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Morton Marcus: He said, to feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things: Earth, stone and water, peace, man and woman, sun, moon and stars. The bloodshot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies, and passions. And in human

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nature, its towering reality. For man's half-dream, men you might say is nature dreaming, but rock and water and sky are constant to feel greatly and understand greatly and express greatly, the natural beauty is the sole business of poetry, the

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rest's diversion. Those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, the love, lust, longing, reasons, but not the reason. His name was Robinson Jeffers and he is the most important poet to come out of this region of California. Tonight, we

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celebrate his birthday. He was born January 10th, 1887. Good evening everybody. This is Mort Marcus, this is the Poetry Show, and tonight we're going to look at the work of Robinson Jeffers, his life and career. Robinson Jeffers was born in

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 10th, 1887. He was the son of Reverend William Hamilton Jeffers and Ann Robinson Tuttle. The elder Jeffers was a professor of Old Testament literature. He was reclusive, very reserved, and he initiated

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young Robinson's education at home by tutoring him in Greek and Latin, and Presbyterian doctrine. In 1902, Robinson entered the University of Western Pennsylvania and as a sophomore with a mastery of French, German, Greek and Latin.

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When the family moved to Los Angeles, he matriculated as a junior at Occidental College, graduated in 1905. Jeffers immediately entered graduate school as a student of literature at the University of Southern California. The spring

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of 1906, he was back in Switzerland where actually he had been educated early in his life and at the University of Switzerland took courses in philosophy and literature. In 1906, Jeffers met Una Call Kuster. She was three years

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older than he and married to a prominent Los Angeles attorney. In each other, Jeffers and Kuster found intellectual and emotional stimulation and compatibility that drew them powerfully together. At length, Una obtained a divorce and

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married Jeffers in August 1913. A year later, the couple moved to Carmel, California, where except for occasional trips to Europe and New Mexico, they spent the rest of their lives. In 1960, they became the parents of twin sons, a daughter born

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earlier did not survive infancy and Jeffers began to build a stone cottage for his family. Later he added the famous 40 foot Stone Tower, the emblem of Tor House as they called their home. Both structures, the house and tower, overlooking Carmel

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Bay, and facing Point Lobos figured significantly in Jeffers' life and poetry. Jeffers began writing actually as a young man and in 1924, which of course would have put him into his late 30s. He published, "Tamar and Other

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Poems" and became a national figure. If we do talk about writers from our area of California here in Central California, we are usually talking about two prime foundations for our literature: in prose, it's John Steinbeck;

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in poetry, it's Robinson Jeffers. From 1924 maybe until the beginning of World War 2, maybe a little after that, Robinson Jeffers had a huge national reputation. But his thought, his philosophy was so much the antithesis of what

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people were feeling not in the 20s and 30s, but come World War 2, that his reputation began to erode. He was even by the 1950s considered to be possibly unpatriotic. It was of course a time in the 1950s when that was very easy to be labeled. His

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reputation literally fell. Within 10 years you did not find a Robinson Jeffers poem in any anthology. It has only been in maybe the last 10 or 12 years that Robinson Jeffers has begun to be looked at again seriously as a poet, whose stature can be

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matched with Robert Frost, Eliot and Pound, very different poets, and he is a very different poet from the other three. Even his prosody is different. It is full of long lines, which you can get accents from, but really look more Greek when you try to parse

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them than they do look English. His voice is extremely rugged. And what is of interest to us is that he captures this coast, that his greatest poetry is, to me anyway, nature description. There's another kind of poetry he wrote, long narratives, which

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usually talk in psychological terms and mythic terms about a woman, Tamar, who is really the symbol for California. These long narrative poems are really fascinating and will be sort of kept by his translation of "Medea," in the late 1940s,

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which had one of the great runs of classical theater on Broadway and then throughout the United States, but let us read some of the poems of this most important poet. Here's an early poem called, "Night," and just look out your window if you live over

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the ocean, because these descriptions, of course, are from the Central Coast. And if I don't say it, and you notice it, he is an enormous influence on Bill Everson, the great poet who's spent his last 15, 20 years here in Santa Cruz, in

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fact, Everson recognized Jeffers, though they never met, as his mentor and his muse. NIGHT by Robinson Jeffers. The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken tide rocks shift

