R. S. Thomas, “Folktale” (1986)
 
Prayers like gravel
flung at the sky’s
window, hoping to attract
the loved one’s
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up,
to what purpose open
that far casement?
I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.
 
Corinna Laughlin's commentary:
 
Today, we’re going to explore a poem by 20th century Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. Scott will read Thomas’s short poem “Folk Tale” and then I’ll be back to offer a brief commentary.
 
R. S. Thomas is probably the most renowned 20th century poet no one has ever heard of. He was born in Wales in 1913 and died there in 2000. Ordained a priest of the Anglican Church in Wales in 1936, he spent much of his life as a priest in small parishes in rural Wales.
 
In 1940, he married Mildred “Elsi” Eldridge, a gifted artist. Her renown as a painter inspired him to “wish to be recognized as a poet.”  His first collection of poems appeared in 1946, and many more followed. In 1996, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thomas was a bit of a Luddite, and his son Gwydion later recalled sermons in which he railed against refrigerators and other modern appliances. The only modern convenience the family ever owned was a vacuum which they never used because it was too noisy.
 
The primary themes of Thomas’s poetry are the landscape and seascape of Wales, the country people with whom he ministered, and the elusive nature of faith and prayer.
 
In “Folk Tale,” Thomas evokes the familiar story of Rapunzel, who lived in a tower, and let down her hair to admit her mother—and, later, her prince. In Thomas’s poem, God is Rapunzel, hidden from view. Unlike Rapunzel, there are no “visible plaits to let down for the believer to climb up”—so why open the window at all?  “I would have refrained long since,” the poet says, “but that peering once through my locked fingers I thought that I detected the movement of a curtain.” Looking through “locked fingers”—through hands folded in prayer—he sensed movement in that far off window, and this glimpse was enough to keep him tossing gravel at the window, to keep him praying.
 
In this poem, Thomas playfully evokes the hard work that prayer is sometimes, and how elusive God can seem. Only by recalling that “movement of a curtain,” that sense of God’s presence, do we keep going, keep tossing gravel at the window, like Rapunzel’s prince, and longing for union.