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

At the near approach of a star-huge tides
Agitated the molten surface of the earth.
The tides grew higher as it passed. It tore from the earth
I he top of one great wave: the moon was torn…

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

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

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 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

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 world has many seas,
Mediterranean,
Atlantic, but
here is the shore of the one ocean.

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

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

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean...
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow…

When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
little troublesome, a little terrible.

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare
Above the ocean.
I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
high up in heaven

Here is a symbol in
Many high tragic
Watch their own eyes.
This gray rock, standing

Когда звезда приближалась, огромные волны
Взволновали литую поверхность земли. А когда
Звезда удалялась, они рванулись за нею и вырвали
Вершину земной волны: так из Тихого океана…

They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
here in an iron
On a long cable; here the ships warped
And took their loads from the engine, the water

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie.
Consider if you like how the lilies grow