The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Analysis, meaning and summary of Robinson Jeffers's poem Carmel Point

1 Comment

  1. Colin Senner says:

    This poem like “Vulture” by Jeffers, cares not for the individual, but for the perpetuation of nature as a whole. This poem contasts to the “modern” themes of this early society of “Rugged Individualism” and instead completely revokes it in the plea for one to give up themself and become one with the landscape/vulture.

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