The People and Landscape of the Welsh Hillcountry

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The People and Landscape of the Welsh Hillcountry

R.S. Thomas writes about the people and landscape of the Welsh

“hillcountry.” By referring closely to at least two of his poems, show

how he makes the Welsh countryside and its inhabitants vivid to the

reader.

RS Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913. He was a Parish Priest in

Wales for more than 20 years. During this time he taught himself the

Welsh language in order to understand the remote hill farmers that are

under his care.

He writes almost exclusively about the people and landscape of the

Welsh hill country. The poems that he writes are lacking in mental

emotion but they never lack tender or compassion for the massively

hardworking farmers he knows so well. The landscape that Thomas

describes so well reflects the grimness of the men’s lives.

The people’s lives are never sweetened nor romanticized and the poet

has no illusions on its harshness. Yet he has a deep understanding for

the hill country and its workers. This shows that R.S Thomas can

relate to the Welsh hill country very well.

The first poem that I am writing about is called “The Hill Farmer

Speaks”. This poem talks about the life of a farmer who has been

greatly affected by his work. The first verse of this poem talks

about a man who has no love and no friends. This we learn is because

of the land as it says, “I am the farmer stripped of love and thought

and grace by the lands hardness.” This shows the hard work that the

man has done over the years has taken from him his love, thought and

grace it is also a metaphor making this vivid for the reader. But he

wants us to know that he is still a human by saying, “Listen, listen,

I am a man like you.” Alliteration is used here (listen, listen), to

cause the affect that the man really is talking to you. The same

affect is caused when he says, “But what I am saying.” It shows you

that the mans surroundings are very empty and hostile by it saying,

“Desolate areas rough with dew.” This is also a metaphor showing its

vividness to the reader.

The second verse of this poem tells us of the wind going over the hill

pastures, hill pastures being a feature of any hill farm. After this

he says, “Year after year,” making this process seem constant. In the

next three lines there seems to be a link between the ewes and the

farmer, where it says, “The ewes starve, milkless, for want of the new

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