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streaming shoulders out of the slack, the slow West, sombering it's torch. A ship's light shows faintly, far out over the weight of the prone ocean on the low cloud. Over the dark mountain, over the dark pine wood down the long dark valley along the

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shrunken river returns the splendor without raise, the shining of shadow, peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining where the shore widens on the bay, she opens dark wings and the ocean accepts her glory. Oh,

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so worshipper of her, you, like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always in the film of waves above that takes the sun, takes also her with more love. The sun lovers have a blonde favorite, a father of lights and noises, wars weeping

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in laughter, hot labor, lust in the light and the other blemishes. Quietness flows from her deeper mountain, and he will die and she is immortal. Far off here, the slender flocks of the mountain forest move amongst stems like towers of the old

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redwoods to the stream, no twig crackling, dip shy, wild muzzles into the mountain water among the dark ferns. And that is just part of that poem. But let me read you one of his most famous poems written at about that time, and it is, "The

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Purse-Seine," and it describes fishing on the coast, and you will hear a lot of very familiar landmarks in this poem, and it is one of his classic poems that is almost always anthologized. THE PURSE-SEINE and the purse-seine is of course, the

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fishing nets of the sardine fishermen. Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon, daylight or moonlight, they could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of

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fish. They work northward from Monterey coasting Santa Cruz off New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point. The look-out man will see some flakes of milk color light on the sea's night purple. He points and the helmsman turns the dark prowl. The motorboat

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circles, the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine net. They close the circle and purse the bottom of the net, then, with great labor, hold it in. I cannot tell you how beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible then when the crowded

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fish know they are caught and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny. The phosphorescent water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live rocket, a comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame.

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While outside, the narrowing floats and cordage of the net, great sea lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark. The vast walls of night stand direct to the stars. Lately, I was looking from a night mountain top on a wide city of colored

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splendor, galaxies of light. How could I help but recall the same net gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared and a little terrible. I thought, we have geared the machines and locked all together into

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interdependence. We have built the great cities, now there is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival. Insulated from the strong Earth, each person in himself, helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed

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and the net is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass disasters will not come in our time nor in our children's but we and our children must watch the net draw narrower, government take all

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powers or revolution and the new government take more than all and kept bodies, kept souls, or anarchy, the mass disasters. These things are progress. Do you marvel our verses troubled or frowning while it keeps its reason? Or it let's go? Let's

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the mood flow in the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter but they are quite wrong. There is no reason for amazement. Surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end, his death.

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Now that is a very early poem, but it is a very seminal poem. He beautifully describes the net closing around the sardines that are phosphorescent and even more so seemed to flame in their last moments, and then compares all that light in a circle with a

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great city that he's seen, and begins to make a comparison between the death of the sardines and what he sees as the death of cities or the death of civilizations. Because unlike so many poets writing today and even writing then, Robinson

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Jeffers, like Pound and Eliot before him, was concerned with big picture as we would say. He was not concerned with what man does going about his daily chores, he was looking at man, as man was just a might, a speck in the world of nature, the

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inhuman world of nature that just kept rolling through its seasons, galaxies rolling through the heavens, and galaxies exploding into supernovas. That was his theme. He thought man was enormously egocentric, and he thought that

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man blew himself up much more than he was worth because in the end, he was not worth much. He was certainly part of the big picture, but a very insignificant part of life, death, rebirth, and life, death, rebirth again. So that is the

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purse-seine and it is a theme that we will be pursuing over and over again, as we hear these poems of Robinson Jefferson. It was themes like that, and I hope you realize the last stanza of that poem sounds so much like our mood today. In fact, it

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sounds so much like our mood today. I really would like to read it again. Because everyone who has been troubled by what has been going on in Washington and what has been going on in this country, since the new millennium, should listen again

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to what he's saying here. We will hear it again, but nowhere as clear as this: "Lately, I was looking from a night mountaintop on a wide city, the colored splendor galaxies of light, how can I

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help but recall them saying that gathering the luminous fish. I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible. I thought we have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence. We have built a

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great cities, now there is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated from the strong Earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closing and the net is being hauled in.

