Robinson Jeffers

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
And pain a few days: cat nor

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

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or
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...

The heads of strong old age are
Beyond all grace of youth
They have strange quiet,
Integrity, health, soundness, to the

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean…Divinely superfluous
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees
And hills tower, waves fall

Unhappy about some far off
That are not my affair,
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the

The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter,
Cassandra,

Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely contemptible, the
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;
But limitary pain — the rock under the tower and the hewn
That takes thunder at the head of the turret-Terrible and real...

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
In the sense of a symbol
The sword: that is: the storms and counter-storms of general destruc...

The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is     for park and playground, this
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at
All docile between this ocean and the other

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 ...

The world has many seas,
Mediterranean,
Atlantic, but        here is the shore of the one ocean
And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; the        enormous scene; the enormous games

The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes

I
Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of
The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck

It is good for strength not to be
To its own weakness, good for the deep urn to run     over, good to
The peaks and the deeps, who can endure it,
Good to be hurt, who can be healed afterward: but     you that have whetted

Is it not by his high superfluousness we
Our God
For to be equal a
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to