The Churches and Chapels of Ronald Stuart Thomas
The Churches and Chapels of Ronald Stuart Thomas

Summary/Abstract: This essay tries to analyse a handful of poems by the Welsh poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000) in an attempt to explore some of the ambiguities and ambivalences with which Thomas’s poetry is riddled. His work focused either on Wales and Welsh people, often in a distinctly caustic manner, or on the challenges religion and faith must confront today. Many of his poems feature descriptions of churches, chapels and other places of worship; these are usually secluded buildings lying in half-deserted villages, rather than the imposing cathedrals and magnificent abbeys of great cities. The churches and chapels which appear in his verse have the double status of official places of worship but also of locations in which a far more intimate communion with the divine can be forged. These prevailingly empty places with their stark interior, dim lights, resonant silence and an air of Protestant frigidity can be treated as objective correlatives of faith, a stony analogon of the modern man’s spiritual plight, a tangible symbol of religion’s demise. The problem signalled in the title of this article has appeared in critical works on Thomas, as well as occasional elucidations of his work, but so far there has been no single scholarly article of substantial length which would focus solely on this issue. While, for reasons of time and space, this essay makes no claims to exhaustiveness, it has the ambition of being an important contribution to literary criticism in the realm of contemporary religious verse. The methods used are those of orthodox literary criticism, the core of which lies in close reading of the text and remaining alert to both shades of meaning of words used by the poet as well as structural aspects of the text which make poetry so rich in hermeneutic possibilities.

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