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They hardly feel the cords drawing yet they shine already; the inevitable mass disasters will not come in our time nor in our children's but we in our children must face the network narrower, government take all powers, or revolution, and the

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new government take more than all, add to kept bodies, kept souls, or anarchy, the mass disasters. These things are progress. Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning while it keeps its reason? Or it let's go, let's the mood flow in

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the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter?" Well, that describes an awful lot. And it describes not only the politics we find ourselves in and the very scary position

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with the politics of Homeland Security and people worried about our civil rights, and this war that is just going on, and seems to be getting us more antagonistic response all over the world. But it also in the end talks about poetry and how

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poetry is falling apart and that people either are just talking about nothing, or they're just sort of going off into hysteria. And it is interesting to note, by the way, this poem was written in the early 1930s, so the vision that Jeffers had

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certainly is not something that we- was written in the last four- let me give you one more political poem, actually, a very famous political poem he wrote, in which he really sees the end of America. Now this is really interesting because again, this

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is written so long ago, but he sees the end of America. He calls it: SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity,

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heavily thickening to empire and protest, only a bubble in the molten mass pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens. I, sadly smiling, remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother and through the

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spring, exultances, ripeness and decadence and home to the mother. You making haste, haste on decay, not blameworthy, life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly a mortal splendor. Meteors are not needed less than mountains; shine, perishing

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republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center, corruption never has been compulsory. When the cities lie at the monster's feet, there are left the mountains. And boys, being nothing so moderate

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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. "Shine, Perishing Republic," by Robinson Jeffers. Here's his

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poem, TOR HOUSE, which we heard about, and which you can visit, in which is a museum now and they give tours. It's spelled T-O-R H-O-U-S-E. It was once a headland of more than three to four acres planted in cypress by Jeffers, this stone house and

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stone tower that he made and now of course is surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of houses. Though you can still see it and still see how different it looks from the oth`ers and can visit it and is now a wonderful museum and

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environment. And he talks about Tor House which he literally built with his own hands dragging the rocks up from Carmel bay, and this is when very few people lived in Carmel. And he sees it in an interesting way. He is not fooled.

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Everything has its time and in the big picture of things, Tor House is nothing and he writes about it this way. If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes, perhaps of my planted forest a few may stand yet.

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Dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard with storm drift, but fire in the acts are devils. Look for foundations of seawall and granite. My fingers had the art to make stone lovestone, you will find some remnant. But if

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you should look in your idleness after 10,000 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 change of names. You will know it by the wild sea

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fragrance of wind. Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little. You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from before the poles changed. And Orion in December evenings was strung in the throat of the

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valley, like a lamp lighted bridge. Come in the morning, you will see white gulls weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon, their dance companion, a ghost walking by daylight, but wider and wider than any bird in the world. My

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ghost you needn't to look for. It is probably here but a dark one, deep in the granite not dancing on wind with the mad win s and the day moo Another one of Jeffers' most popular poems, maybe the one

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that is most anthologized even before, "The Purse-Seine," is, "Hurt Hawks," and if you've ever seen a picture of Jeffers, he was a tall, thin man with a very, very high cheekbones and a hawk-like face and he identified himself with the hawks.

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HURT HAWKS 1. The broken pillar of the wind jags from the clotted shoulder. The wing trails like a banner in defeat, no more to use the sky forever, but live with famine and pain a few days. Cat

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nor coyote will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits, the lame feet of salvation. At night he remembers freedom and flies in a dream, the dawn's ruined it. He is strong and pain

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is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curse of the day come and torment him. At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, the intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes, the wild god of the world is sometimes

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merciful to those that ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him. Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him, beautiful and wild, the hawks and men that are dying, remember

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him. 2. I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk. But the great redtail had nothing left but unable misery from the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed

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under his talons when he moved. We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom. He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening asking for death, not like a beggar, still-eyed with the old implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead

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gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, owl-downy, soft feminine feathers, but what soared, the fierce rush, the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

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And that is Robinson Jeffers', "Hurt Hawks." Here's a poem called, "Hands." And any of you who have been to Tassajara, the hot springs at Tassajara, you know that there was a lot of Native American life in the area around Carmel and Monterey, and

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this is what Jeffers found in a narrow canyon near Tassajara, it's called: HANDS Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara the vault of rock

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is painted with hands, a multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men's palms, no more, no other picture. There's no one to say whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended religion or magic, or made their

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tracings in the idleness of art. But over the division of years, these careful signs-manual are now like a sealed message saying, "Look, we also were human. We had hands, not paws. All hail you people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters

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in the beautiful country, enjoy her season, her beauty, and come down and be supplanted, for you also are human. This is Mort Marcus again with some announcements. And if you wonder what you've been listening to, you've been

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listening to the Poetry Show, and this week we are doing a birthday show for Robinson Jeffers, who was born January the 10th, 1887. However, let's get on to other things. Do you have an old or new vehicle you've been unable to sell?

