In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

I thought seriously about posting this poem for today’s entry: ORIGINAL SIN The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape physically The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking With [...]

Considering his misanthropic views, it’s hard for me to view Jeffers as a Romantic poet, but in a poem like “The Beauty of Things” he certainly seems to share ideas with Emily Dickinson and earlier Romantics like Keats and Shelley: THE BEAUTY OF THINGS To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water, Beast, man [...]

One of my favorite Jeffers poems in Last Poems 1953-62 is this one: GRANDDAUGHTER And here’s a portrait of my granddaughter Una When she was two years old: a remarkable painter. A perfect likeness; nothing tricky nor modernist, Nothing of the artist fudging his art into the picture, But simple and true. She stands in a glade of trees with a [...]