I’m reading The Man Who Went Into The West, Byron Rogers’s hugely enjoyable and funny biography of R S Thomas, a poet I greatly admire and who seems to me a greater poet than the other great Welsh poet of the 20^thcentury, Dylan Thomas. I came across this poem in the biography. RST is the poet of rural and wild Wales, working as a priest in remote parishes. His subjects were Wales, the wind and the stars, the hill farmers, the fragility of life, and God.

This poem derives from his work as a priest, one duty being to visit the sick. Evans, as the poem makes clear, was a hill farmer, and I know from the biography that he died at 47. Thomas buried him. The poem is simple and powerful, perhaps right for anybody who says “I don’t understand poetry.” The first verse sets the scene, the remote farm in the dark, and the second tells how Thomas felt as he left the farm in the rain. The thought of the sick man “stranded upon the vast/And lonely shore of his bleak bed” fills his eyes with tears. Anybody—priest, doctor, nurse, doula, relative, or friend—who has cared for the dying of the incurably sick, as I have done today, recognises that the helplessness of leaving the person “stranded” and “lonely.”

Evans by R S Thomas

Evans?  Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle”s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.

It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth appalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured.  It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded upon the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.