Poetry: Robinson Jeffers

>>8678228
Yes he's one of my favorite poets

Hurt Hawks

The broken pillar of the wing 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 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 dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs 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 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 him.

II

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 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 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.

>>8678424
Have you visited his Tor Home in Carmel?

>>8678474
no just seen pictures.

That impressed me as well. He lived in a beautiful house in a beautiful place that he built with his own hands.
The way he lived his life impressed me as much as his poetry.

>>8678228
Didn't he write The Song of the Dragontails?

>>8678484
Right same here. You got email? I'd love to talk more about Jeffers. Don't want this thread to 404.

>>8678484
This. He took an uncompromising and principled stand against america being incolved in WW2 and it ended his career. Self determined principles,I should add. He just kept on as he had been on the coast near Big Sur. Great example of genius and a poet.

>>8678228
No but I am glad I learned about him today.

>>8678514
;)

What book/collection would you recommend?

>>8678614
The Wild God of the World is good anthology of his poems though it doesn't include his verse drama or book length poems

>>8678655
I'll check it out, thanks.

Hurt Hawks is about Native American genocide.