On the subject of hicks & inbreds, I have a certain degree of experience, having grown up among the men who farm (and occasionally, fuck) sheep, high up in the Welsh mountains where it is quite certain that no edible arable crop will ever grow. RS Thomas, who is regarded in the Principality as a greater poet than either Yeats or Dylan Thomas, wrote a number of poems which sum up the genuine tension between respect for a way of life and horror at the kind of individuals which it typically produces, three of which I reproduce below (the third, "Welsh Landscape", is the most famous).
dd
====================
A Peasant
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
>From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind -
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed, even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
Iago Prytherch
Iago Prytherch, forgive my naming you.
You are so far in your small fields
>From the world’s eye, sharpening your blade
On a cloud’s edge, no one will tell you
How I made fun of you, or pitied either
Your long soliloquies, crouched at your slow
And patient surgery under the faint
November rays of the sun’s lamp.
Made fun of you? That was their graceless
Accusation, because I took
Your rags for theme, because I showed them
Your thought’s bareness; science and art,
The mind’s furniture, having no chance
To install themselves, because of the great
Draught of nature sweeping the skull.
Fun? Pity? No word can describe
My true feelings. I passed and saw you
Labouring there, your dark figure
Marring the simple geometry
Of the square fields with its gaunt question.
My poems were made in its long shadow
Falling coldly across the page.
Welsh Landscape
To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers In all their courses. It is to be aware, Above the noisy tractor And hum of the machine Of strife in the strung woods, Vibrant with sped arrows. You cannot live in the present, At least not in Wales. There is the language for instance, The soft consonants Strange to the ear. There are cries in the dark at night As owls answer the moon, And thick ambush of shadows, Hushed at the fields' corners. There is no present in Wales, And no future; There is only the past, Brittle with relics, Wind-bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcase of an old song.
Get Your Free Email at http://www.al-islam.com