Poetry for Supper
‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’
‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’
‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’
‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.
Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913. When he was five, his father, who had served as an officer in the merchant navy, began working for the Irish ferry service and moved the family to Holyhead, described later by Thomas as “a horrible little town with a glorious expanse of cliff and coastal scenery”. Thomas went on to study classics at the University College of North Wales (now Bangor University). Ordained as a minister of the Church of Wales, he subsequently left north for mid-Wales and elsewhere, but still seems to have felt an outsider; his ancestors were mostly English speakers from the south of the country and English was his mother tongue. Although he learned Welsh as a young man, and chose it as the medium for his autobiographical writings, it wasn’t the language of his poetry.
Poetry for Supper is the title poem of Thomas’s 1958 collection. By now he has established his artistic territory and is able to take time off from the gale-whipped hill farms for poetry talk in the cosy inn-parlour. Real or imagined, the conversation has a lively colloquial swing. The “two old poets” clearly feel at home. Confidently, warmly, they mount a version of the argument that fascinates many creative artists – put crudely, the issue of Spontaneity versus Slog.
The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”.
Thomas re-clothes the metaphor at an earthier level with “the small tuber that feeds on muck” and grows from “obtuse soil” into the poem’s “white flower of immortal beauty”. Yeats, a writer of major significance for Thomas, seems also to be referenced here: “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” (The Circus Animals’ Desertion). That “ladder” is in fact cited by Spontaneity’s opponent, Slog, at the end of his own metaphorical account of the matter. It suggests the depth of the descent.
Slog counterattacks with the help of a fistful of strong line breaks and Geoffrey Chaucer. He is almost certainly recalling The Parliament of Fowles: “The Lyf so short, the craft so long to Lerne, / Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.”
To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in.
Thomas is content to leave the matter where it stands. He is after all a master of the irreconcilable. His pragmatism as a religious poet who sometimes nudges towards agnosticism is paralleled by the resistance to treating a particular poetics (modernism included) as God-given law, or indeed treating his own poetry as sacrosanct. According to biographers, he wrote quickly, revised little, and always had a wastepaper basket handy. But he doesn’t takes sides in Poetry for Supper.
I particularly like the ironical thrust of the narrator’s closing comment that “the talk ran / Noisily by them, glib with prose”. Have the old poets been talking in a kind of superior, more poetry-like language than the others in the bar? I don’t think so. They have contributed to the noise and the glibness, for all that their discussion was a passionate one. Thomas, I think, is wryly suggesting they might, after all, have better spent their time writing poetry than talking about it, cooking up a quarrel that is finally, perhaps, an ego trip or a pleasant supper-time diversion, having little to do with the real, uncertain business of making art.
Thomas’s early commitment to the vocation of poet owed a great deal to the influence and creative example of his wife, the artist Mildred “Elsi” Eldridge. An exhibition currently taking place in Bangor University celebrates the work and partnership of both, and can be visited online here.
