This article is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
Love the Disordered Man
Iain Crichton Smith, R.S. Thomas and Childhood
Based on a talk given for the R.S. Thomas & M.E. Eldridge Poetry & Arts Festival, Aberdaron, June 2023
Ian Crichton Smith and R.S. Thomas are more readily associated with poems about old people than young: Thomas’s decrepit hill farmers or Smith’s innumerable Old Women, notably the one in Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (‘And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate…’), an anthology which featured both poets. Yet many of Smith’s poems, novels, plays and short stories draw on his own childhood, and for Thomas, the idea of childhood at least is interesting. ‘He was on the whole a happy boy’, Thomas writes of himself in Neb, his third-person, Welsh-language autobiography. Even his sceptical son, Gwydion, whose own upbringing was rather bleak, had to agree, somewhat dryly: ‘The days of his boyhood were without end’. But he is happiest looking away from himself. Thomas’s well-known poem ‘Evacuee’ is about displacement, deracination and the discovery of a kind of tranquillity in the face of unease – the evacuated child waking in a rural setting far from the Blitz and ‘waiting for the syren, slow to trust / Nature’s deceptive peace’. Smith’s equivalent is a desperate reaching out for creativity and colour in the Calvinist community of Bayble on Lewis where he grew up (in considerable poverty), where music was considered sinful and children’s swings were chained up on Sunday. While Thomas didn’t learn Welsh until he was thirty, too late for poetry, Smith needed only Gaelic until he started school and would publish many important works in the language. He ...
Ian Crichton Smith and R.S. Thomas are more readily associated with poems about old people than young: Thomas’s decrepit hill farmers or Smith’s innumerable Old Women, notably the one in Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (‘And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate…’), an anthology which featured both poets. Yet many of Smith’s poems, novels, plays and short stories draw on his own childhood, and for Thomas, the idea of childhood at least is interesting. ‘He was on the whole a happy boy’, Thomas writes of himself in Neb, his third-person, Welsh-language autobiography. Even his sceptical son, Gwydion, whose own upbringing was rather bleak, had to agree, somewhat dryly: ‘The days of his boyhood were without end’. But he is happiest looking away from himself. Thomas’s well-known poem ‘Evacuee’ is about displacement, deracination and the discovery of a kind of tranquillity in the face of unease – the evacuated child waking in a rural setting far from the Blitz and ‘waiting for the syren, slow to trust / Nature’s deceptive peace’. Smith’s equivalent is a desperate reaching out for creativity and colour in the Calvinist community of Bayble on Lewis where he grew up (in considerable poverty), where music was considered sinful and children’s swings were chained up on Sunday. While Thomas didn’t learn Welsh until he was thirty, too late for poetry, Smith needed only Gaelic until he started school and would publish many important works in the language. He ...
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