'Readers in a baize library'

 I must have half a dozen slim volumes of R.S. Thomas's poetry, mostly dating from his later years and published by Bloodaxe Books. Today, browsing in my favourite charity bookshop, I found yet one more – a posthumous collection called Residues (2002), the title Thomas himself had given to a file of typescript poems he left behind at his death, from which his literary executor M. Wynne Thomas compiled the slim volume. 
One of the poems in Residues is 'Remembering Betjeman' – an unlikely subject perhaps, as these were, on the face of it, two poets of very different kidney, and Thomas, the 'Welsh Ogre', was not the most clubbable of writers, nor the most anglophile. However, Betjeman had a very high regard for Thomas, and in his introduction to the collection Song at the Year's Turning: Poems 1942-54, wrote that 'the "name" who has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public [this was Thomas's first mainstream publication] will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas'.  In 'Remembering Betjeman' Thomas recalls a visit to his fellow poet's London house, overlooking the graveyard of St Bartholomew the Great. 

The only greenness
from your city
window was that of the grass
in the cemetery
outside. The stones
bent over it likes readers
in a baize library
out of the way
of the traffic. I caught
your gaze homing
there and changed the talk
from poetry to prose, 
enquiring from the living
what only the dead
knew, who had all time
on their side.
                      Into that room,
now that you have left
it, the view enters
unchanged; the grass
is absorbing, the readers
have not looked up
from their breathless
pondering of the manuscript
of the deaf and dumb.
It is a slow view, but one
never to be overtaken
by the hurrying images
of that other window
your successor has turned to,
tipplers at an existence
that has everything
this one has not 
except its repose.