The Beginning and the End: And Other Poems

by Robinson Jeffers

the last works of robinson jeffers

Genres: Poetry, Nature

91 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2023

About the author

Collections of American poet John Robinson Jeffers, who sets many of his works in California, include Tamar and Other Poems (1924).

He knew the central coast and wrote mostly in classic narrative and epic form. Nevertheless, people today know also his short verse and consider him an symbol of the environmental movement.

The Harry Ransom humanities research center at the University of Texas at Austin and the libraries at Occidental College, the University of California, and Yale University collect many manuscripts and materials of Jeffers. Survivors published a collection of his letters posthumously as The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1887–1962 (1968). Jeffers wrote other books or criticism and poetry: are: Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years (1949), Themes in My Poems (1956), Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965), The Alpine Christ and Other Poems (1974), What Odd Expedients" and Other Poems (1981), and Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers (1987).

Stanford University Press recently released a five-volume collection of the complete works of Robinson Jeffers. In an article titled, "A Black Sheep Joins the Fold", written upon the release of the collection in 2001, Stanford Magazine ably remarked that due to a number of circumstances, "there was never an authoritative, scholarly edition of California’s premier bard" until Stanford published the complete works.

Biographical studies include George Sterling, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist (1926); Louis Adamic, Robinson Jeffers (1929); Melba Bennett, Robinson Jeffers and the Sea (1936) and The Stone Mason of Tor House (1966); Edith Greenan, Of Una Jeffers (1939); Mabel Dodge Luhan, Una and Robin (1976; written in 1933); Ward Ritchie, Jeffers: Some Recollections of Robinson Jeffers (1977); and James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (1987). Books about Jeffers's career include L. C. Powell, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work (1940; repr. 1973); William Everson, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968); Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism (1971); Bill Hotchkiss, Jeffers: The Sivaistic Vision (1975); James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990); Alex Vardamis The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers (1972); and Robert Zaller, ed., Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991). The Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, ed. Robert Brophy, is a valuable scholarly resource.

In a rare recording, Jeffers can be heard reading his "The Day Is A Poem" (September 19, 1939) on Poetry Speaks – Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath, Narrated by Charles Osgood (Sourcebooks, Inc., c2001), Disc 1, #41; including text, with Robert Hass on Robinson Jeffers, pp. 88–95. Jeffers was also on the cover of Time – The Weekly Magazine, April 4, 1932 (pictured on p. 90. Poetry Speaks).

"Jeffers Studies", a journal of research on the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and related topics, is published semi-annually by the Robinson Jeffers Association.

Reviews

[Esta Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Astrophysicist Natalie Batalha read the following abridged excerpt from Jeffers’ poem ‘The Beginning and the End’ at the 2022 Universe in Verse – an annual evening of poems celebrating science, read by beloved artists, writers, scientists and musicians:

The unformed volcanic earth, a female thing,
Furiously following with the other planets
Their lord the sun: her body is molten metal pressed rigid
By its own mass; her beautiful skin, basalt and granite and the lighter elements,
Swam to the top. She was like a mare in her heat eyeing the stallion,
Screaming for life in the womb; her atmosphere
Was the breath of her passion: not the blithe air
Men breathe and live, but marsh-gas, ammonia, sulphured hydrogen,
Such poison as our remembering bodies return to
When they die and decay and the end of life
Meets its beginning. The sun heard her and stirred
Her thick air with fierce lightnings and flagellations
Of germinal power, building impossible molecules, amino-acids
And flashy unstable proteins: thence life was born,
Its nitrogen from ammonia, carbon from methane,
Water from the cloud and salts from the young seas,
It dribbled down into the primal ocean like a babe’s urine
Soaking the cloth: heavily built protein molecules
Chemically growing, bursting apart as the tensions
In the inordinate molecule become unbearable —
That is to say, growing and reproducing themselves, a virus
On the warm ocean.
Time and the world changed,
The proteins were no longer created, the ammoniac atmosphere
And the great storms no more. This virus now
Must labor to maintain itself. It clung together
Into bundles of life, which we call cells,
With microscopic walls enclosing themselves
Against the world. But why would life maintain itself,
Being nothing but a dirty scum on the sea
Dropped from foul air? Could it perhaps perceive
Glories to come? Could it foresee that cellular life
Would make the mountain forest and the eagle dawning,
Monstrously beautiful, wings, eyes and claws, dawning
Over the rock-ridge? And the passionate human intelligence
Straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the universe to the last galaxy.
[…]
What is this thing called life? — But I believe
That the earth and stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountain have life,
Only we do not call it so — I speak of the life
That oxydizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already. I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and galaxies
Have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus
[…]
The human soul.
The mind of man…
Slowly, perhaps, man may grow into it —
Do you think so? This villainous king of beasts, this deformed ape? — He has mind
And imagination, he might go far
And end in honor. The hawks are more heroic but man has a steeper mind,
Huge pits of darkness, high peaks of light,
You may calculate a comet’s orbit or the dive of a hawk, not a man’s mind.

