On a tractor

Frantically busy all day - which was 100 years since the birth of Welsh poet R.S.Thomas: no relation in any way to Dylan, being a dour, craggy, conflicted and unrelenting Anglican priest who hated the English domination of Wales but who was not a native Welsh speaker and could write his poems only in English. As well as loathing the English (but from his diction you would mistake him for one), he also put the backs up his compatriots for his bitter denunciation of the peasant hardship of his rural parishioners' mean lives.

I had no time to go looking for photographs to mark the centenary but as I was shutting up the poultry at dusk I heard the farmer next door putting his tractor away and I ran across the field just in time to get a shot of him backing it into a shed. His name's not Cynddylan (and let's face it, is anyone's these days? ) but what the hell.
R.S. wrote this in the 1940s when farming was only just beginning to move into the modern age. His later poems are less accessible.


Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil,
He's a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo, he's away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields'
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.

R.S. Thomas died in 2000 - there's an obituary here and a photo here depicting the characteristic coiffure and garb of the old buzzard in his latter years.

(I'm very behind on comments - apologies)