Robinson Jeffers

7/28/2019 Robinson Jeffers

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/robinson-jeffers 1/5

Age In Prospect

Praise youth's hot blood if you will, I think that happiness

Rather consists in having lived clear through

Youth and hot blood, on to the wintrier hemisphere

Where one has time to wait and remember.

Youth and hot blood are beautiful, so is peacefulness.

Youth had some islands in it but age is indeed

An island and a peak; age has infirmities,

Not few, but youth is all one fever.

To look around and to love in his appearances,

Though a little calmly, the universal God's

Beauty is better I think than to lip eagerly

The mother's breast or another woman's.

And there is no possession more sure than memory's;

But if I reach that gray island, that peak,

My hope is still to possess with eyes the homelinessOf ancient loves, ocean and mountains,

And meditate the sea-mouth of mortality

And the fountain six feet down with a quieter thirst

Than now I feel for old age; a creature progressively

Thirsty for life will be for death too.

Submitted by Holt

Ascent To The Sierras

Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising

Begins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers

to little humps and

barrows, low aimless ridges,

A sudden violence of rock crowns them. The crowded

orchards end, they

have come to a stone knife;The farms are finished; the sudden foot of the

slerra. Hill over hill,

snow-ridge beyond mountain gather

The blue air of their height about them.

Here at the foot of the pass

The fierce clans of the mountain you'd think for

thousands of years,

Men with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles' hunger,

Have gathered among these rocks at the dead hour

Of the morning star and the stars waning

To raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven

Their scared booty to the highlands, the tossing hornsAnd glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have

looked back





Let boys want pleasure, and men

Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,

And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.

Yours is not theirs.

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.

Birth-Dues

Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely

contemptible, the dangled

Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;

But limitary pain -- the rock under the tower

and the hewn coping

That takes thunder at the head of the turret-

Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish

carving himself

With knives will seem to have conquered the world.

The world's God is treacherous and full of

unreason; a torturer, but also

The only foundation and the only fountain.

Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes

of hunger; who hides in the grave

To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian

Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in

love with the God is washed clean

Of death desired and of death dreaded.



He has joy, but Joy is a trick in the air; and

pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible;

And peace; and is based on solider than pain.

He has broken boundaries a little and that will

estrange him; he is monstrous, but notTo the measure of the God.... But I having told

you--

However I suppose that few in the world have

energy to hear effectively-

Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the

people.

Birthday (Autobiography)

Seventy years ago my mother labored to bear me,A twelve-pound baby with a big head,

Her first, it was plain torture. Finally they used the forceps

And dragged me out, with one prong

In my right eye, and slapped and banged me until I breathed.

I am not particularly grateful for it.

As to the eye: it remained invalid and now has a cataract.

It can see gods and spirits in its cloud,

And the weird end of the world: the left one's for common daylight.

As to my mother:

A rather beautiful young woman married to a grim clergyman

Twenty-two years older than she:She had her little innocent diversions, her little travels in Europe—

And once for scandal kissed the Pope's ring—

Perhaps her life was no emptier than other lives. Both parents

Swim in my blood and distort my thought but the old man's welcome.

Bixby's Landing

They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down

here in an iron car

On a long cable; here the ships warped in

And took their loads from the engine, the water

is deep to the cliff. The car

Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,

Stationed like a north star above the peaks of

the redwoods, iron perch

For the little red hawks when they cease from

hovering

When they've struck prey; the spider's fling of a

cable rust-glued to the pulleys.

The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude

Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the

rose-tipped stone-crop, the constant



Ocean's voices, the cloud-lighted space.

The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the

rust of the broken boiler

Quick lizards lighten, and a rattle-snake flows

Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled

fire-brick. In the rotting timbers

And roofless platforms all the free companiesOf windy grasses have root and make seed; wild

buckwheat blooms in the fat

Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.

Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung

nest are the voice of the headland.

Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,

Men's failures are often as beautiful as men's

triumphs, but your returnings

Are even more precious than your first presence.

Documents

Robinson Jeffers