The Day is a Poem / Robinson Jeffers

The Day is a Poem

(September 19, 1939)

This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice.
A man of genius: that is, of amazing
Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child's soul,
Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child
Wailing in Danzig, invoking destruction and wailing at it.
Here, the day was extremely hot: about noon
A south wind like a blast from hell's mouth spilled a slight rain
On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake
Danced the house, no harm done. Tonight I have been amusing myself
Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly
Into black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder.
Well, the day is a poem; but too much
Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens,
Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

~~
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), 1941
from The Double Axe, and other poems, 1948 

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

"The Day is a Poem" read by Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers biography

Self-Criticism in February / Robinson Jeffers

Self-Criticism in February

The bay is not blue but sombre yellow
With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam heads
And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.
You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours
Would feel the equal beauty of the blue.
It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.
But the present time is not pastoral, but founded
On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not
Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.
Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,
And people like phantoms – how often life's are –
And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction –
Alas, it is not unusual in life;
To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now
For the worst fault: you have never mistaken
Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.
Then what is most disliked in those verses
Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing
That God is love, or perhaps that social
Justice will prevail. I can tell lies in prose.

~~
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
from Such Counsels You Gave to Me, and other poems, 1937 

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Robinson Jeffers biography

Summer Holiday / Robinson Jeffers

Summer Holiday

When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain . . .

~~
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
from The Roan Stallion, Tamar, and other poems, 1925

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Robinson Jeffers biography

"Summer hiliday" read by Sam Abrams. Courtesy tournaveu poetic.

November Surf / Robinson Jeffers

November Surf

Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year’s filth:
The orange-peel, egg-shells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots
Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then. . . . But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness.

~~
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
from Thurso's Landing, and other poems, 1932

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Robinson Jeffers biography