Robinson Jeffers Quotes

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.

Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man. But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious; And not to be astonished at any evil, all are deserved; And not to fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.

Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... 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 are made from.

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.

Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.

Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhmanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

I have heard the summer dust crying to be born.

We have to live like people in a web of knives, we mustn't reach out our hands or we get them gashed.

One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flow And man's dark soul.

Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

perhaps we desire death / or why is poison so sweet? / why do little Sirens make kindlier music / for a man caught in the net of the world between news-cast & work-desk?

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.

No one but death the redeemer will humble that head.

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," said the gamey black-maned wild boar tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

What is this thing called life? I believe That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life, Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo- Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow From a chemical reaction? I think they were here already, I think the rocks And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies have their various consciousness, all things are conscious; But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire: It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness, As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all, Like the cells of a man's body making one being, They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.

I learned that ruling poor men's hands is nothing. Ruling men's money's a wedge in the world. But after I'd split it open a crack I looked in and saw the trick inside it, the filthy nothing, the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men.

To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand years Will Hardly leach,” he thought, “this dust of that fire.

... He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The ghosts . . . try to remember the sunlight. Light has died out of their skies.

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. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.

In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.

This is my last worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace.

You making haste haste on decay...

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Qut of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children. I would have them keep their dis- tance from the thickening center; corruption. Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountajns. 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.

The flesh of my body Is nothing in my longing. What you think I want Will be pure dust after hundreds of years and something from me be crying to something from you High up in their air.

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed In a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony… … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood- sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world.

The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist.

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. Watch the wheel slope and tum. They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors, This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack. You are not CatulIus, you know, To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty Political hatredS. 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.

We don't know enough, we'll never know. Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so fine. The fleet limbs of the antelope?

For now I know that whatever bent this world around us, whether it was God or whether it was blind Chance as blind as my father, Is perfectly good, we're given a dollar of life to gamble against a dollar's worth of desire And if we win we have both but losers lose nothing,

On the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten — Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars —

To Robinson Jeffers, craggy old California poet, beauty was an objective external reality, something which existed outside of us, in 'the pristine granite' of the cliffs and mountains, not simply a product of human aesthetics. 'The beauty of things was born before eyes,' he wrote, 'and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it,

Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among the leaves and his hounds tore him A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much.

The beauty of things means virtue and value in them It is in the beholder's eye, not the worlds? Certainly. It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means the world is sound.

Love The Wild Swan 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 Hash, of the splendor of things. Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax, The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings." --This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game. Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

In the poems of . . . Robinson Jeffers, it is a style of consciousness rather than of language we see most in an altered light, some shadowed corner of experience newly illumined and made perceptible by words.

Robinson Jeffers longed throughout his life ]for a poetry of 'pure undoubtable being'], but could not bear to relinquish his moral connection with the humanity he continually condemned for its self-centeredness.

SONG OF QUIETNESS Drink deep, drink deep of quietness, And on the margins of the sea Remember not thine old distress Nor all the miseries to be. Calmer than mists, and cold As they, that fold on fold Up the dim valley are rolled, Learn thou to be.

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future . . . I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths to dream of, rose-marble-fingered Women shed light down the great lines; But you have invoked the slime in the skull, The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Gods like racial dreams, the woman's desire, The man's fear, the hawk-faced prophet's; but nothing Human seems happy at the feet of yours. Therefore though not forgotten, not loved, in the gray old years in the evening leaning Over the gray stones of the tower-top, You shall be called heartless and blind.

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean, The blue pool in the old garden, More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific: The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant. Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs Nor any future world-quarrel of westering And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons, Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan. Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey 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.

I wish the little rivers under the laughing kingfishers in every canyon were fire, and the ocean Fire, and my heart not afraid to go down.

By God, if you go killing Unhappiness who'll be left in the houses?

Sad sons of the stormy fall, No escape, you have to inflict and endure; surely it is time for you To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside, Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds, Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain, But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans.

Fascism is an attempt to forge a bond between an historical sacral culture with its roots in the past, and an emergent pluralist mentality not yet thoroughly formalized in a living tradition.

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others." Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

You have perhaps heard some false reports On the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten-- Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars-- If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them Were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears-- And where is the German Reich? There also Will be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours; Mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die; One fierce life lasts.

