The Broken Balance
I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla
The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers answered:
"Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period
A sign is declared in heaven
Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans
Rule, and Etruria is finished;
A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind."
I heard yesterday
So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,
It was hard to be wise.... You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled
For the people; they will have their happiness.
When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It;
When life grows hateful, there's power ...
II. To the Children
Power's good; life is not always good but power's good.
So you must think when abundance
Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough.
The steep singleness of passion
Dies; they will say, "What was that?" but the power triumphs.
Loveliness will live under glass
And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains.
There is beauty in power also.
You children must widen your minds' eyes to take mountains
Instead of faces, and millions
Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power
After the lone hawk's dead.
III
That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow
Fire licking the sides of the gray stones,
Has a more passionate and more pure heart
In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;
But he is betrayed by his own courage,
The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.
Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;
The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock
With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills
The red-shafted woodpecker flying,
A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,
Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.
These live their felt natures; they know their norm
And live it to the brim; they understand life.
While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked
Their natures until the souls the in them;
They have sold themselves for toys and protection:
No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys.
Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
But in the eyes and mouths that surround them,
Having no function but to serve and support
Civilization, the enemy of man,
No wonder they live insanely, and desire
With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.
Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman,
But now the world is turned upside down;
The good do evil, the hope's in criminals; in vice
That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.
Through wars and corruptions the house will fall.
Mourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.
IV
Rain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots,
The pitiless pruning-iron in the branches,
Strengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends
Or powerless foes until the grapes purple.
But when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish.
The world sickens with change, rain becomes poison,
The earth is a pit, it Is time to perish.
The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature
Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.
When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.
Reach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow,
Discover the depths; let the long pale tendrils
Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . .
And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.
V
Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
Under men's hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
It was only a moment's accident,
The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor; from here I can even
Perceive that that snuffed candle had something . . . a fantastic virtue,
A faint and unshapely pathos . . .
So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape's by-shot
Was moderately admirable?
VI. Palinode
All summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants'
Perch, and their droppings have painted it shining white.
If the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain
At noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise
On the black water: it is barely possible that even men's present
Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)
Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.
VII
Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass
Stands narrowed between the people and the storm.
The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet
Summer after summer encroach and destroy.
Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color,
Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars;
But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck
The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Robinson Jeffers frames the poem as a sequence of hard-eyed meditations on historical collapse, natural power, and the uneasy place of human beings within both. The opening movement reaches back to Plutarch and the fall of Rome, then turns abruptly toward the present, where a trumpet-like warning suggests that political forms, not just empires, pass away when they become too heavy to bear. From there the poem widens into a stern address to children, urging them to think beyond individual attachments and to understand power as a force that outlasts sentiment and private comfort.
As the poem progresses, Jeffers contrasts creatures that live according to instinct with human beings who have become fragmented, self-betraying, and dependent on civilization. He repeatedly returns to images of growth, pruning, ripening, decay, and eventual renewal, suggesting that suffering and destruction are not accidental but part of a larger cycle. By the end, however, the poem complicates its own severity: after condemning human civilization as a blight on the earth, it allows that even damaged human life has a strange, imperfect worth. The final stanza restores a bitter but resilient perspective, leaving the reader with the sense that the natural world will endure long after human institutions fail.
Theme
- Historical decline - The poem sees civilizations as temporary structures that grow burdened, decay, and are eventually replaced by new orders.
- Power and endurance - Jeffers treats power as a brutal but necessary reality, something children must learn to recognize rather than sentimentalize.
- Nature versus civilization - Natural beings are shown as self-possessed and whole, while human civilization appears corrupting, abstract, and destructive.
- Cycles of growth and ruin - Images of ripening, pruning, storms, and perishing present destruction as part of a larger natural process.
- Human self-division - The poem portrays modern people as scattered in desire and identity, lacking the center that other creatures possess.
- Bitter admiration for existence - Even while condemning humanity, the poem admits a grudging respect for human life and its strange pathos.
Literary Devices
- Allusion - The reference to Plutarch and Sulla links the poem's argument to classical history and the fall of Rome.
- Extended metaphor - The vineyard and pruning imagery turns the life of a culture into the life cycle of a plant that must be cut, ripened, and finally perish.
- Apostrophe - The direct address to children creates a didactic, urgent tone and makes the poem feel like a warning handed to the next generation.
- Juxtaposition - Jeffers sets animals against humans, ancient history against modern politics, and natural endurance against civic decay.
- Imagery - Vivid sensory details of trumpets, cliffs, cormorants, storms, and berries give the poem its harsh physical force.
- Symbolic characterization - The hawk, heron, cormorant, and weasel embody forms of instinctive being that the poem admires or studies.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly suggests that destruction can be strengthening, and that decline may reveal truth rather than merely loss.
Symbolism
- Trumpet-blast - The sudden sound signals historical change and the arrival of a new political age.
- Vines and berries - These suggest both natural growth and the necessity of strain, pruning, and eventual decline.
- Hawk - The hawk represents concentrated will, power, and the fierce integrity the poem admires in nature.
- Cormorants - Their white-stained perch hints at endurance, accumulation, and the untidy persistence of life.
- Broken balance - The title image stands for the loss of measure between humanity, power, and the natural world.
- Sea-cliff and wild grass - The cliff-edge landscape symbolizes precarious endurance under pressure from both nature and human encroachment.
Tone
Jeffers's tone is severe, prophetic, and unsentimental, but it is not merely despairing; it carries the cold authority of someone trying to name what will endure after human hopes fail. The mood for the reader is bleak, urgent, and expansive at once, moving from political warning to cosmic detachment. Even when the poem grants moments of admiration, the feeling remains austere, as if beauty can only be seen clearly when stripped of comfort.
Historical Context
Jeffers wrote during a period marked by industrial expansion, modern warfare, and growing anxiety about the scale and consequences of civilization. His poetry often reflects a broader early twentieth-century distrust of urban life, mass culture, and human exceptionalism, while drawing on classical sources and long historical memory to place modern events inside a wider pattern of rise and collapse.
The poem also belongs to a modernist climate in which writers were questioning inherited political ideals and searching for new ways to understand power, history, and the place of the human being in an indifferent universe. Jeffers's fierce naturalism and his interest in imperial decline connect the poem to that larger cultural moment, even as his voice remains distinctively severe and elemental.
Similar Poems
- The Second Coming - W. B. Yeats
- Sunday Morning - Wallace Stevens
- Design - Robert Frost
- The Wild Swans at Coole - W. B. Yeats