Recent articles by the good doctor

Theodore Dalrymple: A Man Out of Time, Veiled Threat and... Casual Reaction to Criminal Brutality

Eh... I had thought of moving to NZ someday if I ever won the lottery...

From his review of a biography of R. S. Thomas:

The account of the death of the poet’s wife in 1991 is extremely moving. She had long been ill. Her bedroom in their small cottage—which had no amenities, apart from a view so beautiful that it stops my heart to think about it—was reached by a ladder. He brought her home from the hospital when it was apparent that she could not recover, and carried “her up the steps himself as he might a bride,” though he himself had just had an operation for a hernia (he was 78 at the time, she 82). She died four days later.

After her death, he wrote love poems of the greatest possible tenderness:

She left me. What voice
colder than the wind
out of the grave said:
“It is over?” Impalpable,
invisible, she comes
to me still, as she would
do, and I at my reading.
There is a tremor
of light, as of a bird crossing
the sun’s path, and I look
up in recognition
of a presence in absence.
Not a word, not a sound,
as she goes her way,
but a scent lingering
which is that of time immolating
itself in love’s fire.

And, even more tenderly:

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
Love’s moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed her with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
“Come” said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird’s grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

This is all the more remarkable since, according to the poems that Thomas wrote over the years, their marriage was not out of a storybook. Indeed, he and his wife had contracted it almost coldly, without expectations of romantic bliss:

I saw her,
when young, and spread the panoply
of my feathers instinctively
to engage her. She was not deceived,
but accepted me as a girl
will under a thin moon
in love’s absence as someone
she could build a home with
for her imagined child.

Fifty years after their marriage, he wrote:

Cold hands meeting,
the eyes aside
as vows are contracted
in the tongue’s absence.

Gradually
over fifty long years
of held breath
the heart has become warm.

I doubt that any marriage could be more uncongenial to the modern sensibility than this one: a mere calculation on one side that grows into undemonstrative, but deep, emotion. It is precisely because this kind of relation is so uncongenial or alien to us that it serves as something worth reflecting upon.

Some of his poems here.