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Consider donating it to KUSP. Our vehicle donation program accepts almost anything with a motor, preferably less than 10 years old: motorcycles, cars, trucks, RVs, boats and planes. You'll support KUSP and receive a tax break too. Visit our

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website at KUSP.org and click on vehicle donation, or call 866-432-7568. Immediately following the Poetry Show at nine o'clock is "From the Bookshelf," hosted by Gary Shapiro. Each week Gary presents a spoken word program with

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stories, authors and special guests. Tonight's special guest is James Kaplan to whom Jerry Lewis told the story of his great collaboration with Dean Martin, "Dean and Me: A Love Story," that is the story of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the

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greatest comedy team of the 1950s, as I'm sure most of you know, that's tonight at nine o'clock and the next announcement has already happened, so there's no next announcement. Let us go back to the poetry of the wonderful

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Robinson Jeffers here who, as I said, is really the seminal poet of Central California. He talks about, even by name, the wonderful places we live. Let's go on to some of the poems he wrote before World War 2. I'm trying to think of some of the

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poems I have here. And I've got it here, so here is poems written right before World War 2, actually World War 2 had started. This is called: THE DAY IS A POEM and it's dated September 19th, 1939. Now,

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what's interesting about that is that Hitler marched on Poland on September 1st, 1939. And that was in Danzig which is the main port of Poland. And even during the Cold War would be the place where solidarity started its strikes and obviously, this was

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a victory speech by Adolf Hitler. And here is Robinson Jeffers thinking about this. This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice. A man of genius, that is, of amazing ability, courage,

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devotion, cored on a sick child's soul, heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child wailing in Danzig, invoking destruction and wailing at it. Here, the day was extremely hot, about noon a south wind like a blast from

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hell's mouth spilled a slight rain on the parched land, and at five, a light earthquake danced the house, no harm done. Tonight I've been amusing myself watching the blood-red moon droop slowly into black sea through bursts of dry lightning

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and distant thunder. Well, the day is a poem, but too much like one of old Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens, painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry. And here he goes on, "The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean." And

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as you know, Clint Eastwood's film company is called, "Mal Paso." And that is the name of the mountain that is referred to in this moment, of course, Clint Eastwood lives down in Carmel. So there are lots of connections between the geographical

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location and places in Robinson Jeffers poems and where we live. This is: THE STARS GO OVER THE LONELY, again 1939-1940. Unhappy about some far off things that are not my affair,

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w`andering along the coast and up the lean ridges, I saw in the evening the stars go over the lonely ocean, and a black-maned wild boar plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain. The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots, fat grubs, slick

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beetles and sprouted acorns. The best nation in Europe has fallen, and that is Finland. But the stars go over the lonely ocean," the old bear-bristled boar, tearing the sod on Ma Paso Mountain. "The world's in a bad way, my man, and bound to be

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worse before it mends. Better lie up in the mountain here four or five centuries while the stars go over the lonely ocean," said the old father of wild pigs, plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain. "Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy

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and the dogs that talk revolution, drunk with talk, liars and believers. I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies," said the gamey black-maned wild boar, tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

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And then there's a love poem to Una which I won't read which also talks about this war and life at war and how it has to be looked at really in the vision of of a much larger world. Let me go to a poem to Una and it's from a book called, "Hunger

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Field." And this is actually from "Hunger Field," which is a long poem and you'll see what Hunger Field is but in the course of the poem, you'll see what Hunger Field is, but this is just part of it and it is to Una. Una had died the year

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before and they were very much soulmates and in many ways, in fact, she was his muse. She was the one who would go to the outside world and even show him things, so anyway, here we go. And this is- this was to her and it is a real rumination here

