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Robinson Jeffers
John Robinson Jeffers (10 January 1887 -20 January 1962) American poet
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- O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.
- A Hill-Top View (1904); This is one of his earliest poems, printed in the the Aurora, a student publication of Occidental College.
- The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an ocean.
- "Continent's End", Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
- Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's
ancient rhythm I never learned it of you.
Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both
our tones flow from the older fountain.
- "Continent's End", Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
- I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
- Love the Wild Swan (1935)
- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
- Love the Wild Swan (1935)
- Then what is the answer?— Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
- Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
- There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.
- You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.
- Responding to a pamphlet Writers Take Sides (1938) by the American Writers League, which asked: "Are you for or are you against Franco and fascism?".
- Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol.
- Contemplation of The Sword (1938)
- Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.
- Contemplation of The Sword (1938)
- I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
- Shine, Perishing Republic (1939)
- Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
- Shine, Perishing Republic (1939)
- Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
- Shine, Perishing Republic (1939)
- And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught— they say—
God, when he walked on earth.
- Shine, Perishing Republic (1939)
- The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean...
- The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean (1940)
- Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
- The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean (1940)
- That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
- Be Angry At The Sun (1941)
- The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
- Be Angry At The Sun (1941)
- When I first went to Occidental College... there was a literary magazine...called the Aurora, and I remember thinking it odd that Occidental— the west, the setting sun— should be represented by a magazine called Aurora, the dawn. At least it gave us a wide range, the whole daylight sky.
I was continually writing verses in those days. Nobody, not even I myself, thought they were good verses; but Aurora's editor accepted many of them and it gave me pleasure to see my rhymes in print. They did rhyme, if that is any value, and were usually metrical, but why was I so eager to publish what hardly anyone would read and no one would remember? I suppose the desire for publication is a normal part of the instinct for writing... the writer sits at home, and the mere fact of being printed provides his verses with a kind of audience... So, having his vanity partially satisfied, he can go ahead and try better work.
- Letter to a group of Occidental College students (1955)
- He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does not
care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness— look at the
tide-stream stars— and the fall of nations— and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley
to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor— I know
not— of faceless violence, the root of all things.
- The Great Explosion in the posthumous publication The Beginning and the End (1973)
- I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism—
For all men to such minds are devils or gods— and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.
- Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.
- Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
We built our house when I and my love were young.
- The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.
But the place was maiden, no previous
Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements,
Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain
Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn
Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here
All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human.
Oh heavy change.
The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.
They have built streets around us, new houses
Line them and cars obsess them— and my dearest has died.
The ocean at least is not changed at all,
Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest
Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons.
- If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River Valley; these four will remain
In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind.
- Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea— look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
- I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions— the world of spirits.
Attributed
- I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
- Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.
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