| Description | The poems date from the latter half of the 1930s, in the period when R.S. Thomas was curate at the Parish Church of St. Mary, Chirk. R.S. Thomas’s name does not appear on the cover of the typescript but the address given there (‘Bryn Coed, Chirk, N.Wales’) was where he lived for most of this period. The presence of the address suggest that he sent the collection, or intended to send it, to a publisher, though there is no evidence that he actually did so. None of these poems appears in his first published collection The Stones of the Field (Druid Press, 1946). |
| AdminHistory | It was at Chirk that R.S. Thomas met Mildred Elsie Eldridge, who taught at Oswestry High School for Girls and then at Moreton Hall School. They were married in July 1940. The poem ‘Sonnet’ (‘I never thought in this poor world to find /Another who had loved the things I love’) is likely to be the first poem which Thomas wrote to the woman who became his wife. See Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas (Aurum, 2006), 52-3, 102-3. |