On Wednesday the 16th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the third poem being ‘Raptor’.
Raptor
You have made God small
setting him astride
a pipette or a retort
studying the bubbles
absorbed in an experiment
that will come to nothing.
I think of him rather
as an enormous owl
abroad in the shadows
brushing me sometimes
with his wing so the blood
in my veins freezes, able
to find his way from one
soul to another because
he can see in the dark.
I have heard him crooning
to himself, so that almost
I could believe in angels,
those feathered overtones
in love's rafters, I have heard
him scream, too, fastening
his talons in his great
adversary, or in some lesser
denizen, maybe, like you or me.
Rowan Williams has been quoted as saying that RS
Thomas is a ‘great articulator of an uneasy faith.’ An increasing influence on
the poet’s writing and thinking is the work of Danish philosopher and
theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. God may be glimpsed by a person occasionally in a
country church, but is essentially baffling and unknowable. God is wholly other
to our human categories of understanding.
Raptor is a later poem, published in No Truce
with the Furies in 1995. There’s something of this experience of the wholly
otherness of God touched on here. This poem makes us feel uncomfortable. It
asks us to include aspects of life that we would prefer not to in our
conversation about God.
The opening six lines form themselves as a
‘retort’ to the reader: to you - who treat God as something or someone we know
and feel very familiar with. The reader assumes something about God that
is not possible: an entity to break down scientifically, known in a laboratory,
able to be tested and measured. The poet plays on the word ‘retort’: being
a return argument, a retaliating defensive holding of a position; or, a ‘retort
stand’ , equipment or glassware to support scientific equipment. Both meanings
imply the reader assumes science experiments and quantifiable measurements will
open up to us the nature of God. Articulate this even in measured stanzas. But
if we remain true to this
task in our absorption, the task becomes really
one of ‘bubbles’, effervescent, evaporating, interesting to our attention but
ultimately futile. God cannot be measured and is not quantifiable. This is a
call to the reader to wake up from this illusion.
The poet’s own ‘retort’ or refutation to ‘you’
becomes the premise of the poem. In the first stanza this, he says, is what
‘you’ think of God. But the next three stanzas will turn to what the poet
thinks.
Turning away from the laboratory he draws on
nature as his chosen place to think on God. A place which is never quantifiable
in bubbles nor readymade to order. He chooses a metaphor: considering God to be
a large bird who can move in the half light, live in the shadows and operate
stealthily in the dark. This ‘enormous owl’ has no inclination to lie astride
instruments in a laboratory, but flies ‘abroad’ in the night. It is a living
creature whose enormity defies the smallness of being grounded inside a
pipette. It can’t be objectified, but neither
one whose presence can be denied: sometimes it
physically touches the poet with its wing. And then the poet’s ‘blood freezes.’
The brush of feathers may be ever so gentle, but the physical response is
immediate and dramatic. The Owl has the capacity to visit ‘one soul to another’
amongst all of us. It is never still for long. Its presence can cause our very
self to stop and feel aghast.
Rather than retracting this sense of unease and
discomfort the poet pushes the point further in stanza 3. This is a God whose
very language is a weird inaccessible ‘crooning.’ It sings in a soft low
voice to itself - its own strange tunes are unintelligible to humans; a God
whose words are secret, keeping its own counsel. A capricious God too, who
without warning, can turn violent, flinging itself down with a ‘scream’ to
‘fasten its talons’ into its opponent. Is this a mighty act on the part of the
Owl against some great enemy? Are we the ‘denizen’ whereby our own spiritual
territory unaccountably and suddenly invaded and
violated? Are these talons for rescue or
consumption?
There is a fascination with violence and cruelty
which runs through this poem and is projected onto God. If we can’t examine God
under a microscope is this the sort of God we end up inviting in? If we can’t
control God, are we then vulnerable to sudden predatory attack? If we can’t pin
down God with our mind under a microscope then we risk being pinned down by God
in our emotional response of terror?
But RS Thomas is being honest
in his perception that for him God can be complicit and involved in cruelty in
the world. We live in a world where natural
disasters, violence and suffering happen for no apparent reason. How do we begin
to reconcile ourselves with this phenomenon? We each have to come to terms with
violence in the world in our own way.
So on one level we can read this poem as a
wrestling with the notion of a God who chooses not only to be complicit in but
an active agent of violence in nature and human disaster. There is good
precedent for this wrestling state of soul in our Christian scriptures: the
prophets, the psalmist, Jesus’ ‘haunting cry’ on the cross. There is permission
in our Christian history of language about God to explore these darker
instincts.
But there’s more.
The poet shows us that if we choose to engage
with the process of understanding God as a metaphor rather than investigation
under a microscope then we are changing the very premise in our discourse about
the nature of God. Something else is understood to be at work here and we have
to invite it in to our language. For a start we surrender control. No longer
the scientist in control of the experiment, we enter a territory in which
mystery and unknown pathways are acknowledged. We have to learn to see
differently. And to speak what we see differently.
The territory involves owning our emotions,
imagination and intuition. There is quite a range being expressed: feelings of
wonder and awe at an ‘enormous owl abroad in the shadows’, at ‘angels in love’s
rafters.’ The poem is full of soft sibilant sounds which at times give the
effect of tenderness. But there is also the terror, ‘the blood in the vein freezes,’ the
owl’s scream in fastening his talons. Feelings and intuitions may not be at all
comfortable nor welcome, but that doesn’t make them less credible. In fact, underlying
the poem is the
understanding that in reckoning with pain,
suffering and violence we have to bring these responses into play. In doing
this the reckoning now has its own language and expression. And we, as free
agents not studying scientists, now are able to recognise and credit not only
the sinister ‘croon’ but also legitimise the presence of angels and hear their overtones,
for their voices in ‘love’s rafters’ though unknowable are still valid.
What we are receiving in these three stanzas is
not a cut and hang out to dry God, but something much bigger, deeper,
richer. By employing our whole range of perceptions, thoughts and
feelings about God we are loosened into a new understanding not only about the
nature of God, but of ourselves. There are fears being expressed here that need
to be brought out, seen for what they are. They too may have their own bubbles of
illusion. This poem is expression a pathway towards forming a much richer, more
mature relationship with God. In this sense, Raptor is a call to be free
to wrestle with dark emotions, frightening thoughts and observation of
evil. We can never know God fully. But if we open
ourselves emotionally and imaginatively, we can
grow into discovering a relationship with God which can, despite all, hold our
terrors, inspire our wonder and help us see, as He does, into the dark.
R. S. Thomas. No truce with the furies. Bloodaxe Books, 1995
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