So many have written so much about R.S. Thomas, but I like the thoughts of Theodore Dalrymple. This is from the City Journal.

      She left me. What voice
      colder than the wind
      out of the grave said:
      “It is over?” Impalpable,
      invisible, she comes
      to me still, as she would
      do, and I at my reading.
      There is a tremor
      of light, as of a bird crossing
      the sun’s path, and I look
      up in recognition
      of a presence in absence.
      Not a word, not a sound,
      as she goes her way,
      but a scent lingering
      which is that of time immolating
      itself in love’s fire.
And, even more tenderly: 3/27   This is all the more remarkable since, according to the poems that Thomas wrote over the years, their marriage was not out of a storybook. Indeed, he and his wife had contracted it almost coldly, without expectations of romantic bliss:
      I saw her,
      when young, and spread the panoply
      of my feathers instinctively
      to engage her. She was not deceived,
      but accepted me as a girl
      will under a thin moon
      in love’s absence as someone
      she could build a home with
      for her imagined child.
Fifty years after their marriage, he wrote:
      Cold hands meeting,
      the eyes aside
      as vows are contracted
      in the tongue’s absence.
      Gradually
      over fifty long years
      of held breath
      the heart has become warm.
   I doubt that any marriage could be more uncongenial to the modern sensibility than this one: a mere calculation on one side that grows into undemonstrative, but deep, emotion. It is precisely because this kind of relation is so uncongenial or alien to us that it serves as something worth reflecting upon.
   Thomas was a deeply serious man: serious, not solemn or merely earnest. He struggled to find God to the end of his life, not in the happy-clappy born-again sense but as the search to find a meaning for existence:
      For me now
      there is only the God-space
      into which I send out
      my probes. I had looked forward
      to old age as a time
      of quietness, a time to draw
      my horizons about me,
      to watch memories ripening
      in the sunlight of a walled garden.
      But there is the void
      over my head and the distance
      within that the tireless signals
      come from. And astronaut
      on impossible journeys
      to the far side of the self
      I return with messages
      I cannot decipher . . .
   Few lived more intensely than Thomas, though he rarely left the tiny compass of North Wales. All his relationships were intense, though undemonstrative. He hated his mother bitterly, for reasons not entirely clear (but I suspect for her ordinariness). Yet he allowed her at the end of her life to live with him and his wife.
      We made her live
      on, not out of our affection
      for her, but from a dislike of death.
This honesty has the quality of flayed skin, but reconciliation comes at the end:
      The ambulance came
      to rescue us from the issues
      of her body; she was delivered
      from the incompetence of
      our conscience into the hospital’s
      cleaner care. Yet I took her hand
      there and made a tight-rope
      of our fingers for the misshapen
      feelings to keep their balance upon.
   Few lives, certainly of contemporary figures, cause us to look inward as intensely as does that of Thomas. This short biography is the best possible introduction to his work.