R.S. Thomas' "The Spring Equinox"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2021

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. John Betjeman, in his 1955 introduction to Song at the Year's Turning, the first collection of Thomas's poetry from a major publisher, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after he himself was forgotten. M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century." - Bio via Wikipedia.

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Monday, March 22nd, 2021.
0:07.4	Spring is here. Spring has sprung, so to speak. The first day of spring was this weekend.
0:13.0	And so this week I want to share some poems with you that are spring themed. And I'm going to
0:17.6	begin with a poet who has a birthday this month or would have had a birthday
0:21.8	this month. It is R.S. Thomas Ronald, Stuart Thomas. He is a Welsh poet and he was also a priest,
0:28.6	an Anglican priest, and he lived from March 29th, 1913 to the 25th of September in the year 2000.
0:36.8	Thomas was a delightful, very interesting poet,
0:41.0	who managed to be pretty successful by the end of his life. By poet standards, his final book
0:45.9	sold 20,000 copies each just in Britain alone. So, you know, that's pretty good for a poet.
0:53.4	And the poem that I'm going to read today
0:54.9	is called Spring Equinox. I'm actually reading it out of a really nice book. It's called A Nature
0:59.7	Poem for Every Day of the Year. It's edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, from Bathford. That's the
1:07.1	publishing company. If you head over to our Goldberry Books, bookshop.orgorg, you can find it there. So head over to bookshop.org slash shop
1:14.6	slash goldberry books, and you can find this. It's really a lovely book. There's a nature
1:18.9	poem for every day of the year. And there's also a book called A Nature Poem for Every Night of the
1:22.2	year, which has just a slightly different vibe to it and is equally as fun, equally as delightful.
1:31.3	So here is R.S. Thomas' poem Spring Equinox.
1:42.6	Do not say, referring to the sun, its journey northward has begun, as though it were a bird,
1:51.0	annually migrating that now returns to build in rich trees its nest of golden grass do not belie its lusty health with words such as imply a pallid invalid recuper. The age demands the facts.
2:03.0	Therefore, be brief.
2:06.0	Others will sense the simile
2:07.3	and say,
	...

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