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Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, July 9, 1937

Today is the birthday of Robinson Jeffers (born John Robinson Jeffers; Allegheny, Pennsylvania; January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962 Carmel, California); poet, known for his work about the central California coast.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from Occidental College at age 18. After he graduated from Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern California (USC) to study at first literature, and then medicine.

He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years older than he was, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney. Jeffers and Mrs. Kuster became lovers. Mr. Kuster discovered their affair in 1910. Jeffers dropped out of USC medical school and enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he abandoned after a semester, at which time he returned to Los Angeles. By 1912 the affair became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, then the lovers lived together by Lake Washington to await the completion of Una’s divorce.

The two were married in 1913, then moved to La Jolla, California, and finally Carmel, California, where Jeffers constructed their home, Tor House and Hawk Tower, a gift of love for Una.  Una died of cancer in 1950.

Verse

• 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.
  • A Hill-Top View (1904); This is one of his earliest poems, printed in the the Aurora, a student publication of Occidental College.

• 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.
  • “Continent’s End” in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• 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.
  • “Continent’s End” in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• 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.
  • “Continent’s End” in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• 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.
  • “Continent’s End” in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• 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.
  • “To The Stone-Cutters” in Tamar and Other Poems (1924)

• Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
  they have had what they wanted
  • “Post Mortem” in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

• I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
  For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
  • “Apology for Bad Dreams” in The Women at Point Sur (1927)

• 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.
  • “Love the Wild Swan” (1935)

• 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.
  • “Love the Wild Swan” (1935)

• Here is a symbol in which
  Many high tragic thoughts
  Watch their own eyes.
  • “Rock and Hawk” in Solstice and Other Poems (1935)

• I think, here is your emblem
  To hang in the future sky;
  Not the cross, not the hive,
  But this; bright power, dark peace;
  Fierce consciousness joined with final
  Disinterestedness;
  Life with calm death; the falcon’s
  Realist eyes and act
  Married to the massive
  Mysticism of stone,
  Which failure cannot cast down
  Nor success make proud.
  • “Rock and Hawk” in Solstice and Other Poems (1935)

• 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.
  • “The Answer” (1936)

• 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.
  • “The Answer” (1936)

• There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
  • “The Purse-Seine” (1937)

• 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.
  • “Contemplation of The Sword” (1938)
• 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.
  • “Contemplation of The Sword” (1938)

• I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
  to make earth.
  • “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1939)

• Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
  shine, perishing republic.
  • “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1939)

• Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
  • “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.
  • “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1939)

• 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…
  • “The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean” (1940)

• 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.
  • “The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean” (1940)

• 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.
  • “Be Angry At The Sun” (1941)

• The gang serves lies, the passionate
  Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
  Hunts in no pack.
  • “Be Angry At The Sun” (1941)

I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I’ll have lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism —
For all men to such minds are devils or gods — and that increases
Man’s dignity, man’s importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.

• “The Silent Shepherds” (1958)

• Science and mathematics
  Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
  They never touch it: consider what an explosion
  Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
  If any mind for a moment touch truth.
  • “The Silent Shepherds” (1958)

• 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.
  • “The Great Explosion” in the posthumous publication The Beginning and the End (1973)

• Come little ones,
  You are worth no more than the foxes and yellow
  wolfkins, yet I will give you wisdom.
  O future children:
  Trouble is coming; the world as of the present time
  Sails on its rocks; but you will be born and live
  Afterwards. Also a day will come when the earth
  Will scratch herself and smile and rub off humanity:
  But you will be born before that.Time will come, no doubt,
  When the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze,
  and the air on them; frozen gases, white flasks of air
  Will be dust: which no wind ever will stir: this very
  dust in dim starlight glistening
  Is dead wind, the white corpse of wind.
  Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way,
  our universe, all the stars that have names are dead.
  Vast is the night. How you have grown, dear night,
  walking your empty halls, how tall!
  • The Double Axe and Other Poems, including eleven suppressed poems (1977) II.The Inhumanist XLV