To one kneeling down, no word came, only the wind's song, saddening the lips of the grave

saints rigid in glass, or the dry whisper of unseen wings, bats not angels in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence?

He nailed long and saw love in a dark crown of thorns blazing

and a winter tree golden with fruit of a man's body.

This is In a Country Church by R.S. Thomas.

Well, welcome back to speaking with joy, everyone.

I am delighted today to have the pleasure of introducing you to a dear friend who is Shanti.

Welcome on the show, Shanti.

Hello, lovely to be here.

Yes, it's lovely to have you.

Shanti and I got to know each other in Oxford,

and I am so excited to do this podcast talking about a poet who I know a bit about,

and I've always enjoyed and whenever I stumbled upon him,

but know very little about, really, on a deeper sense.

But Shanti is my resident poetry expert, and so today we will have the

great fun of talking about R.S. Thomas and themes of looking at landscapes being sort of analogous

to how we regard or look at God. Did I say that right, Shanty?

You did. So give us a bit of an introduction, first of all, to yourself, to what you do, what you study, and where you are.

So I am right now in Peterhouse, Cambridge, in my cozy little living room, which is where I'm also doing my PhD at the moment.

And I'm looking at ideas of pilgrimage in romantic literature.

So a few hundred years earlier than R.S. Thomas, Wordsworth, Coleridge and John Clare are the main

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