Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, October 3, 2004.

Today we have a poem by R.S. Thomas, Ronald Stuart Thomas, born 1913 in Cardiff, though his family is largely English by birth and descent. His father moved the family

to Wales where he was born and where he lived most of his life. He learned the Welsh language.

He was an ordained minister in the Church of Wales. And some of his writing is in Welsh, but his poetry, he always wrote

in English, which is fortunate for us. The poem is called poetry for supper, and it's an argument

about sources of poetic inspiration and poetic invention.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

Poetry for supper.

Listen now, verse should be as natural as the small tuber that feeds on muck and grows slowly from obtuse soil to the white flower

of immortal beauty. Natural hell. What was it Chaucer said once about the long toil that goes like

blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature in the verse sprawls limp as bindweed if it break at all life's iron crust.

Man, you must sweat and rhyme your guts taught if you'd build your verse a ladder.

You speak as though no sunlight ever surprised the mind groping on its cloudy path.

Sunlight's a thing that needs a window before it enter a dark room.

Windows don't open.

So, two old poets hunched at their beer in the low haze of an inn parlor,

while the talk ran noisily by them, glib with prose.

So here we have an expression, a very domesticated, mundane expression of a timeless debate.

Does poetry spring from careful calculation,

or does poetry spring from spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions? The first speaker seems to speak in favor of spontaneity.

It's not always pretty.

At first, there is a tuber feeding on muck.

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