Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962)

John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887-January 20, 1962) was an American poet who, after extensive travel in his youth, spent most of his life in Carmel, California, USA in a granite home he built for his family with his own hands, which included a large stone tower. He called them "Tor House" and "Hawk ower".

His short verse includes "Hurt Hawks", "The Purse-Seine", and "Shine, Perishing Republic". His intense relationship with the physical world is described in often brutal and apocalyptic verse and demonstrates a preference for the natural world over what he sees as the negative influence of civilization.

Quotes

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

"Long live freedom and damn the ideologies." ~ "The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean" (1940)

"Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains." ~ "Shine, Perishing Republic" (1941)

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
A little too abstract, a little too wise,	1 Comment
Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising
Beyond the narrows of the Inner Hebrides
Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless
Here is a symbol in which	2 Comments
I	1 Comment
I
I am heaping the bones of the old mother
I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
I followed the narrow cliffside trail half way up the mountain
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside	1 Comment
I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened
I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla	1 Comment
If God has been good enough to give you a poet	2 Comments
If you should look for this place after a handful
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
It is good for strength not to be merciful
Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.	1 Comment
Only stand high a long enough time your lightning
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark	1 Comment
Peace is the heir of dead desire,
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
Seventy years ago my mother labored to bear me,
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
That public men publish falsehoods
The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive
The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
The extraordinary patience of things!	1 Comment
The heads of strong old age are beautiful
The heroic stars spending themselves,
The little biplane that has the river-meadow for landing-field	1 Comment
The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers	1 Comment
The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,	1 Comment
The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels
The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,	1 Comment
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
The world has many seas, Mediterranean, Atlantic, but
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky,
There is a jaggle of masonry here, on a small hill
They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
This country least, but every inhabited country	1 Comment
This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice.
To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
Unhappy about some far off things
We have now won two world-wars, neither of which concerned us, we were
What's the best life for a man?
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,	1 Comment
When the sun shouts and people abound
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening	1 Comment
Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
Wise men in their bad hours have envied
"I hate my verses, every line, every word.	1 Comment