The Innocence of R. S. Thomas

WHEN R. S. THOMAS’S SON was asked how his father liked to occupy himself outside his ministerial duties, he recalled his father’s capacity for being busy ‘in the ways that boys manage to be busy’.1 Such a remark certainly complicates any perception of Thomas as a man locked within a permanent state of gloom. Yet as his son pointed out, while there was this rather dour exterior, as people thought, rather unfriendly and rather unloving, and possibly acerbic, inside he was obviously seething, seething with love and seething with emotion and seething with sensibility, and seething with his search for the good lord. So it was very strange, [like] a very strong box, with a very vigorous interior, which couldn’t get out, but did come out of course in terms of the poetry.2 Gwydion Thomas made several cutting remarks about his father, but none was more acute than this. For Thomas was a man with ascetic tendencies who could nevertheless denounce Protestantism as ‘the adroit castrator / Of art; the bitter negation / Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy’.3 Likewise, his frustration with the stony silence of the hill farmer Iago Prytherch springs from the thought that,