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It being St David’s Day, I thought I’d read some of RS Thomas’s poems on Welshness and the Welsh. Reading quite a few of them, back to back, I was left feeling slightly embarrassed. Not because of the bitterness and misanthropy (directed at the Welsh as much as the English); those characteristics can sometimes be revealing. It’s more the disproportion: the poems often end up splashed with some blood, and sometimes it is spilt by warriors. But any Welsh nationalist who believes Welsh history is distinctively bloody should compare notes with, say, a Chechen, an Indian, or a Serbian. And then there’s the more proximate example of Irish history.

As the history can’t live up to the epic language the result is bathos. I suspect Thomas was somehow aware of this: for him heroism lived in legends, or in shadowy, imagined history. The Welsh – the really existing ones – had let him down and, comfortable with their beer and televisions, continued to do so (cue that bitterness and misanthropy).

And a good thing too. It would also be disproportionate to paint Thomas as a frustrated Radovan Karadzic, but there are parallels, what-ifs to ponder.

His nature poetry, infused as it is with a freshly-expressed spirituality that somehow approaches one unawares, is much more satisfying. This one, The River, seems right for today – even though looking for those things that ‘winter has not erased’ needn’t be confined to a season:

And the cobbled water
Of the stream with the trout’s indelible
Shadows that winter
Has not erased – I walk it
Again under a clean
Sky with the fish, speckled like thrushes,
Silently singing among the weed’s
Branches.
…………. I bring the heart
Not the mind to the interpretation
Of their music, letting the stream
Comb me, feeling it fresh
In my veins, revisiting the sources
That are as near now
As on the morning I set out from them.