Robinson Jeffers - Sea Quotes

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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
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
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
The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains.
But the place was maiden, no previous
Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements,
Rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain
Coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn
Stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here
All that we saw or heard was beautiful
And hardly human. Oh heavy change.
The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.
They have built streets around us, new houses
Line them and cars obsess them — and my dearest has died.
The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest
Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons.

Robinson Jeffers
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea — look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

Robinson Jeffers