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Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers was born on January 10, 1887. His father, a professor of Old Testament Literature and Biblical History at Western Theology Seminary in Pittsburgh, supervised Jeffers's education, and Robinson began to...
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Carmel Point  
by Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things! 

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
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.



From The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Three Volumes, edited by Tim Hunt. Used with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Further reproduction of this material in any form requires the written permission of the publishers.
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