Quotes from Poetry For Supper — R. S. Thomas
1913–2000 United Kingdom
← All quotes by R. S. Thomas
6 quotes
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.
Poetry For Supper (1958)
A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history’s overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.
Poetry For Supper (1958)
They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes: rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
Poetry For Supper (1958)
"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.
Poetry For Supper (1958)
"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"
Poetry For Supper (1958)
It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.
Poetry For Supper (1958)