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Robinson Jeffers: 118 quotes2 likes

“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 here
In the sense of a symbol.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Contemplation of The Sword" (1938)

“Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea — look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.”

Robinson Jeffers

"The Eye"

“Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)

“I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel.”

Robinson Jeffers

The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press (2001) ISBN 978-0804738903

“There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.”

Robinson Jeffers

"The Purse-Seine" (1937)

“I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)

“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

"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)

“The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Be Angry At The Sun" (1941)

“I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Apology for Bad Dreams" in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

“The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.”

Robinson Jeffers

Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)

“At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Continent's End" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

“Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
We built our house when I and my love were young.”

Robinson Jeffers

"The Last Conservative"

“Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Rock and Hawk" in Solstice and Other Poems (1935)

“You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.”

Robinson Jeffers

Response in a pamphlet Writers Take Sides : Letters About the War in Spain from 418 American Authors (1938) by the American Writers League, which asked various authors: "Are you for or are you against Franco and fascism?".

“Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
they have had what they wanted”

Robinson Jeffers

"Post Mortem" in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

“Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.”

Robinson Jeffers

As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (1981) edited by Leonard S. Klein, Vol. 2, p. 504

“Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.”

Robinson Jeffers

"Contemplation of The Sword" (1938)

“When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…”

Robinson Jeffers

"Summer Holiday"

“Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.”

Robinson Jeffers

" To The Stone-Cutters http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/stone.html" in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)