A Stone Has Rolled from My Mind

Sunday

William McKeachie alerted me to this lovely Easter poem by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas. It puts me in mind of the poetry of George Herbert in that the speaker has doubts, even though the night of Good Friday has given way to the twilight of Easter. Why twilight rather than dawn? Perhaps because, even after the resurrection, there are still problems—new problems—that need to be sorted out. I assume the problem that “towers immovable before us” is that of death, despite Jesus’s reassurance.

The speaker mentions spending a long time “on my knees in a cold chancel,” which sounds like the dark night of the soul. As Herbert describes such moments, 

“As good go anywhere,” they [my bent thoughts] say,
“As to benumb
Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.”

Along these lines, I love Thomas’s image of passing 

our hands
over their surface like blind
men feeling for the mechanism
that will swing them aside. 

Yet from our kneeling in prayer, as Herbert too testifies, something marvelous can happen. A stone is rolled from the mind as the old questions become yesterday’s news. The speaker seeing them lying “folded and in a place by themselves” is a reference to Peter seeing “the linen wrappings lying there.” The answer has come after all.

The Answer
By R. S. Thomas

Not darkness but twilight
In which even the best
of minds must make its way
now. And slowly the questions
occur, vague but formidable
for all that. We pass our hands
over their surface like blind
men feeling for the mechanism
that will swing them aside. They
yield, but only to reform
as new problems; and one
does not even do that
but towers immovable
before us

Is there no way
of other thought of answering
its challenge? There is an anticipation
of it to the point of
dying. There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.