Coming in from the open air

Selected Poems
by R. S. Thomas
Penguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908

Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just a poem you were asked to discuss. And it got worse, much worse. The poem was a carol.

Poems I thought I knew about: they were puzzles. Poems allowed me to write at length, using words whose meaning I was not entirely sure about, like ambiguity and irony. Yet here was something so simple, so clear, it had to be a trick. I stared as balefully as a used-car dealer at ‘In the bleak midwinter/ Frosty wind made moan…’ I was 16 years old, and had encountered the sneakiness of poets.

Even at the end they confuse you.