Praise Life
This country least, but every inhabited country
Is clotted with human anguish.
Remember that at your feasts.
And this is no new thing but from time out of mind,
No transient thing, but exactly
Conterminous with human life.
Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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On Building With Stone
To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
Like swarthy Cheops, but my own hands
For only slaves, is a far sweeter toil than to cut
Passions in verse for a sick people.
I'd liefer bed one boulder in the house-wall than be the time's
Archilochus: we name not Homer: who now
Can even imagine the fabulous dawn when bay-leaves (to a blind
Beggar) were not bitter in the teeth?
Submitted by Holt
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Joy
Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great;
Peace is great, strength is great.
Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture
Spreads her gray sails on the air
Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain
Stands, while years like water
Trench his long sides. 'I am neither mountain nor bird
Nor star; and I seek joy.'
The weakness of your breed: yet at length quietness
Will cover those wistful eyes.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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The Low Sky
No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
Could long wings or great eyes fly
Under this low-lidded soft sky?
On the wide heather the curlew's whistle
Dies of its echo, it has no room
Under the low lid of this tomb.
But one to whom mind and imagination
Sometimes used to seem burdensome
Is glad to lie down awhile in the tomb.
Among stones and quietness
The mind dissolves without a sound,
The flesh drops into the ground.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Ave Caesar
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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The Epic Stars
The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem--
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle--
We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.
Submitted by Holt
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Quia Absurdum
Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless
Pool of the stars. (Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)
Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.
(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.)
Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will. Choose the Christian sheep-cote
Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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End Of The World
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don't think so. They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Distant Rainfall
Like mourning women veiled to the feet
Tall slender rainstorms walk slowly against gray cloud along the
far verge.
The ocean is green where the river empties,
Dull gray between the points of the headlands, purple where
the women walk.
What do they want? Whom are they mourning?
What hero's dust in the urn between the two hands hidden in
the veil?
Titaness after Titaness proudly
Bearing her tender magnificent sorrow at her heart, the lost
battle's beauty.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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The Place For No Story
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek:
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.
poem by Robinson Jeffers
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