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Robinson Jeffers: Online Poems


[Ed. Note: The definitive edition of Robinson Jeffers' poetry is a 5-volume edition edited by Tim Hunt and published by Stanford University Press.]

To The Stone-Cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
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.

from Tamar (1920-1923) Source

 

Fire On The Hills

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.

Online Source

 

The Great Explosion

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
            dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
            harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
            way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
            other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae
            like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
                                No wonder we are so fascinated with
        fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
        the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
        gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the
        whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back
        and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
        terrible life.
                            He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty.
        We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
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 Caramel 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.

Online Source


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