Robinson Jeffers Quotes

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...

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

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.

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.

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 least ugly faction; these evils are essential. To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

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.