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about her and the lonely life that he now is contemplating without her. He was of course at this time 63 years old. It was 1949, 1950 when she died, he would not know that he would only live 12 more years. But here he is contemplating Una and

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her death. If time is only another dimension, and all that dies remains alive, not anulled, but removed out of our sight. Una is still alive. A few years back we were making love greedy as

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hawks, a boy and a married girl. A few years back, we were still young, strong-shouldered, joyfully laboring to make our house. Then she, in the wide sea window, endlessly enduring but not very patient, teaches our sons to read, she is still

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there. Her beautiful pale face, heavy hair, great eyes bent to the book. And a few years back, we sit with our grown sons in the pitching motorboat, off Horn Head, in Donegal, watching the sea parrots tumble like clowns along the thousand foot cliff

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and the gannets, like falling stars, hawk at the sea. Her great blue eyes are brimmed with the wild beauty. Or we walk in Orkney, under the mystery of huge stones that stand there, raised high in the world's dawn by unknown men to forgotten gods

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and see dimly through the deep northern dusk, a great skein of wild swans dropped from the cloud to the gray lake. She weeps, a little for joy or beauty, only the homecoming to our loved rock over the gray in an ageless Pacific makes her

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such joy. It is possible that all these conditions of us are fixed points on the returning orbit of time and exist eternally. It is no good. Una has died and I am left waiting for death like a leafless tree waiting for the roots to rot and

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the trunk to fall. I never thought you would leave me, dear love. I knew you would die sometimes, I should die first, but you have died. It is quite natural. Because you loved life,you must die first and I never cared much to live on.

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Life is cheap these days. We have to compete with Asia, we are cheap as dust and death is cheap but not hers. It is a common thing: we die, we cease to exist, and our dear lovers fulfill themselves with sorrow and drunkenness, the quart at

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midnight and the cups in the morning or they go seeking a second love. But you and I are at least not ridiculous. September again, the gray grass, the gray sea, the ink-black trees, with white-bellied night herons in them, rolling on the

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bows at dusk, barking like dogs, and the awful loss. As a year she has died and I have lived for a long year on soft, rotten emotions, vain longing and drunken pity, grief and grey ashes. Oh, child of God, it is not that I am lonely for you. I

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am lonely, I am mutilated, for you a part of me but men endure that. I am growing old and my love is gone. No doubt I can live without you, bitterly and well, that's not the cry. My torment is memory, my grief to have seen the banner and beauty

00:42:26.430 - 00:42:50.850

of your brave life dragged in the dust down the dim road to death, to have seen you defeated, you who never despaired, passing through weakness and pain, to nothing. It is usual I believe, I stood by, I believe I never failed

00:42:50.850 - 00:43:15.270

you. The contemptible thought, whether I failed or not, I am not the one, I was not dying, is death bitter, my dearest? It is nothing, it is a silence, but dying can be bitter. In this black year, I have thought often of Hungerfield, the man at Horse

00:43:15.270 - 00:43:34.860

Creek who fought with death, bodily said the witnesses, throat for throat, fury against fury in the dark and conquered him. If I had the courage and the hope, with a pure rage, I should be now death captive, no doubt, not conqueror, I should

00:43:34.860 - 00:44:00.420

be with my dearest in the hollow darkness when nothing hurts. I should not remember your silver-backed hand-mirror you asked me for and sat up in bed to gaze at it, to see your face a little changed. You were still beautiful, but not as you'd been

00:44:01.080 - 00:44:30.120

a falcon. You said nothing. You sighed and laid down the glass and I made a dog smile over a tearing heart saying that you looked well. So, with these huge emotional wrecks, Robinson Jeffers faces

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his inhuman philosophy in his inhuman world. I will read around three or four more poems. Here is one of the most visionary of his poems as he looks at the ocean, and much like Shelley in, "Ode to the West Wind," he goes under the

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ocean and sees the life under the ocean. It's an amazing visionary poem with a gorgeously beautiful language. It is one that is not necessarily anthologized all the time and in fact, some of the poems that I'm reading you are not anthologized

00:45:04.890 - 00:45:15.180

in the regular anthologies. This is, "Ocean," and just listen to the gorgeousness of this description and then the imagination that goes under the ocean into the depths of the ocean.

