Two Welsh Poets on the Priesthood
By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker, ’82
Those who exercise the ministerial priesthood may sometimes feel perplexed about what they are doing and what difference it makes. I have found that reflection on a pair of twentieth-century Welsh poems, “The Country Clergy” and “Importance,” can prove helpful in this regard, so I commend them to clergy and to anyone concerned with the significance of ordained ministry.
The poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), an outstanding Welsh poet of his time, was a priest of the Church in Wales, where he served a succession of rural parishes over the course of many years. Thomas was raised in an English-speaking family in Liverpool and learned Welsh as an adult. He preferred to converse in Welsh and wrote some prose in Welsh, but regretted that he found himself unable to write poetry in Welsh.
According to Richard Harries, after the death of W. H. Auden in 1973, Thomas was “the major English-language poet writing on religious themes in a way that resonates with unbelievers and believers alike.” One source for “The Country Clergy” is The Penguin Book of English Christian Verse, edited by Peter Levi (Penguin Books, 1984):
I see them working in old rectories
By the sun’s light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
During different periods of his life the writer of “Importance,” D. Gwenallt Jones (1899-1968), was a Presbyterian and a member of the Church in Wales. As D. Densil Morgan observes, the vision of Gwenallt Jones “was a wholeness achieved through much mental turmoil and spiritual travail but in the end affirmative, jubilant and triumphant.” God’s natural order included the person, the family, the nation, and the family of nations along with the Cross that kept any of the others from being turned into a god.
“Importance” appears in Sensuous Glory: The Poetic Vision of D. Gwenallt Jones by Donald Allchin and D. Densil Morgan, with translations by Patrick Thomas and forward by Rowan Williams (Canterbury Press, 2000). The translator’s notes observe that a St. David’s Day Dinner was “often an occasion for ostentatious expressions of Welsh patriotism by establishment figures” and that the Welsh word for “to flatter” means literally “to soap.”
Yes, their pictures in the brittle papers show
That there are very important people in Wales:
Parliamentarians asking expensive questions
And boasting when an Election draws near.
Patrons at a St. David’s Day Dinner
Mixing soap with water and food:
People receiving the Queen’s honours
Standing like well-dressed idols by the Gate.
Poets shaping classics
And competing in the literary race:
Half gods who go berserk
At any unpleasant criticism.
Here, by Pilate’s court,
They can be put in their place;
Measured with a yardstick, weighed in the scales;
The eternal yardstick and scales of heaven.
The most important by far are the insignificant priest
Praising Mary in a town somewhere:
And the never-mentioned Minister in the depths of the country
In his poverty preaching the Word.
The Rev. Charles Hoffacker (’82) is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. Now enjoying an active retirement, he ministers in various ways, including as a writer, independent scholar, activist, and board member of the Frances Perkins Center.