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Robinson Jeffers Quotes
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Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
Robinson Jeffers
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Pleasure is merely contemptible,
the dangled
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice.
Robinson Jeffers
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Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.
Robinson Jeffers
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The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean...
Robinson Jeffers
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At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring
The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite. I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.
Robinson Jeffers
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If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River Valley; these four will remain
In the changes of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind.
Robinson Jeffers
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Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life.
Robinson Jeffers
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There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.
Robinson Jeffers
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He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante's Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does not
care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness — look at the
tide-stream stars — and the fall of nations — and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley
to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor — I know
not — of faceless violence, the root of all things.
Robinson Jeffers
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I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.
Robinson Jeffers
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O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.
Robinson Jeffers
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I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Robinson Jeffers
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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.
Robinson Jeffers
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The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
Robinson Jeffers
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The world's God is treacherous and full of
unreason.
Robinson Jeffers
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I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
Robinson Jeffers
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As for me, I would rather Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.
Robinson Jeffers
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You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.
Robinson Jeffers
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And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say —
God, when he walked on earth.
Robinson Jeffers
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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
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The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother.
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun's eye on the tideline. It was long and long ago; we have grown proud since then and you have grown bitter; life retains
Your mobile soft unquiet strength; and envies hardness, the insolent quietness of stone.
Robinson Jeffers
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Against the outcrop boulders of a raised beach
We built our house when I and my love were young.
Robinson Jeffers
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Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment,
they have had what they wanted
Robinson Jeffers
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Then what is the answer? — Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled.
Robinson Jeffers
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That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Robinson Jeffers
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Robinson Jeffers
Creative Commons
Born:
January 10, 1887
Died:
January 20, 1962
(aged 75)
Bio:
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast.
Known for:
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938)
Not Man Apart
Californians (1916)
The wild god of the world
Dear Judas, and Other Poems (1930)
Most used words:
god
beauty
life
stone
sea
man
love
earth
mountain
ocean
stars
time
rock
granite
beautiful
Robinson Jeffers on Wikipedia
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