00:45:17.070 - 00:45:34.720

OCEAN, Robinson Jeffers The gray whales are going south. I see their fountains rise from black sea. Great dark bulks of hot blood, piling the deep cold sea to their trysting place off Mexican California where water

00:45:34.720 - 00:45:53.860

is warm and love finds massive joy. From the flukes to the blowhole, the whole giant flames like a star. In February storm, the ocean is black and rainbowed, the high spouts of white spray rise and fall over in the wind. There is no April

00:45:53.950 - 00:46:10.690

in the ocean. How do these creatures know that spring is at hand? They remember their ancestors [unidentified] crawled on Earth, the little fellows like otters who took to sea and have grown great. Go out to the ocean, little ones, you will

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grow great or die. And here, the small trout flicker in the streams that tumble from the coast mountain, little quick flames of life but from time to time, one of them goes mad, wanting room and freedom he slips between the rock jaws and

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takes to sea where from time immemorial, the long sharks wait. If he lives, he becomes a steelhead, a rainbow trout grown beyond nature in the ocean, go out to the great ocean, grow great or die. Oh, ambitious children, it would be wiser no

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doubt to rest in the brook and remain little, but if the devil drives, I hope you will [unidentified] far out to the wide ocean and find your fortune and beware of teeth. It is not important, there are deeps you will never reach and peaks you

00:47:10.840 - 00:47:29.470

will never explore where the great squids and kraken lie in the gates and the awful twilight, the whip bombed hungers, and mile under mile below, deep under deep on the deep floor in the darkness under the weight of the world, like

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lighted galleons, the ghost fish with phosphorescent portholes along their flanks, sail over and eat each other. A condition of life, to eat each other, but in the slime below, prodigious worms as great and as slow as glaciers burrow in the sediment,

00:47:51.040 - 00:48:14.860

mindless and blind, huge tubes of muddy flesh sucking not meat, but carrion, drippings and offal from the upper sea. They move a yard in a year where there are no years, no sun, no seasons, darkness and slime. They spend nothing on action, all on gross

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flesh. Oh, ambitious ones, will you grow great or die? It hardly matters. The words are comparative, greatness is but less little and death is changed life. Here is a philosophical poem, written late in life and I have

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been reading from early poems onto later poems, and it's called, "De Rerum Virtute." And again, it's got some wonderful description in it, as it describes the evolution of man. DE RERUM VIRTUTE, by Robinson Jeffers. It is in five parts,

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here is part one. Here's the skull of a man, a man's thoughts and emotions have moved under the thin bone vault like clouds under the blue one. Love and desire and pain, thunderclouds of wrath and white

00:49:27.200 - 00:49:46.730

gales of fear have hung inside here. And sometimes the curious desire of knowing values and purpose and the causes of things has coasted like a little observer airplane over the images that filled this mind. It never discovered much, the skull

00:49:47.750 - 00:50:11.810

and now all's empty, a bone bubble, a blown-out eggshell. 2. That's what the skull's like, for the egg too has a mind, doing what our able chemists will never do, building the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins, these are the

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young wing muscles, these are the great crystalline eyes, these are the flighty nerves and brain, choosing and forming a limited but super human intelligence, prophetic of the future and aware of the past. The hawk's egg will make a hawk

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and the serpent's, a gliding serpent, but each with a little difference from its ancestors. And slowly, if it works, the race forms a new race, that also is a part of the plan within the egg. I believe the first living cell had echoes of the future in

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it and felt directions and the great animals, the deep green forest and the whale's-track sea. I believe this globed Earth not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, but feels and chooses. And the galaxy, the firewheel on which

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we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe is not blind force, but fulfills its life and intends its courses. "All things are full of God. Winter and Summer, day and

00:51:24.800 - 00:51:51.860

night, war and peace are God." 3. Thus the thing stands. The labor and the games go on. What for? What for? Am I a God that I should know? Men live in peace and happiness, men live in horror and die howling. Do you

00:51:51.860 - 00:52:08.660

think the blithe sun is ignorant that black waist and beggarly blindness trail him like hounds, and will have him at last our great sun? He will be strangled among his dead satellites, remembering magnificence.

