RESERVOIRS
From
https://ramblingatthebridgehead
Reservoirs by R.S. Thomas
There are places in Wales I don’t go:
Reservoirs that are the subconscious
Of a people, troubled far down
With gravestones, chapels, villages even;
The serenity of their expression
Revolts me, it is a pose
For strangers, a watercolour’s appeal
To the mass, instead of the poem’s
Harsher conditions. There are the hills,
Too; gardens gone under the scum
Of the forests; and the smashed faces
Of the farms with the stone trickle
Of their tears down the hills’ side.
Where can I go, then, from the smell
Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead
Nation? I have walked the shore
For an hour and seen the English
Scavenging among the remains
Of our culture, covering the sand
Like the tide and, with the roughness
Of the tide, elbowing our language
Into the grave that we have dug for it.
by R. S. Thomas
from Not That He Brought Flowers (1968)
Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. M. Wynn Thomas said: “He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience.”
R. S. Thomas believed in what he called “the true Wales of my imagination”, a Welsh-speaking aboriginal community that was in tune with the natural world. He viewed western (specifically English) materialism and greed, represented in the poetry by his mythical “Machine”, as the destroyers of community. He could tolerate neither the English who bought up Wales, and in his view stripped it of its wild and essential nature, nor the Welsh whom he saw as all too eager to kowtow to English money and influence.
As Capel Celyn was flooded in 1965 it’s almost certain one of the resevoirs referred to in this poem is this lost community. Capel Celyn was a rural community to the north west of Bala in Gwynedd, north Wales, in the Afon Tryweryn valley. The village and other parts of the valley were flooded to create a reservoir, Llyn Celyn, in order to supply Liverpool and Wirral with water for industry. The village contained, among other things, a chapel, as the name suggests, capel being Welsh for chapel, while celyn is Welsh for holly.
More, I hear you ask?
Clywedog by Gillian Clarke
The people came out in pairs, Old, most of them, holding their places Close till the very last minute, Even planting the beans as usual That year, grown at last accustomed To the pulse of the bulldozers. High in those uphill gardens, scarlet Beanflowers blazed hours after The water rose…
July 10, 2018
In "Literature"
Invitation by R. S. Thomas
And one voice says: Come Back to the rain and Manure of Siloh, to the small talk, Of the wind, and the chapel's Temptation; to the pale, Sickly half-smile Of the daughter of the Village grocer. The other says: Come to the streets, where the Pound sings and the doors Open to its music, with life Like an express train Running to time.…
December 21, 2018
In "Literature"
Once it was the Colour of Saying by Dylan Thomas
Once it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill With a capsized field where a school sat still And a black and white patch of girls grew playing; The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo That all the charmingly drowned arise to…
August 25, 2018
In "Literature"
posted by chris @ 12:30 am
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