Our religious convictions and cosmological narratives tell us that this earth and the whole universe are gifts that we have received from the spring of life, from God. It is our obligation to respect, protect and sustain these gifts.

— Statement of Faith and Spiritual Leaders on the United Nations Climate Change Conference, 2015¹

  When reading literature of the Christian episteme, one must be careful of presenting nature as mere metaphor for God’s beneficence. Sublime traces of grandeur – vast canyons, powerful waves, dense vegetation – are not to be mistaken for the presence of God itself. Rather, these elements are figured in the Christian imagination as evidence of divine omnipresence: not only is God creator of the universe, but His dynamic presence is necessary to sustain the existence of every created thing.² This notion of immanence, that God is manifested in the material world, is positioned dialectally against His transcendence, that His nature and power are independent of materiality. Theologian Arthur Peacocke advances the position that God continuously creates through the processes of the natural order, affirming that God works from inside the universe but is not limited by it.³

  This quandary opens questions of divine epistemology through poetry, a critical terrain weaving the literary and liturgical. If there is a concordance amongst all created things, however abstract, does that not attest to the poetic possibility of detecting God in the mundane and banal? An affirmative understanding of God is intuitive, for it is a sense of sublimity aroused when one can perceive God’s qualities in the material world. By contrast, one is led to question the experience of divine absence, one in which God is known intensely by a hollowing of a particular place. Yet, these epistemologies presuppose one another. As theologian Meister Eckhart articulates of the via negativa:

If thou lovest God as God, as spirit, as person, o as image, that must all go. — ‘Then how shall I love him?’ love him as he is: a not-God, a not-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image; as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien from all duality.⁴

While Eckhart purports to image or know God only through what He is not like, the via negativa cannot escape the inferences of language, which inscribe into the text the opposite, what He is like — the via positiva.⁵ This tension between the integrity of reason and the expression of intuition is fundamental to this problem. The religious poet’s task is to acknowledge the theology of imagining God, being concerned with absence and otherness and also with presence and likeness.⁶ The landscape, as an aesthetic segmentation of nature, functions as one such metaphor by which God can be made comprehensible.

  When examining the poetry of R. S. Thomas, however, this epistemology is frustrated: how can one speak of the ineffable when the only descriptive language available is colonial? The intermingling of Christian contemplation and the totalising impetus of evangelism attests to an expansion of the ecological imagination within a colonial framework. The hunger for the divine that Thomas displays, in some ways, is already inscribed in the language and cultural topography of an imagined England. While one may assume that poetry evokes the sacred in a physical place, this is complicated when said place is a site of complex cultural history, defined by struggle, displacement, and a fraught relationship with the language that attempts to articulate it.

  The broad contention of this study, then, is that while the spectre of coloniality strains the position of the subject, it does not inhibit the possibilities of encountering the divine. The dialectical positioning of the immanent against the transcendent is reflected in the affirmative and negative epistemologies expressed in the poetry of Thomas, where a religious idiom is used to conceptualise a response to the natural world.

  Thomas served as a faithful minister in the Anglican church, first in rural Montgomeryshire and then in Aberdaron at the western tip of the Llŷn Peninsula. The elation of transcendent feeling is not a given in his works as they vacillate between affirmative and negative pathways to experiencing the divine. The sparseness of the Welsh landscape served to exteriorise his feelings of precariousness. When such individuated experience is read within broader community, E. V. Walter asserts that the “totality of what people do, think, and feel in a specific location gives identity to a place, and through its physique and morale it shapes a reality which is unique to a place.”⁷ To Thomas, such a reality is produced, discursively, through the mediations of poetry.

  John Inge attempts to provide a theological framework for understanding the natural world in A Christian Theology of Place. His argument is tethered to Christian doctrine as he articulates, “We start with the biblical account of a God who self-reveals, who did so to many individuals, and has done so decisively in Christ. […] the biblical narrative leads us to expect God’s self-revelation and, therefore, that the world is a possible place of sacramentality”.⁸ For Inge, the experience of nature cannot retain its sacramental character if it remains extra-scriptural. The poet’s engagement of the landscape, therefore, is inflected with God’s possibility of self-revelation, with biblical antecedents in Mt. Sinai and its surrounding desert. Inge continues:

Sacramentality is not simply an affirmation of the world as it is, but of the fact that Christ is in the world to unite the broken fragments of life by making the material a vehicle for the spiritual. […] The life and person of Jesus reveal the grammar of reality to which these experiences point, which the liturgy is seeking to evoke, and which the poet is seeking to illuminate.⁹

Inge’s universalist position identifies the persistence of reconciliation through the figure of Christ, of glimpses of beauty that hold reality in rapt tension. This cycle of brokenness and restoration does not remain unfamiliar to Thomas as he evokes the unrelenting rhythms of burden and relief in the Welsh landscape.

  Furthermore, this poetic examination of landscape is intimately entwined with the constitution of subjectivity. Gaston Bachelard writes about this internalisation of place which he understands by way of “topoanalysis”. Bachelard argues that the significance of locality is as important in the mind as it is in the outside world, so that place can be non-physical and yet fully count as place. He insists that the psyche, or the soul, is the spatial receptacle for images, with the chronology of things giving only “a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others.”¹⁰ Bachelard suggests that in order to understand oneself, the exploration of self-identity through place as biographical habitat is crucial.¹¹ Similarly, Martin Heidegger asserts that the human person is a dasein, literally a “being there”, referring to the essential nature of “placidness”.¹² By this conception, man is not a subject apart from the world, but an integral, immersed member.¹³ It is in these descriptions of mutual identity constitution, as poetically mediated by depictions of landscape, that Thomas can be situated. Yet, as metaphor for God, one must remain aware of poetry’s limitations and the temptation, in George Herbert’s phrase, to “rest in nature”.¹⁴

  Beyond the imaginative possibilities created through this engagement with nature, the interstitial position of language is problematised for Thomas. English remains the tool by which a sense of home and origin is discerned. As Ned Thomas writes, the Welsh Anglophone writer’s language and concepts come already shaped to a high degree outside Wales — there are already in English, well-established “moulds” for conceptualising Wales, the influence of which is hard even for self-conscious writers to escape entirely.¹⁵ The gravitational pull of England is described as “a received Romanticism of the far horizon, the erotic periphery”, one that “enters the literary vocabulary of the young poet from outside, is challenged, problematised, and then redefined by a more profound understanding of [its] philosophic roots […] to create a new centre of consciousness here and for the poet’s own people.”¹⁶ The importation of such a way of seeing the landscape results in a doubled alienation for Thomas from his ethnolinguistic Welsh identity and the presence of God. The precariousness of a divine encounter is paralleled by a precarious relationship with the English language and its inescapable relation to the Romantic tradition.

  Thomas’s aspiration toward this experience of immanence is located in the notion of Abercuawg which, as first articulated in the 9th-century Welsh poem “Claf Abercuawg”¹⁷, “is not a place, nor is its vision of purity and natural beauty even an achievable ideal; its value lies in the spiritual and imaginative effort which the individual makes in struggling to achieve the ideal.”¹⁸ As Thomas elaborates:

Abercuawg … has to do with the process of becoming … But in accepting the process of becoming, man realises that he is a created being. This is man’s estate. He is always on the verge of comprehending God, but insomuch as he is a mortal creature, he never will.¹⁹

The unknowability of God, the precipice at which Thomas remains as writer, infuses his poetic descriptions of Wales with a feeling of ambivalence. Thomas’s standing in relation to place and to God situates him at the verge of comprehension, peering over an edge. It is an unlocated place of transparency, a situation that remains interstitial and processual, subjugated to the profound otherness of God. As M. Wynn Thomas describes, “Thomas can offer us only the coarse pebble-glass of an inevitably compromised moral utterance.”²⁰ Byron Rogers describes this as the “loneliness of a priest in a parish, of an Anglican priest in an overwhelmingly Nonconformist Wales, and of the poet longing to, and unable to, write in Welsh.”²¹ In his early work, this distance is maintained from his most characteristic subject: the rural labourer isolated on an expanse of bleak hillside, engaged in grim monotonous work.²² This experience of harshness in the Montgomeryshire hill farms contested his idealistic, pastorally-framed visions of the rural world, instigating an anti-Wordsworthian move where Thomas would come to terms with the crudeness of his constituents.²³ Thomas’ poetic sketches of rural Wales are part of his experience of “Abercuawg”, of recognising the inescapability of an incomplete knowledge. Thomas tries to articulate God only to discover God’s elusiveness, his receding before the poet. In this respect, Thomas’s voice is laced with a feeling of bereavement, mourning the absence of the Welsh self and of God. Yet, it is insufficient to say that Thomas is merely concerned with the unknowability of God in nature. There remains the impetus to excavate a divine presence in landscape.

  Positive ecstasy is a process of affirmation, an overwhelming experience of the characteristics of God that can be discerned with definition – joy, beauty, pleasure. It is an epistemological encounter that finds a literary lineage in Western Christianity. As St. Augustine articulates:

My greatest certainty was that “the invisible things of thine from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even thy eternal power and Godhead.”²⁴ For when I inquired how it was that I could appreciate the beauty of bodies, both celestial and terrestrial […] I realized that I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind.²⁵

The erosion of the self through the appreciation of beauty extends into the development of an environmental theology. It is this recognition of created beauty that cultivates a perception of immanence, not unlike the image of Ralph Waldo Emerson’ s “transparent eyeball”.²⁶ For St. Augustine, this possibility of perceiving beauty affirms the transcendent, a recollection in tranquillity. He goes on to attest, “If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced — silenced the phantasies of earth, waters, and air — silenced, too, the poles […] if we could hear him without these, as we two now strained ourselves to do, we then with rapid thought might touch on that Eternal Wisdom which abides over all.”²⁷ The circularity of divine immanence is expressed further in the writings of theologian Richard Hooker, one distinguished from a sheer phenomenon of intuition and emotion. He writes:

All other things that are of God have God in them and he them in himself likewise… God hath his influence into the very essence of all things, without which influence of Deity supporting them their utter annihilation could not choose but follow. Of him all things have both received their first being and their continuance to be that which they are. All things therefore are partakers of God, they are his offspring, his influence is in them, and the personal wisdom of God for that very cause is said to excel in nimbleness or agility, to pierce into all intellectual pure, and subtile spirits, to go through all, and to reach unto everything that is. Otherwise, how should the same wisdom be that which supporteth, beareth up, sustaineth all?²⁸

The material world cannot be divorced from God or as it were, be despiritualised. Hooker describes God’s wisdom as penetrating and all-encompassing, one that inheres in “the very essence of all things”. As Inge observes, this reading of creation in which the glory of the creator shines through is consistent in Anglican theology, surfacing in the poetry of George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, from whom Thomas takes reference at various points. The solidity of this theological framework is expressed in George Herbert’s “Prayer (I)” (1633), wherein he describes prayer as “A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear”, before enumerating:

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.²⁹

The juxtaposition of cosmic and “exotic”, familiar and distant, firmly attests to an expanding vision of God’s world and of approaches to God that sharpen, but do not diminish, the spiritual imagination. In ‘The Circulation’ (late 17th century), Traherne draws attention to the cyclical nature of receiving spiritual nourishment from God and returning it through praise.³⁰ This is physicalised through various metaphors borrowed from nature as he writes, “All things to Circulations owe / Themselves”. This principle is demonstrated in various images – “A sponge drinks in the water, which / Is afterwards exprest” and “Flame that ejects its golden beams / Sups up the grosser air.” Traherne discerns the energy cycle that governs natural processes and in doing so, elevates them to the position of the sacred. The environment, then, becomes an entity that affirms the presence of God, the creative energy that animates biological and natural processes.

  If an affirmative epistemology is regarded as generative, the visions articulated by the post-rational via negativa necessarily emerge from a place of striving. Sixth-century Christian mystic Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite describes it as such:

Reason is in the dark, because love has entered the mysterious radiance of the Divine Dark, the inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell, and to which thought with all its struggles cannot attain.³¹

By accessing God via negativa, the individual attains a state of consciousness that is above thought, on a plane of spiritual experience with which the intellect cannot deal. It is recognising that God “may not be found by any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart”, as described in the Epistle of Discretion. It is an aspiration toward God that defies an a priori rationality, in which God is not necessarily unveiled by that which is tangible and discernible. God remains “wholly other”, known by what He chooses to reveal. This is the ambivalence that shapes the divine absence in the poems of St. John of the Cross and Henry Vaughan, both of whom influenced Thomas. St. John’s contemplations sought to explain the purgation of the soul in its ascent toward spiritual perfection, as with the tradition of the “Dark Night of the Soul”.³³ His reliance is on the natural elements of light and dark while on pilgrimage, a chiaroscuro that demarcates the presence and absence of God. In “Songs of the soul” (1577-1579), he writes,

Upon a darksome night,
Kindling with love in flame of yearning keen
–O moment of delight!–
I went, by all unseen,
New-hush’d to rest the house where I had been.

‘Twas that light guided me,
More surely than the noonday’s brightest glare,
To the place where none would be
Save one that waited there–
Well knew I whom or ere I forth did fare.³⁴

The darkness inaugurates the speaker’s journey, one that bursts into cognisance through the “Kindling” of a “flame of yearning keen”. It is this deep spiritual yearning that ignites the pilgrimage, a careful guide to “the house” where God is said to reside. The strength of the guiding “light” is likened to “noonday’s brightest glare”, a cosmic amplification and compression of intensity, a gradual revelation of a pathway to divine recognition. This metaphor demarcates the moments of Christian pilgrimage when the loving affirmation of God cannot be found and one must move forward out of faith in God's character. It is a yearning for the absent God that is exemplified in St. John’s “Song of the Soul and the Bridegroom” (1577-1579) , where creation echoes a divine goodness, but remains eluded by God. As he expresses,

O groves and thickets
Planted by the hand of the Beloved;
O verdant meads
Enameled with flowers,
Tell me, has He passed by you?³⁵

This understanding of pilgrimage as restless pursuit is anchored in landscape in the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In “Regeneration” (1650), Vaughan writes:

Storm’d thus; I straight perceiv’d my spring
      Meere stage, and show,
My walke a monstrous mountain’d thing
   Rough-cast with Rocks, and snow;
   And as a Pilgrims Eye
      Far from reliefe,
Measures the melancholy skye
Then drops, and rains for griefe³⁶

Vaughan’s vision of nature is beset less by the enchantment of divine presence, but is alive to its punitive, rather than restorative, elements. The journey is a “monstrous mountain’d thing”, an exterior manifestation of desolation, coupled with the “melancholy skye” that “rains for griefe”. The pilgrimage is punctuated by a cognisance of absence, represented intuitively by fear and sorrow. Vaughan touches on the regenerative properties of spring in describing how “The unthrift Sunne shot vitall gold / A thousand peeces”, how “The aire was all in spice” and “every bush / A garland wore”. Yet, he is unable to locate its divine origin, lamenting “I heard / A rushing wind / Which still increas’d, but when it stirr’d / No where I could not find”. Vaughan makes a plea to God: “On me one breath, / And let me dye before my death!” Vaughan’s articulation of the divine is attentive to the traces of God – the breath of the spirit, a momentary glimpse of beauty – but finds itself irresolute. Nature’s expression of the divine, however indicative of its immanence, remains just beyond reach.

  This vision of elusiveness holds in Thomas’s poetic inscription of Wales. Thomas cannot rely on conventional avenues of beneficence to come to God, not least because he reads the rugged Welsh landscape, like Vaughan, as a reflection of desolation. Thomas precludes any tendency to sentimentalise nature, presenting a landscape where beauty, culture and religion are dispensable luxuries.³⁷ In “Welsh Landscape” (1952), Thomas writes, “To live in Wales is to be conscious / At dusk of the spilled blood / That went to the making of the wild sky / Dyeing the immaculate rivers / In all their courses.”³⁸ Thomas recognises violence at the root of Welsh nationhood, of the wars waged in service of its constitution. The landscape of skies and rivers reveal not a divine imprint, but a submergence in bloodshed. The people live and work within this landscape without reference to its attractions, associated traditions, or God.³⁹ Thomas’s pessimism persists:

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.

Thomas locates a despair at the interstice of man, nature, and God, one that portends no possibility of Welsh transformation. There is a passivity to Thomas’s description of “an impotent people”, attesting to the forces of social, cultural, and economic change that erode the will and energy of those farming the Welsh hills.⁴⁰ The landscape is read as a powerful, negative force to which the peasants must adapt, representing a God who is indifferent. If the peasants read God at all it is as nature first and then as an irrelevant superstructure.⁴¹

  Thomas’s ambivalence stems in part from the construction of Wales in the English imagination, one that he contests and presses against. In “A Welsh Testament” (1961), Thomas is attentive to the notion that God “had a Welsh name: / We spoke to him in the old language; / He was to have a peculiar care / For the Welsh people. History showed us / He was too big to be nailed to the wall / Of a stone chapel.”⁴² There is an intimacy laced in this description of God, one that inheres in the resonance of a native language, given tangible expression via inscription upon stone. This sense of divine proximity, one that bestows life and dignity, bristles against his distaste for English travellers, as Thomas “saw them stare / From their long cars, / as I passed knee-deep / In ewes and wethers”, standing by “the thorn hedges”.⁴³ Thomas seems insistent on ascribing for the Welsh people a sense of being “set apart”, of recognising God beyond “the boards of a black book”.⁴⁴

  In “Sea-Watching” (1975), Thomas fashions himself as “the hermit of the rocks, habited with the wind / and the midst”, dwelling by the “Grey waters, vast / as an area of prayer.”⁴⁵ The figure of John returns in the image of a solitary Thomas alone in prayer, dissolving into the features of the coast by way of spiritual communion. It is here that we may identify the recognition of the self as a “created being” and the sublimity that accompanies this recognition. He continues:

There were days,
so beautiful the emptiness
it might have filled,
      its absence
was its presence; not to be told
any more, so single my mind
after its long fast,
      my watching from praying.

Herein we recognise the straining of the subjectivity in pursuit of the divine familiar to St. John and Vaughan. “Sea-Watching” presents a scene that stands in for God, or some act of God. There is an ambivalence in the way the sea is presented as parallel to divine presence. Simultaneously, the sea’s vivid presence stops the approach to the absent formless God himself.⁴⁶ To avoid the strong sense of the material conveyed by the cataphatic, and to promote a deeper apprehension of God, Thomas adjusts his position to that of the mystic, the apophatic.⁴⁷ This expression must resist the creation of images that distort this apprehension. Thomas retains an optimism amid the precariousness of an absent God, a cognisance of divine presence and beauty through an unknowingness. The feeling of dissolution is cognate with an apophatic recognition of God, an unfolding of the material into the spiritual. It is as Thomas remarks in “The Bright Field” (1975): “a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth / once, but is the eternity that awaits you”’⁴⁸ It is a momentary glimpse of the divine amidst the fragments of a broken world, one that draws the subject back to God, to a place of dwelling in the peculiarities of self-revelation.

  Thomas’s strivings toward God proceed from a distance, a precarity wherein his “I” is withheld. One senses that the landscape will never conform to the hopes Thomas holds for it, that he is a witness to the environment’s witness of him. Yet, even with the overbearing weight of a divine absence, Thomas’s poetry yields moments of epiphany, reminders that those moments of apophatic desolation are not conclusive. It is these eruptions that offer powerful relief, as in “The Bright Field” where Thomas proclaims, “that was the / pearl of great price, the one field that had / treasure in it. I realise now / that I must give all that I have to possess it.”⁴⁹ It is these epiphanic bursts that render the Welsh landscape legible once again, inscriptions of divine presence.

