Robinson Jeffers died over sixty years ago, but his poems speak to our time. In one poem, “Prescription of Painful Ends,” he evokes the image of an exhausted horse that stumbles but manages to right itself (for him, the two world wars in his lifetime). The horse continues, but it is only a matter of time before it falls.
And from Jeffers’s perspective, it’s not such a bad thing for human civilization to end. When he writes in another poem, “Carmel Point,” “we must uncenter our minds from ourselves,” it is not in the hope that we can avert the doom of mankind by recognizing that we are part of nature and not its master, but simply to reconcile ourselves with our transience.
Does this sound bitter? Oddly enough, to me, it didn’t. Throughout this collection, Jeffers conveys the peace he finds at Big Sur, contemplating the (relative) permanence of granite cliff and ocean tide. ( )