"Even God had a Welsh name: He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book."

"Yet men sought us despite this. My high cheek-bones, my length of skull Drew them as to a rare portrait By a dead master. I saw them stare From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep In ewes and wethers. I saw them stand By the thorn hedges, watching me string The far flocks on a shrill whistle. And always there was their eyes; strong Pressure on me: You are Welsh, they said; Speak to us so; keep your fields free Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar Of hot tractors; we must have peace And quietness."

"Is a museum Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper Of the heart's relics, blowing the dust In my own eyes? I am a man; I never wanted the drab role Life assigned me, an actor playing To the past's audience upon a stage Of earth and stone; the absurd label Of birth, of race hanging askew About my shoulders. I was in prison Until you came; your voice was a key Turning in the enormous lock Of hopelessness. Did the door open To let me out or yourselves in?"

"I am a man now. Pass your hand over my brow. You can feel the place where the brains grow."

"I am like a tree, From my top boughs I can see The footprints that led up to me."

"There is blood in my veins That has run clear of the stain Contracted in so many loins."

"Why, then, are my hands red with the blood of so many dead? Is this where I was misled?"

"Why are my hands this way That they will not do as i say? Does no God hear when I pray?"

"I have nowhere to go. The swift satellites show The clock of my whole being is slow."

"It is too late to start For destinations not of the heart. I must stay here with my hurt."

"The deep spaces between stars, Fathomless as the cold shadow His mind cast."

"She is young. Have I the right Even to name her? Child, It is not love I offer Your quick limbs, your eyes; Only the barren homage Of an old man whom time Crucifies."

"Deliver me from the long drought of the mind. Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain."

"It is alive. It is you, God. Looking out I can see no death. The earth moves, the sea moves, the wind goes on its exuberant journeys. Many creatures reflect you, the flowers your color, the tides the precision of your calculations. There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing so small that your workmanship is not revealed."

"The darkness is the deepening shadow of your presence; the silence a process in the metabolism of the being of love."

"Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you."

"Sometimes a strange light shines, purer than the moon, casting no shadow, that is the halo upon the bones of the pioneers who died for truth."

"There was a larger pattern we worked at: they on a big loom, I with a small needle."

"A power guided my hand. If an invisible company waited to see what I would do, I in my own way asked for direction, so we should journey together a little nearer the accomplishment of the design."

"It was not I who lived, but life rather that lived me."

"Is there a place here for the spirit? Is there time on this brief platform for anything other than mind's failure to explain itself?"

"Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand."

"In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason?"

"I had looked forward to old age as a time of quietness, a time to draw my horizons about me, to watch memories ripening in the sunlight of a walled garden. But there is the void over my head and the distance within that the tireless signals come from. And astronaut on impossible journeys to the far side of the self I return with messages I cannot decipher."

"Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?"

"somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time."

"What was the shell doing, on the shore? An ear endlessly drinking? What? Sound? Silence? Which came first? Listen."

"I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens"

"Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are."

"All art is anonymous."

"He was wonderful, very pure, very bitter but the bitterness was beautifully and very sparely rendered. He was completely authoritative, a very, very fine poet, completely off on his own, out of the loop but a real individual. It's not about being a major or minor poet. It's about getting a work absolutely right by your own standards and he did that wonderfully well."

"His example reduces most modern verse to footling whimsy."

"R. S. Thomas continues to articulate through his poetry questions that are inscribed on the heart of most Christian pilgrims in their search for meaning and truth. We search for God and feel Him near at hand, only then to blink and find Him gone. This poetry persuades us that we are not alone in this experience of faith — the poet has been there before us."

"I am not notably frivolous, but whenever I read R. S. Thomas’s poetry, or his biography, I cannot help but reflect that, like the majority of mankind, I have spent most of my life chasing false gods."

"Thomas is not a Wordsworthian poet, and his “nature” is not Wordsworth’s; it is history, rather than divinity, which he responds to most, in the bleak beauty of Wales. In Christian terms, Thomas is not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness … He is a poet of the cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness."

"Thomas has been famously plain-spoken — within the prevailing unclearess. Every poem represents an act of will with which he tries to beat a path, to habituate the microbe, to define its Christian antecedents. It is a painstaking effort: he must find a language that is exact, spare, solid, disciplined yet resonant."

"A recurrent theme in his poetry is that of God as a kind of joker — benign and malign by bewilderingly unpredictable turns. … Improving our understanding of temporal existence by distortion is exactly what, Thomas came to feel, the Surrealists did. That he saw their work as approximating that of the subtlest theologians is clear from the fine poem about Kierkegaard he included in his final volume, No Truce with the Furies, where Thomas's favorite theological thinker is characterized as "the first / of the Surrealists, picturing / our condition with the draughtsmanship / of a Dali"."

"RS Thomas is widely recognised as the major British religious poet of the later 20th Century. … His poems challenge, move and inspire readers throughout the world."

"Thomas offers a “sustained critique” not of Romanticism, but of a world that has “eroded away”— a world that has abandoned Romantic imagination. … Thomas intends to resist the anti-romantic Modern spirit. Moreover, as he struggles with his personal faith, the poet’s Romantic imagination defines his attempts to commune with God."

"In nature, it is divinity, rather than history, which Thomas responds to most. … Thomas finds the God of nature elusive, but when He reveals Himself, he does so through the natural world. God’s reflection, His shadow, and His echo exist in the Welsh hills. His influence there is both a presence and an absence (and, at times, an absence that is like a presence)."

"Thomas continues to believe that somewhere beyond God’s metaphoric manifestations, somewhere beyond the questions and sufferings, there is an actual God — inexplicably, even intentionally absent — but real, and one day He may permanently end "the long drought of the mind.""

"Another uncompromising poet whom Betjeman greatly admired was R. S. Thomas who has been described as the Solzhenitsyn of Wales "because he was a troubler of the Welsh conscience.""

"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."

"To sigh, yet not recede; to grieve, yet not repent."

"'T was good advice, and meant, my son, Be good."

"But 'twas a maxim he had often tried, That right was right, and there he would abide."

"Better to love amiss than nothing to have loved."

"Cut and come again."

"Who calls a lawyer rogue, may find, too late Upon one of these depends his whole estate."

"In idle wishes fools supinely stay; Be there a will, and wisdom finds a way."