Robinson Jeffers

John Robinson Jeffers was an 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" in 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" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
  Challengers of oblivion
  Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
  The square-limbed Roman letters
  Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.
  • "To The Stone-Cutters" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
  they have had what they wanted
  • "Post Mortem" in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

• I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
  For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
  • "Apology for Bad Dreams" in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

• 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 is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the 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.
  I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
  • Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189; also partly quoted in the essay "Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet" by John Courtney

• I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
  (An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)
  • Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190

• 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.
  • "The Answer" (1936)

• 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.
  • "The Answer" (1936)

• There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.
  • "The Purse-Seine" (1937)

• 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.
  • Response in a pamphlet Writers Take Sides : Letters About the War in Spain from 418 American Authors (1938) by the American Writers League, which asked various authors: "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)

• The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.
  • Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)

• 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)

• Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.
  • As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (1981) edited by Leonard S. Klein, Vol. 2, p. 504

• 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.
  • "The Silent Shepherds"

• 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.
  • "The Silent Shepherds"

• Here is a symbol in which
  Many high tragic thoughts
  Watch their own eyes.
  • "Rock and Hawk"

• I think, here is your emblem
  To hang in the future sky;
  Not the cross, not the hive,
  But this; bright power, dark peace;
  Fierce consciousness joined with final
  Disinterestedness;
  Life with calm death; the falcon’s
  Realist eyes and act
  Married to the massive
  Mysticism of stone,
  Which failure cannot cast down
  Nor success make proud.
  • "Rock and Hawk"

• When the sun shouts and people abound
  One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
  And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
  Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
  Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
  Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
  Then nothing will remain of the iron age
  And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
  Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
  In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...
  • "Summer Holiday"

• The extraordinary patience of things!
  This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses —
  How beautiful when we first beheld it,
  Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
  No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing...
  • "Carmel Point"

• Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
  Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
  That swells and in time will ebb, and all
  Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
  Lives in the very grain of the granite,
  Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
  We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
  We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
  As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
  • "Carmel Point"

• Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
  We built our house when I and my love were young.
  • "The Last Conservative"

• 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.

  • "The Last Conservative"

• 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.
  • Tor House"

• 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 Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
  this is the staring unsleeping
  Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
  • "The Eye"

Quotes about Jeffers

• Something utterly wild had crept into his mind. The seabeaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, possessed and spoke through him. It was one of the most uncanny and compete relationships between a man and his natural background that I know in literature.
  • Loren Eiseley

• His spiritual insights were in three major areas: First, he has inspired mankind to see the world anew as the ultimate reality. Second, he perceived and described the physical universe itself as immanently divine. And finally, he challenged us to accept the ultimate demands of modern science which assign humanity no real or ultimate importance in the universe while also aspiring us to lives of spiritual celebration attuned to the awe, beauty and wonder about us.
  • John Courtney, Vice-President, of the Tor House Foundation, in "Robinson Jeffers - Pantheist poet"

• To Robinson Jeffers the earth was hopelessly prostrate.
  • Louis Untermeyer, A Concise Treasury of Great Poems p.476