Painting Poems in R. S. Thomas’s Ingrowing Thoughts

This paper aims to examine painting poems in terms of poetic themes from R. S. Thomas’s Ingrowing Thoughts published in 1985. In his long poetic career, Thomas discloses that there was a time when he wanted to break away to find a new theme from his routine themes of choice; God, nature, or Wales. It was then that he took a great interest in paintings; through them, he looked into the plight of man who is helpless to bear the tragedies of the world and meditated on the finiteness of human life. Above all, reckoning the emotional emptiness of the figures in the paintings, he inquires into human identity and extends his thoughts to religious meditation. For Thomas, painting poems appear to be his effort to expand his poetic spectrum by moving away from the specialized themes and overcoming his own poetic stagnation, accepting that the poem is one of the most important statements which religion cannot explain nor express.