Robinson Jeffers

“perhaps we desire death / or why is poison so sweet? / why do little Sirens make kindlier music / for a man caught in the net of the world between news-cast & work-desk?”

“I have heard the summer dust crying to be born.”

“The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,The blue pool in the old garden,More than five thousand years has drunk sacrificeOf ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfsNor any future world-quarrel of westeringAnd eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey sea-smokeInto pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulgingEyeball of water, arched over to Asia,Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleepingEye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars.”

“One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flowAnd man's dark soul.”

“Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.”

“To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand yearsWill Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.”

“That public men publish falsehoodsIs 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. Watch the wheel slope and tum. They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors, This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truthHunts in no pack. You are not CatulIus, you know, To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty Political hatredS. Let boys want pleasure, and menStruggle for power, and women perhaps for fame, And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped. Yours is not theirs.”

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-tance from the thickening center; corruption.Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountajns. 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.”

“Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.”

“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. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.”

“The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famineAnd pain a few days: cat nor coyoteWill shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.He stands under the oak-bush and waits The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedomAnd flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.The curs of the day come and torment himAt distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to thoseThat ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. III'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtailHad nothing left but unable miseryFrom the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,Not like a beggar, still eyed with the oldImplacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but whatSoared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its risingBefore it was quite unsheathed from reality”

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in meOlder and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”

“A little too abstract, a little too wise,It is time for us to kiss the earth again,It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,Let the rich life run to the roots again.”

“The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrelsWith her meagre pale demoralized daughter.Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sunAnd saying that when she was first marriedShe lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.(It is empty now, the roof has fallenBut the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoodsHave all been cut down, the oaks are standing;The place is now more solitary than ever before.)"When I was nursing my second babyMy husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brakeAnd brought it; I put its mouth to the breastRather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.I had more joy from that than from the others."Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad roadWith market-wagons, mean cares and decay.She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skinSoon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.”

“What is this thing called life? I believeThat the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,Only we do not call it so--I speak of the lifeThat oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energyMakes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things growFrom a chemical reaction?I think they were here already, I think the rocksAnd the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxieshave their various consciousness, all things are conscious;But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brainBring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glassTo concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearthFrom which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animalsBorn howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryardPrefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,Like the cells of a man's body making one being,They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”

“You have perhaps heard some false reportsOn the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten--Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars--If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond themWere that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears--And where is the German Reich? There alsoWill be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours;Mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die;One fierce life lasts.”

“I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.”

“We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.”

“Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.”

“I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there.”

“The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.”

“You making haste haste on decay...”

“You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenlyA mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.”

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

“Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.”

“Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... 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 are made from.”

“As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.”