Thomas + The Machine

Despite appearances, R.S. Thomas, the crag-faced curmudgeon of Sarn-y-Plas, had a tender side, which showed up quite often in his poetry, as in this love poem to his long-suffering wife of 51 years, the artist Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge –

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers. 


For me, a word stands out, almost incongruously, from this poem – Machine, 'the Machine'. It crops up elsewhere in Thomas's poetry too; it was clearly a major preoccupation of his. Here it is again – 

  . . . The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.

   God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.

And how about this startling image? 

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary?

'Overrun by vocabulary' – aren't we all, in this age of the internet, the mobile phone and social media? And Thomas wrote those lines in 1990, when that age had scarcely begun. For him, the Machine had always meant the relentless advance of technology, driven by money, gradually destroying the organic human world as it goes on its denaturing, deracinating, desacralising, ultimately dehumanising way. It's an image and a phrase that has taken off in recent years, as more and more people have become aware of the destructive processes that are going on in the high-tech world (though it's unlikely Rage Against The Machine had R.S. Thomas in mind when they chose their name). And now Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I admire for the way he has let his thinking develop and lead him on, has brought together his thoughts on the subject in a fat new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I'm going to be reading it, off and on, over the coming months, and might well report back. Meanwhile, there's always R.S. Thomas...