The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also. Nothing at all has suffered erasure. There is life not of our time. He calls ungainly bodies As beautiful as the grace of horses. He is weary of nothing; he watches air-planes; he watches pelicans.

for a poem Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

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 famine And pain a few days: cat nor coyote Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment him At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. II I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail Had nothing left but unable misery From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality

Ascent To The Sierras poet Robinson Jeffers #140 on top 500 poets Poet's PagePoemsCommentsStatsE-BooksBiographyQuotationsShare on FacebookShare on Twitter Poems by Robinson Jeffers : 8 / 140 « prev. poem next poem » 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 horns And glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have looked back Standing above these rock-heads to bark laughter At the burning granaries and the farms and the town That sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies... lighting the dead... It is not true: from this land The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace with the valleys; no blood in the sod; there is no old sword Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are all one people, their homes never knew harrying; The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless as deer. Oh, fortunate earth; you must find someone To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds of the future, against the wolf in men's hearts?

Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars— Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity. Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence; Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence: Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

CONTIMENT’S END 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 doubled stretch of water. I said: You yoke the Aleutian seal-rocks with the lava and coral sowings that flower the south, Over your flood the life that sought the sunrise faces ours that has followed the evening star. The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother. You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. That watched you fill your beds out of the condensation of thin vapor and watched you change them, That saw you soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents. Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

It is worth noting that the writers who have most vividly captured the feel of the California landscape have been native sons, like John Steinbeck, or long residents like Robinson Jeffers.

Wise men in their bad hours have envied The little people making merry like grasshoppers In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking Backward but never forward, and if they somehow Take hold upon the future they do it Half asleep, with the tools of generation Foolishly reduplicating Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too, Groan against labors, wars and partings, Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended The summer insects enviable; One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery. Strength and desire possess the future, The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers, Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made Something more equal to the centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened nor troubled And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

For the mind of every man is balanced upon the creative tension within him of conceptual mediation between the opposed polarities of the finite and the infinite, the essential and the existential. the exact equation between them is responsible for the basic human types, which, in aesthetics, constitute the classical and the romantic temperaments.

Then all meaning was in the group . . . today . . . all is in the individual.

Nietzsche: 'myth itself is a kind or style of thinking. It imparts an idea of the universe, but does it in the sequence of events, actions, sufferings.

The myth disregards — does not know — the individual.

Heinrich Zimmer: 'Myth is the sole and spontaneous image of life itself in its flowing harmony and mutually hostile contrarieties, in all the polyphony and harmony of their contradictions.

The anthropocentric version of the God of Christianity will not avail. . . . Instead emerges a new hero, a new messiah, a new superman. He will seek to weld all together in a terrible act of unbelievable affirmation beyond the limits of common human desire, beyond common hope. He will free himself through the ancient acts of violation — fornication, incest, rape. . . . His name is the Rev. Dr. Arthur Barclay.

Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars— Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.

I named you Fauna because I loved Robinson Jeffers’ poem about Flora and Fauna. I asked that they keep that name. I wanted only two things, I didn’t think they’d let me have what I wanted, but one was that you be named Fauna, and the other was that you at least have on your birth certificate that your father was Negro. Because in my little world I believed that black people were made of far superior stuff than the whites I knew. All the great men that I knew, all the great girls that I knew were black: Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Josh White,

...poetry cannot speak without remembering the turns of the sun and moon, and the rhythm of the ocean, and the recurrence of human generations, the returning waves of life and death.

We had come without knowing it to our inevitable place. —Robinson Jeffers

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine The fleet limbs of the antelope? —Robinson Jeffers

This is the essence of tragedy, To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate, All stone, approach.

I think . . . I think says the brain . . . But the little spire with the eyes of ecstasy On the brain’s dome is the life, Not thinking anything, But flaming . . . little fool you will cease Flaming when you flame up to peace.

The Song of Wandering Aengus”—William Butler Yeats “Jabberwocky”—Lewis Carroll “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—Robert Frost “Continent’s End”—Robinson Jeffers “Forgiveness”—George MacDonald “O Me! O Life!”—Walt Whitman “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”—Robert Herrick “In Memoriam A.H.H.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson “i like my body when it is with your”—E. E. Cummings “A Psalm of Life”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—William Butler Yeats “Three Marching Songs”—William Butler Yeats “Song of Myself”—Walt Whitman “in the rain”—E. E. Cummings