Watercolor Garden
Jul/080
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Has anyone done an analysis of loss in Reservoirs by R.S Thomas?
Please just talk about how he evolves on a sense of loss, here is the poem:
There are places in Wales I don't go:
Reservoirs that are the subconcious
Of a people, troubled far down
With gravestones, chapels, villages even;
The serenity of their expression
Revolts me, it is a pose
For strangers, a watercolour's appeal
To the mass, instead of the poem's
Harsher conditions. There are the hills,
Too; gardens gone under the scum
Of the forests; and the smashed faces
Of the farms with the stone trickle
Of their tears down the hills' side.
Where can I go, then, from the smell
Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead
Nation? I have walked the shore
For an hour and seen the English
Scavenging among the remains
Of our culture, covering the sand
Like the tide and, with the roughness
Of the tide, elbowing our language
Into the grave that we have dug for it.
Reservoirs
Published in R S Thomas’ 1968 collection “Not that he brought flowers” returns to one of Thomas’ enduring themes, the loss of Welshness.
The reservoir is both literal, a drowned valley providing water for England, and a metaphor, reservoir as a repository of Welshness, lost and drowned by Englishness. At the time of writing a number of Welsh valleys were being dammed to provide water supplies for (mostly) English water consumers and these were the subject of much protest by the Welsh National Party and the Welsh Language Society.
This loss of Welshness can be found in many of Thomas’ earlier poems, the “Iago Prytherch” series, about a peasant farmer (Such as “Invasion on the farm” (1955 )) and poems such as “Welsh Landscape” (1955) “A Welshman to any Tourist” and “A Welsh Testament” (1961).
The “gravestones, chapels, villages even;” of line 4 are lost literally beneath the waters, but also stand in for the lost villages and lost traditional life and identity of Wales. Again, at the time of writing Wales did not have an independent assembly, as now, and even the language was disappearing.
Lines 5-7 see the Welsh tradition as becoming lost to a prettified “watercolour” version, rather than the gritty poetry (And poetry is a traditional Welsh value) that Thomas prefers.
Lines 10-14 list the physical manifestations; gardens; forests; and farms summered beneath the “scum”
In the second verse Thomas is more explicit - how can he escape from the dead Nation, and those responsible, the English are named as scavengers amongst Welsh culture and language, sweeping Wales clean of Welshness like the tide sweeps the sand clean
By the way, please do read my favorite R S Thomas poems
The View from the Window
And
Children's Song
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