"Carmel Point"
Context: Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
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Source: The Selected Poetry
"Continent's End" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
"Tor House"
Context: If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River Valley; these four will remain
In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind.
“All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human.”
"The Last Conservative"
Context: The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.
But the place was maiden, no previous
Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements,
Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain
Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn
Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here
All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human. Oh heavy change.
The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.
They have built streets around us, new houses
Line them and cars obsess them — and my dearest has died.
The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest
Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons.
"Tor House"
Context: If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River Valley; these four will remain
In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind.
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190
Context: I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)
“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution”
"The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean" (1940)
Context: Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189; also partly quoted in the essay "Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet" http://web.archive.org/20011119074326/members.aol.com/PHarri5642/jeffers.htm by John Courtney
Context: I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.
I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
A Hill-Top View (1904); This is one of his earliest poems, printed in the Aurora, a student publication of Occidental College.
Context: O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.
"Love the Wild Swan" (1935)
Context: I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)
“The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends”
"The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean" (1940)
Context: The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean...
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190
Context: I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)
“Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful.”
"The Answer" (1936)
Context: Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189; also partly quoted in the essay "Robinson Jeffers, Pantheist Poet" http://web.archive.org/20011119074326/members.aol.com/PHarri5642/jeffers.htm by John Courtney
Context: I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions — the world of spirits.
I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
"Carmel Point"
Context: Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
"The Great Explosion" in the posthumous publication The Beginning and the End (1973)
Context: 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 Carmel 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.
“These are real and we see their beauty.”
"The Great Explosion" in the posthumous publication The Beginning and the End (1973)
Context: 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 Carmel 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.
“Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.”
"Be Angry At The Sun" (1941)
Context: That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.