The Award of the Cymmrodorion Medal to Mr. R.S. Thomas

On Thursday, 6 July 2000, in the simple ceremony at his home, R.S.Thomas was presented with the Society’s Medal by the President. It was Mr. Thomas’s wish that the occasion should be private, but also present were two Vice Presidents, Professor Ceiri Griffiths and Judge Dewi Watkin Powell, Sir Kyffin Williams, a previous recipient of the Medal, and Mr.Robin Llewelyn of Portmeirion, as well as the wives of those present. The President referred to R.S. Thomas’s eminence, that ‘we were in the presence of a truly great poet who honoured the Society by his acceptance of the award’. R.S. Thomas responded warmly and was clearly delighted with the honour.

	L to r: Prof. Emrys Jones (President of the Society), Mr. Robin Llywelyn, Mr. R. S. Thomas and Sir Kyffin Williams.

R.S. THOMAS: A TRIBUTE

R.S. Thomas is the Solzhenitsyn of Wales; a writer of violent integrity, conscience-stricken at the state of his country, haunted still by the image of it he saw as a child. Growing up on the far tip of Anglesey, he could see the magnificent silhouette of Snowdonia on the distant mainland. Throughout his life, R.S.Thomas has been journeying, in imagination, towards that elusive lost heartland of national identity.

One of his earliest parishes was that of Manafon, a hamlet in the heart of the hill-country of mid-Wales, and his first poetry came from the shock of his exposure to the tough, harsh life of peasant farmers struggling to survive on bleak upland farms. Central to most of his first eight volumes (1946-68)was the gaunt figure of such a farmer, Iago Prytherch, a poor forked creature whom Thomas turned, through the loving ferocity of his scrutiny and the yearning intensity of his baffled meditations, into an allegory of the irreducible strangeness of human existence, its inherent resistance to reductive explanation. Prytherch -a figure as compellingly mysterious as those sculpted by Giacometti or to be met in Beckett ’s plays -continued to haunt Thomas even after he left Manafon. But then came a move to Aberdaron, at the far end of the long, lean Llyn peninsula, ‘a bough of land between sea and sky.’ In the remote period of Celtic Christianity it had been a sacred place on the pilgrim route to Enlli (Bardsey); the pre-Cambrian rocks of the peninsula are notably ancient; the ever-present, looking-glass sea meant that ‘the mind spun, vertigo not at the cliff’s edge,but from the abyss of time.’Thomas was there moved to produce a new poetry of profound spiritual meditation, beginning with H’m (1972). From then on his poems have become laboratories of the spirit, where language is tested by being put under the moral microscope in an attempt to determine the conditions on which religious belief is possible after the Holocaust and Hiroshima. His short narrow texts look vulnerably exposed on their white pages, as if every word were being held uncomfortably to account for what is says; as if language is placed on probation; as if it is being required to bear inadequate witness to its own probity.

Of the Collected Poems published on his eightieth birthday, the then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes exclaimed: ‘this is a book I’ve been waiting for. Lorca said: “The poem that pierces the heart like a knife has yet to be written.” But has anybody come closer to it than R.S. Thomas?’ The same year, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, reflecting the fact that this work had been translated into French, German, Italian, Catalan, Danish, Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew. Yet, in spite of worldwide recognition of his greatness, R.S. Thomas has remained a ‘hermit of poetry ’, exemplifying the truth of the remark made by one of his favourite poets, Wallace Stevens: ‘Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds.’

M.WYNN THOMAS