; the heart, only one.

Anyway, here is one of Sorley’s poignant lyrics of despairing love, and, for the reasons given, I have ventured to offer my own translation rather than his. Hm, what’s the Gaelic for chutzpah: perhaps ‘dànachd’ comes close…

An tè dhan tug mi . . .

An tè dhan tug mi uile ghaol,
cha tug i gaol dhomh air a shon;
ged a chiùrradh mise air a sàillibh,
cha do thuig i ’n tàmailt idir.

Ach tric an smuaintean na h-oidhch’
an uair bhios m’ aigne ’na coille chiair,
thig osag chuimhne ’gluasad duillich,
a’ cur a furtachd gu luasgan.

Agus bho dhoimhne coille chuim,
o fhreumhach snodhaich ’s meangach meanbh,
bidh ’n eubha throm: carson bha h-àille
mar fhosgladh fàire ri latha?

Somhairle MacGillEain

She to whom I gave…

I gave to her all love; she gave to me
No love in return.
Although I suffered for her sake
She never saw the shame of it at all.

But often when I lie awake
Memory like a night-breeze
Stirs the dim wood of my mind,
Turning my peace to unrest.

And from the heart of that wood,
From sap-filled root and slender bough,
Will come the heavy cry: why was her beauty
Like a door that opened for me on to day?

Some poems you read, think ‘yes, very nice’, then forget until you come across them again, and some, once met, you live with. For me this is one of the latter. As a teenager I loved to run at night, and one of my courses, a fifteen-miler, took me far out into unlit countryside. One winter night at about the ten mile mark, just where a country lane passed through dense woods on either side, it began to snow, soft feathery flakes whirling down out of a dark sky, tingling on my tongue and carpeting the ground so that it was like running on white moss. I found that I knew Frost’s poem by heart – it is one of those poems it is difficult not to know by heart – and it ran in my head as I ran, making one of those rare magical moments when life and poetry come together in a perfect fit. I was troubled not at all by the suggestion of a final permanent sleep in that closing line – was I not young, and immortal?

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost