Friday, May 6, 2011

How To Live, Part Six: "Not Conscious That You Have Been Seeking Suddenly You Come Upon It"

My series of "No Escape" posts suggests that the Wherever You Go, There You Are rule quashes any hope we may have of finding the Ideal Place.  R. S. Thomas -- like others -- suspects that what we seek may be right there in front of us, and that the only way to discover it is by giving up the search.

                       Arrival

Not conscious
       that you have been seeking
             suddenly
       you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills
             dust free
       with no road out
but the one you came in by.

             A bird chimes
        from a green tree
the hour that is no hour
        you know.  The river dawdles
to hold a mirror for you
where you may see yourself
        as you are, a traveller
             with the moon's halo
        above him, who has arrived
        after long journeying where he
             began, catching this
        one truth by surprise
that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (1983).

Thomas's poem is reminiscent of these lines towards the end of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" (in Four Quartets):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

                                     Paul Nash, "Wittenham" (1935)
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5 comments:

  1. From My Easy ChairMay 8, 2011 at 8:15 AM

    The poems and your comments put me in mind of Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle," one of the saddest stories I've ever read.

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  2. Stephen PentzMay 8, 2011 at 9:39 PM

    From My Easy Chair: thank you for the comment. I hadn't thought of the relationship with "The Beast in the Jungle," but I can see the connection. I agree with you about the sadness of the story -- the Thomas poem and the lines from Eliot at least hold out hope of discovery and/or redemption.

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  3. forchevilleMay 10, 2011 at 9:18 PM

    More than a few echoes of Eliot's Four Quartets (esp. East Coker) in these lines:

    the village in the Welsh hills
    dust free
    with no road out
    but the one you came in by.

    A bird chimes
    from a green tree
    the hour that is no hour
    you know.

    But Thomas' last line:
    that there is everything to look forward to.

    kind of wrecks the timeless effect; we seem to be back with appetency and time future and its metalled ways.

    Or am I just an old killjoy?

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  4. Stephen PentzMay 11, 2011 at 1:46 PM

    forcheville: Thank you very much for visiting and commenting. I don't think that you are a "killjoy," but I don't feel that the sense of timelessness is necessarily lost in the final line. You may be familiar with "The Bright Field" or "Llananno" by Thomas -- they share a similar feeling of journeying toward something, but in a goalless (I need a better word!) fashion, and then stumbling upon the timeless. (I have included the poems in a previous post, but I don't know how to link to them in a comment, sorry.)

    Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stephen PentzMay 16, 2011 at 6:44 PM

    forcheville: thank you very much for visiting and commenting. On May 11, I responded to your comment, but I just noticed today that it disappeared when Blogger had its lengthy systemwide outage last week. My apologies for not noticing this.

    I don't think that you are being a "killjoy," but I don't pick up on the return to time and the future perhaps as much as you do. I am also thinking of other poems by Thomas (that you are probably aware of) -- "The Bright Field", for instance -- in which Thomas again visits the timeless moment (or a "turning aside", as he calls it). But I see your point.

    Thank you again.

    ReplyDelete