  In “The Moor” (1966), Thomas finds a semiology of religion within the Welsh landscape that proves transformative. The speaker makes this immediately obvious by declaring, “It was like a church to me”, as he enters the moor “on soft foot”.⁵⁰ There is a sanctity to the moor defined not by the didacticism of homilies, but by an awareness of God’s presence. Thomas’s speaker continues to describe this intimacy, one that “brought a moistening of the eye” and “the mind’s cession / Of its kingdom”. Thomas’s language seems to draw on a decisive pneumatology – the stillness, the tears, the surrender of individual sovereignty must emerge from a spiritual force. One is tempted to recall the perception of places as an assembly of gods and ancestral spirits, an animistic map of embedded memory.⁵¹

  However, it is not a moor deity that stirs the speaker. Rather, the experience of a locality becomes a conduit to access the divine. The particular reveals the universal, a testament to a notion of divine sovereignty in all places. It is not a meaning forcibly inscribed, but one that seems to emerge from within. The speaker’s sense of ego is dismantled, expressed in pared down language: “I walked on, / Simple and poor, while the air crumbled / And broke on me generously as bread”. The imagery of the Eucharist is not lost, a painful memory of a body broken for the atonement of man. Yet, there is a curious conflation with baptism, as if by sprinkling or pouring, as the air “[breaks] on” the speaker. The moor becomes the church, working to bring an immediate bearing upon the speaker’s spiritual condition, intuiting a feeling of piety and rebirth. The striking sensation of awe that the speaker encounters, “Breath held like a cap in the hand”, becomes a channel toward an overwhelming transcendence.

  This powerful sense of locality is reinforced in “Pietà’ (1966)” as Thomas dwells on the hills and the sea, sites that enact interior transformations. He writes:

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.

And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.⁵²

For Thomas, there is a redemptive beauty that emerges at the edge of creation. The hills are commonplace, “Always the same”, frozen in “the still scene”, but they partake in the manifold witness to Christ. It is framed against the “tall Cross”, the head that “Aches for the Body”, the Welsh church in “the cradle / Of a maid’s arms”. The hills are a reminder of a divine sublimity, undergirded by a recognition of human fragility. Perhaps these are concerns that subsume his prior ambivalence, parsing the redemption available to the Welsh people. It is a sacramentality that oversees his worldly doubt.

  Herein nature retains its ability to incline the imagination toward God. It is Thomas’s commitment to uncovering the “grammar of reality”, of recognising the broken fragments that are “coming together again”,⁵³ that reveals there is no finality in apophasis. God breaks through by perception of His creation, a light that cuts through divine darkness. In expressing the apprehension of apophasis, the poet draws on created things as metaphor, thus acknowledging the possibility that the created might function as a reflection of God. In other words, the cataphatic is an essential complement to the apophatic; without it the former cannot express its intuited knowledge.⁵⁴ We are led back, invariably, to an assertion made by John O’Donohue:

The human eye adores gazing; it feasts on the wild beauty of new landscapes, the dignity of trees, the tenderness of a human face, or the white sphere of the moon blessing the earth in a circle of light. The eye is always drawn to the shape of a thing. It finds some deep consolation and sense of home in special shapes.⁵⁵

Thomas may proceed by different pathways to divine presence, but eventually, through the practices and imperatives of poetry, finds himself seated in the quiet transcendence of creation.