00:52:10.730 - 00:52:30.560

4. I stand on the cliff at Sovranes creek-mouth. Westward beyond the raging water and the bent shoulder of the world, the bitter futile war in Korea proceeds, like an idiot prophesizing. It is too hot in mind for anyone, except God

00:52:30.560 - 00:52:48.380

perhaps, to see beauty in it. Indeed it is hard to see beauty in any of the acts of man, but that means the acts of a sick microbe on a satellite of a dust-grain twirled in a whirlwind in the world of stars. Something perhaps may come with

00:52:48.380 - 00:53:07.730

him, in any event he can't last long. Well, I am short of patience since my wife died. And this era of spite and hate-filled half-worlds gets to the bone. I believe that man too is beautiful, but it is hard to see and wrapped up in

00:53:07.730 - 00:53:27.140

falsehoods. Michelangelo and the Greek sculptures, how they flattered the race. Homer and Shakespeare, how they flattered the race. 5. One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men, the

00:53:27.140 - 00:53:48.020

immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look, and without imagination, desire nor dream, directly at the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful? These plunging promontories and flame shaped peaks, stopping the somber stupendous glory, the

00:53:48.020 - 00:54:09.290

storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore, with foam flying at their flanks and the long sea lions crouching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff wind and the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream. But in the sagebrush desert, all one

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sun-stricken color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain forest, or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice, is the earth not beautiful? Nor the great skies over the earth? The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is

00:54:31.460 - 00:54:51.830

in the beholders eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, whatever the sick microbe does, but he too, is part of it.

00:54:56.460 - 00:55:25.590

And we have been talking about Robinson Jeffers, the great poet who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 10th, 1887, and died in Carmel, California, where he lived most of his life after 1910 and wrote about. And I would like to end

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this program on this primary and seminal poet of this area by one of the most beautiful poems I think he wrote. And again, this is after the death of Una. It is very close to his own death now and he takes a walk, and again it is the beautiful descriptions

00:55:49.920 - 00:56:05.220

of nature. And I love it when he does enter his poems and just talks to us from the first person as he does in I think one of the most beautiful poems in the language and certainly one of his most beautiful poems, and it is called:

00:56:05.550 - 00:56:22.810

THE DEER LAY DOWN THEIR BONES I followed the narrow cliffside trail halfway up the mountain above the deep river-canyon. There was a little cataract crossed the path, flinging itself over tree roots and

00:56:22.810 - 00:56:41.470

rocks, shaking the jeweled fern-fronds, bright bubbling water, pure from the mountain, but a bad smell came up. Wondering at it, I clambered down the steep stream some forty feet and found in the midst of bush-oak and laurel, hung like a

00:56:41.470 - 00:57:00.790

bird's nest on the precipice brink a small hidden clearing, grass and a shallow pool. But all about there were bones lying in the grass, clean bones and stinking bones, antlers and bones. I understood that the place was a refuge for wounded

00:57:00.790 - 00:57:21.250

deer, there are so many hurt ones escape the hunters and limp away to lie hidden. Here, they have water for the awful thirst and peace to die in. Dense green laurel and grim cliff make sanctuary, and a sweet wind blows upward from the deep

00:57:21.250 - 00:57:43.960

gorge, I wish my bones were with theirs. But that's a foolish thing to confess and a little cowardly. We know that life is on the whole quite equally good and bad, mostly gray neutral and can be endured to the dim end, no matter what magic of grass,

00:57:43.960 - 00:58:06.670

water, and precipice, and pain of wounds, makes death look dear. We have been given life and have used it, not a great gift perhaps, but in all honesty should use it all. Mine's empty since my love died, empty? The flame-haired grandchild with

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great blue eyes that look like hers? What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder what sort of man in the fall of the world, Oh, I'm growing old, this is the trouble. My children and little grandchildren will find their way and why should I

00:58:25.600 - 00:58:48.040

wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-seven, ten years more or less, before I crawl out on a ledge of rock, and die snapping, like a wolf, like a wolf who has lost his mate? I am bound by my own thirty-year old decision, who drinks the wine should take

00:58:48.040 - 00:59:07.930

the dregs, even in the bitter lees and sediment new discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones, I must wear mine. Thank you very much. This is Mort Marcus, this has been the

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Poetry Show. Robinson Jeffers died January 20th, 1962. Stay tuned for From the Bookshelf. Unknown: This is Central Coast Public Radio, KUSP Santa Cruz, KBDH San Ardo, or on the web at KUSP.org.