Robinson Jeffers

 

 

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, July 9, 1937

John Robinson Jeffers, the top of my list of favorite poets, was born January 10, 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and died Jan 20, 1962 in Carmel, California.

I was browsing his poetry, as I often do, and came across some works that, though written more than 60 years ago, seem to speak of the times. All times, it seems.

Jeffers was immensely popular, an unwilling "darling" of the literati of the twenties and thirties. But his intense antiwar sentiments, his criticism of America's entering WWII tossed him from favor. Although he later published several books of poetry, he never regained his initial acclaim.

These poems were published in 1963, one year after his death:

Birth And Death

I am old and in the ordinary course of nature
shall die soon, but the human race is not old
But rather childish, it is an infant and acts
like one,
And now it has captured the keys of the kingdoms
of unearthly violence. Will it use them? It
loves destruction you know.
And the earth is too small to feed us, we must
have room.
It seems expedient that not as of old one man,
but many nations and races die for the people.
Have you noticed meanwhile the population
explosion
Of man on earth, the torrents of new-born babies,
the bursting schools? Astonishing. It saps
man's dignity.
We used to be individuals, not populations.
Perhaps we are now preparing for the great
slaughter. No reason to be alarmed; stone-dead
is dead;
Breeding like rabbits we hasten to meet the day.


Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
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.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly 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 distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
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.


--Robinson Jeffers


~Perhaps, like Jeffers must have felt, today I'm simply depressed about the state of things in the world, this grand old beautiful world which seems yet again on a collision course with a man-made apocalypse.



Cat

January 10 – Robinson Jeffers

  

Robinson Jeffers, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, July 9, 1937

Robinson Jeffers January 10, 1887 - January 20, 1962

My favorite poet. I always seem to return to those of his works that make a statement about the world, as he saw it during his lifetime, and as it is today.
 
From The Academy of American Poets:Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche's concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation.

Some works by Jeffers:
The Purse-Seine
by Robinson Jeffers (1937)
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net,
unable to see the phosphorescence of the
shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting
Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
light on the sea's night-purple; he points,
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
labor haul it in.
I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall
to the other of their closing destiny the
phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body
sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside
the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up
to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls
of night
Stand erect to the stars.
Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
powers--or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are
quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew
that cultures decay, and life's end is death.


Wise Men In Their Bad Hours
by Robinson Jeffers
Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers
In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; they eat and laugh too,
Groan against labors, wars and partings,
Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended
The summer insects enviable;
One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.
Strength and desire possess the future,
The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future
Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers,
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened nor troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.


Natural Music
by Robinson Jeffers
The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

-- Cat