Robinson Jeffers, “Boats in a Fog” Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers, The exuberant voices of music, Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness That makes beauty; the mind Knows, grown adult. A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean, A throbbing of engines moved in it, At length, a stone’s-throw out, between […]
Robinson Jeffers, “Shiva” There is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky. She killed the pigeons of peace and security, She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and men, She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty. She loads the arts with nonsense, she is very cunning, Science with dreams and the state with powers […]
Robinson Jeffers, “Vulture” I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven, And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers Whistle […]
The Maid’s Thought Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something. The west wind is dead, the waves Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons Whole hillsides burst aglow With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month, And every pool was rimmed With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines. Now tall and slender suddenly The […]
The following essay was published in the New Criterion in February, 1993, and reflects a view of American poetry from at least the 1970s forward. It’s quite depressing to read this two decades later, since the status of poetry as a subculture can’t help but be worse than it was then, and worse in part because the technology noted as […]
