According to the Nation, it is a rare 'cult following', the devotees of Jeffers...as a group of friends, we decided to investigate...long before deemed a cult by the Nation...and ended up reading, meeting, talking, some visiting Thor House... the poem that tagged him as a traitor was in the Nation article...I have lost it
Hooded Night
At night, toward dawn, all the lights of the shore have
died,
And a wind moves. Moves in the dark
The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than
manlike,
Not to be compared; itself with itself.
Its breath blown shoreward huddles the world with a fog;
no stars
Dance into heaven; no ship's light glances.
I see the heavy granite bodies of the rocks of the headland,
That were ancient here before Egypt had pyramids,
Bulk on the gray of the sky, and beyond them the jets of
young trees
I planted the year of the Versaille peace.
But here is the final unridiculous peace. Before the first
man
Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,
And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of fog where
the moon
Falls on the west. Here is reality.
The other is a spectral episode: after the inquisitive
animal's
Amusements are quiet: the dark glory.
Robinson Jeffers
...if only he were from the east coast, he was the west coast's TS Eliot, opined the Nation's critic...
We added new people to our circle, choose a new author, fought and broke up. Six months of peace and mystery with Jeffers... |
