The Old Man’s Dream After He Died

from CAWDOR
Gently with delicate mindless fingers
Decomposition began to pick and caress the unstable chemistry
Of the cells of the brain; Oh very gently, as the first weak breath
of wind in a wood: the storm is still far,
The leaves are stirred faintly to a gentle whispering: the nerve-cells,
by what would soon destroy them, were stirred
To a gentle whispering. Or one might say the brain began to
glow, with its own light, in the starless
Darkness under the dead bone sky; like bits of rotting wood on
the floor of the night forest
Warm rains have soaked, you see them beside the path shine like
vague eyes. So gently the dead man's brain
Glowing by itself made and enjoyed its dream.

The nights of many
years before this time
He had been dreaming the sweetness of death, as a starved man
dreams bread, but now decomposition
Reversed the chemistry; who had adored in sleep under so many

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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The Wind-Struck Music

Ed Stiles and old Tom Birnam went up to their cattle on the
bare hills
Above Mai Paso; they'd ridden under the stars' white death,
when they reached the ridge the huge tiger-lily
Of a certain cloud-lapped astonishing autumn sunrise opened all
its petals. Ed Stiles pulled in his horse,
That flashy palamino he rode cream-color, heavy white mane,
white tail, his pride and said
'Look, Tom. My God. Ain't that a beautiful sunrise?' Birnam
drew down his mouth, set the hard old chin,
And whined: 'Now, Ed: listen here: I haven't an ounce of
poetry in all my body. It's cows we're after.'
Ed laughed and followed; they began to sort the heifers out of
the herd. One red little deer-legged creature
Rolled her wild eyes and ran away down the hill, the old man
hard after her. She ran through a deep-cut gully,
And Birnam's piebald would have made a clean jump but the clay lip
Crumbled under his take-off, he slipped and
Spilled in the pit,
flailed with four hooves and came out scrambling.

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Contemplation Of The Sword

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. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assasin and poisoner.

The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-tourture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man's forhead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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The Purse-Seine

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net,
unable to see the phosphorescence of the
shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting
Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
light on the sea's night-purple; he points,
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
then, when the crowded fish

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Theory Of Truth

(Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
the road. I remember
This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
proposed three questions to himself:
First, is there a God and of what nature? Second, whether there's
anything after we die but worm's meat?
Third, how should men live? Large time-worn questions no
doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.

How
many minds have worn these questions; old coins
Rubbed faceless, dateless. The most have despaired and accepted
doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
With aching strands of insanity in them.
I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
mind the delusions and miseries of human life.

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Ghosts In England

At East Lulworth the dead were friendly and pitiful, I saw them
peek from their ancient earthworks on the coast hills
At the camps of the living men in the valley, the army-mechanics'
barracks, the roads where they try the tanks
And the armored cars: 'We also,' they say, 'trembled in our
time. We felt the world change in the rain,
Our people like yours were falling under the wheel. Great
past and declining present are a pitiful burden
For living men; but failure is not the worm that worries
the dead, you will not weep when you come,'
Said the soft mournful shadows on the Dorset shore. And those
on the Rollright ridge by the time-eaten stone-circle
Said nothing and had no wish in the world, having blessedly aged
out of humanity, stared with great eyes
White as the hollowed limestone, not caring but seeing, inhuman
as the wind.

But the other ghosts were not good,
But like a moon of jackals around a sick stag.
At Zennor in the tumbled granite chaos, at Marazion and the

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Night

The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken
Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
Out of the slack, the slow west
Sombering its torch; a ship's light
Shows faintly, far out,
Over the weight of the prone ocean
On the low cloud.

Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow,
Peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining.
Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings
And the ocean accepts her glory. O soul worshipful of her
You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always,
And the film of waves above that takes the sun takes also
Her, with more love. The sun-lovers have a blond favorite,
A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter,
Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes. Quietness
Flows from her deeper fountain; and he will die; and she is

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Hellenistics

I look at the Greek-derived design that nourished my infancy
this Wedgwood copy of the Portland vase:
Someone had given it to my father my eyes at five years old
used to devour it by the hour.

I look at a Greek coin, four-drachma piece struck by Lysimachus:
young Alexander's head
With the horns of Ammon and brave brow-ridges, the bright
pride and immortal youth and wild sensitiveness.

I think of Achilles, Sappho, the Nike. I think of those mercenaries
who marched in the heart of Asia
And lived to salute the sea: the lean faces like lance-heads, the
grace of panthers. The dull welter of Asia.

I am past childhood, I look at this ocean and the fishing birds, the
streaming skerries, the shining water,
The foam-heads, the exultant dawn-light going west, the pelicans,
their huge wings half folded, plunging like stones.

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All The Little Hoofprints

Farther up the gorge the sea's voice fainted and ceased.
We heard a new noise far away ahead of us, vague and metallic,
it might have been some unpleasant bird's voice
Bedded in a matrix of long silences. At length we came to a little
cabin lost in the redwoods,
An old man sat on a bench before the doorway filing a cross-cut
saw; sometimes he slept,
Sometimes he filed. Two or three horses in the corral by the
streamside lifted their heads
To watch us pass, but the old man did not.

In the afternoon we
returned the same way,
And had the picture in our minds of magnificent regions of space
and mountain not seen before. (This was
The first time that we visited Pigeon Gap, whence you look
down behind the great shouldering pyramid-
Edges of Pico Blanco through eagle-gulfs of air to a forest basin
Where two-hundred-foot redwoods look like the pile on a Turkish
carpet.) With such extensions of the idol-

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Ossian’s Grave

PREHISTORIC MONUMENT NEAR CUSHENDALL
IN ANTRIM
Steep up in Lubitavish townland stands
A ring of great stones like fangs, the shafts of the stones
Grown up with thousands of years of gradual turf,
The fangs of the stones still biting skyward; and hard
Against the stone ring, the oblong enclosure
Of an old grave guarded with erect slabs; gray rocks
Backed by broken thorn-trees, over the gorge of Glenaan;
It is called Ossian's Grave. Ossian rests high then,
Haughtily alone.
If there were any fame or burial or monument
For me to envy,
Warrior and poet they should be yours and yours.
For this is the pure fame, not caged in a poem,
Fabulous, a glory untroubled with works, a name in the north
Like a mountain in the mist, like Aura
Heavy with heather and the dark gray rocks, or Trostan
Dark purple in the cloud: happier than what the wings
And imperfections of work hover like vultures

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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