Robinson Jeffers Short Poems
Famous Short Robinson Jeffers Poems. Short poetry by famous poet Robinson Jeffers. A collection of the all-time best Robinson Jeffers short poems
by
Robinson Jeffers
The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem--
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle--
We don't know enough, we'll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.
by
Robinson Jeffers
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.
The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
by
Robinson Jeffers
When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died.
I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past.
But now I don't think so.
They'll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.
by
Robinson Jeffers
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
by
Robinson Jeffers
To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
Like swarthy Cheops, but my own hands
For only slaves, is a far sweeter toil than to cut
Passions in verse for a sick people.
I'd liefer bed one boulder in the house-wall than be the time's
Archilochus: we name not Homer: who now
Can even imagine the fabulous dawn when bay-leaves (to a blind
Beggar) were not bitter in the teeth?
by
Robinson Jeffers
This country least, but every inhabited country
Is clotted with human anguish.
Remember that at your feasts.
And this is no new thing but from time out of mind,
No transient thing, but exactly
Conterminous with human life.
Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.
by
Robinson Jeffers
The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean .
.
.
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.
The incredible beauty of joy
Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
Be joined, there is not a maiden
Burns and thirsts for love
More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
Weave like a web in the air
Divinely superfluous beauty.
by
Robinson Jeffers
Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless
Pool of the stars.
(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.
)
Guard yourself from perceiving the inherent nastiness of man and woman.
(Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.
)
Faith, as they now confess, is preposterous, an act of will.
Choose the Christian sheep-cote
Or the Communist rat-fight: faith will cover your head from the man-devouring stars.