“A Plank To Walk Over Seventy Thousand Fathoms”:R. S. Thomas’s Poetic Pilgrimage

R.S.Thomas(1913-2000)is a Welsh priest-poet haunted by the question of God all his life.Using metaphors and symbols as the signposts of divinity,he completes his remarkable pilgrimage toward God through poetry.This thesis will explore R.S.Thomas’ s “fear and trembling” over“seventy thousand fathoms” to see how he encounters God at the limit of human experience.The introduction outlines Thomas’ s life and poetic writing,summarizes main researches on his religious poems,and leads to the topic.Thomas’ s pilgrimage is to chase an impersonal and interior God during which he faces challenges caused by blind technological development,man’s enlarged self,and limited human language.Even though at the end of his pilgrimage,Thomas has to suffer the pain of alienation from God,experiencing God as the divine Other.Chapter one discusses Thomas’ s greeting of a new religion and echoing with Paul Tillich,John Robinson,and W.B.Yeats to find God“in here” and “right now” as the Ground-of-Being.Thomas pins his hope on self-transcendence and objects to ruining the original natural world with an increasing amount of man-made objects.Chapter two depicts Thomas’ s abandoning of theories and doctrines as a jeopardized walking over “seventy thousand fathoms” without any certainty.Facing the conflict between the theological interpretations of God and his actual observation,Thomas chooses not the dogmatic God but a theoretically “wild field” where he pioneers new ways of explaining God’s absence and silence by refusing domesticating or personalizing God,and resorting to paradox so that the opposites could be reconciled.In Chapter three,on his way of encountering the divine Other,Thomas has to wrestle with a series of problems,which express his suspicion of man’s ability to understand God: an enlarged sense of the self or narcissism overshadows God’s face;limited human language through words fails to express one’s holy experience;inescapable alienation in experiencing the holy Other.The conclusion summarizes how Thomas embarks on his pilgrimage by way of poetry,points out the limitations of this study,and also looks forward to further studies.To sum up,for a more mature Thomas,God just lies in the pursuit or the pilgrimage rather than at the end of it.