¹ Faith and Spiritual Leaders, “Statement of Faith and Spiritual Leaders on the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21 in Paris in December 2015,” United Nations, https://actalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/COP21_Statement_englisch2.pdf.
² St. Symeon, Practical & Theological Discourses, 1.1: “When men search for God with their bodily eyes they find Him nowhere, for He is invisible. But for those who ponder in the Spirit He is present everywhere. He is in all, yet beyond all.”
³ Arthur Peacocke, “Articulating God’s Presence in and to the World Unveiled by the Sciences” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 143-144, 147-151.
⁴ Meister Eckhart, “Sermon LXXXIII” in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology, ed. F. C. Happold (London: Penguin, 1990), 177.
⁵ Elaine Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996), 2.
⁶ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 3.
⁷ E. V. Walter,Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (North Carolina States; University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 2
⁸ John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003), 76.
⁹ Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, 76.
¹⁰ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion, 1964), xii, 8-9.
¹¹ Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, 17.
¹² Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 12.
¹³ Place: Experience and Symbol, ed. Miles Richardson (Louisiana: Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 1984), 45.
¹⁴ George Herbert, “The Pulley”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44370/the-pulley.
¹⁵ Ned Thomas, “R.S. Thomas and Wales” in The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press Ltd, 1993), 211.
¹⁶ Thomas, “R.S. Thomas and Wales”, 212-213.
¹⁷ “Claf Abercuawg” in Canu Llywarch Hen gyda Rhagmadrodd a Nodiadau, ed. Ifor Williams, 2nd edn (Cardiff: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1935, repr. 1957), 23-27.
¹⁸ R .S. Thomas, “Abercuawg” in R. S. Thomas: Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Wales: Seren Books, 1995), 126.
¹⁹ Thomas, 'Abercuawg', 126.
²⁰ M. Wynn Thomas, “Introduction” in The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press Ltd, 1993), 14.
²¹ Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas (London: Aurum Press Limited, 2006), 64.
²² Tony Brown, ““Over Seventy Thousand Fathoms”: the Sea and Self-definition in the poetry of R. S. Thomas” in The Page’s Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press Ltd, 1993), 150.
²³ Brown, ““Over Seventy Thousand Fathoms”: the Sea and Self-definition in the poetry of R. S. Thomas”, 149.
²⁴ Holy Bible, NIV, ed. The New York Bible Society (Michigan: Biblica, Inc., 2011), Romans 1:20.
²⁵ St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. Albert Cook Outler, trans. Albert Cook Outler (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2002), 121.
²⁶ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, ed. Robert D. Richardson Jr., (New York: Bantam Dell, 1990), 18.
²⁷ St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, 164.
²⁸ Richard Hooker, The works of that learned and judicious divine, Mr. Richard Hooker: in eight books of Ecclesiastical polity (London: R. White, 1676), 269.
²⁹ George Herbert, “Prayer (I)”, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44371/prayer-i.
³⁰ Thomas Traherne, “The Circulation”, poetry nook, https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/circulation-1.
³¹ Evelyn Underhill, “Introduction” in A Book of Contemplation the Which Is Called the Cloud of Unknowing, in the Which a Soul Is Oned With God, ed. Evelyn Underhill, (London: John M. Watkins, 1922), 8.
³² Underhill, “Introduction”, 4.
³³ Daven M. Kari, “R.S. Thomas and the Dark Night of the Soul: Song, Suffering, and Silence in a Life of Faith”, Renascence 60, no. 2 (2008): 103-104.
³⁴ St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul in The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, ed. E. Allison Peers, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Burns and Oates, 1935; repr. 1957), 417.
³⁵ St. John of the Cross, A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, trans. David Lewis (Michigan: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1909), 9.
³⁶ Henry Vaughan, “Regeneration” in Henry Vaughan: Selected Poems, ed. Anne Cluysenaar (London: SPCK, 2004), 51-53.
³⁷ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 51.
³⁸ R. S. Thomas, “Welsh Landscape” in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 5.
³⁹ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 51.
⁴⁰ Brown, ““Over Seventy Thousand Fathoms”: the Sea and Self-definition in the poetry of R. S. Thomas”, 151.
⁴¹ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 60.
⁴² R. S. Thomas, “A Welsh Testament” in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 49.
⁴³ Thomas, "A Welsh Testament", 49.
⁴⁴ Thomas, "A Welsh Testament", 49.
⁴⁵ R. S. Thomas, “Sea-Watching” in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 117.
⁴⁶ J. P. Ward,The Poetry of R. S. Thomas (Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), 90.
⁴⁷ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 145.
⁴⁸ R. S. Thomas, “The Bright Field” in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 115.
⁴⁹ Thomas, “The Bright Field”, 115.
⁵⁰ R. S. Thomas, “The Moor” in Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 61.
⁵¹ Philip Marsden, Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (London: Granta Books, 2014), 73.
⁵² R. S. Thomas, “Pietà” in Selected Poems(London: Penguin Books, 2003), 59.
⁵³ Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, 76.
⁵⁴ Shepherd, R. S. Thomas: Conceding an Absence, 133.
⁵⁵ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (New York: Bantam, 1996), 202.