I was struck by this reading, particularly by the last two paragraphs. The lines ‘all things are conscious; But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus’ is redolent of the philosophical hypothesis of consciousness known as (albeit unfortunately pseudoscientific-sounding in name) ‘panpsychism’, and the luminous discourse on this subject and related topics between Annaka Harris, Sam Harris and Donald Hoffman:
#159 – Conscious: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/ma...
#178 – The Reality Illusion: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/ma...

Jeffers shifts, with both awe and shades of rational nihilism, between the comparable grandeur of the macrocosmic phenomena and the microcosmic underpinnings that comprise reality and existence. His awareness and deep appreciation of cosmology and biology, and how this confers reality and existence with beauty (analogous to Richard Feynman’s famous monologue in an ode to a flower: ‘…the science only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower’) seems prescient for his time. He also touches on subjects and themes such as the comical lunacy - as he perhaps perceives it - of religious supernaturalism and a willing surrender to subscribe to it nevertheless, nuclear proliferation, climate change and ecology, warfare, violence, death, mortality, aging, solitude, God, mythology, the inveterate proclivities of human nature and the cyclical trends of human civilization.
Some personal highlight poems include: The Great Explosion, The Beginning and the End, Star-Swirls, Let Them Alone, Savagely Individual, The Silent Shepherds, See the Human Figure, Animula and The Shears.
A short read that feels akin to reading a holy devotional (though perhaps more informed), I hope to re-read it very soon on the quiet ocean shores when I finally see my dear mother again.

[Andy Caffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depending upon how you look at it, Robinson Jeffers was either one of the photo-warrior poets or one of the earliest warrior poets of the industrial era.

This is his last collection of poems, written from 1954 until his death in 1962.

This is the era into which I was born (1957). So to me, this is special because it shows how at least some people at the time of my birth were already ecologically hip and reintegrating into it, and thinking as I do today as our polar ice sheets are collapsing and about to destroy all of coastal civilization with rapid sea level rise (and 99.99% of the world doesn't even get that this asteroid is inevitable and imminent.

But Jeffers handmade over years tor home will make it through. It's on a cliff and made of feet-thick walls made from stones he'd gathered from his beach.

And I was stunned to read in this book that he definitely saw it all coming!

That makes him one of America's Poet Prophets: vox clamantis in deserto...

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers
Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean;
Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.
They will drown New York, they will drown London
And this place, where I have planted trees and built a stone house,
Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,
And the little fish will flicker in and out the windows, I built it well,
Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,
The tower at least will hold against the sea's buffeting; it will become
Geological, fossil and permanent


From the first poem, the universe bursts forth:

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.


A cantankerous spirit, akin to Edward Abbey, he saw society as corrupt and malevolent. This book has a section, "Do You Still Make War?," but he also ruminates over his own coming death and laments for his grandchildren.

Obviously, he did not consider the US exceptional, or that civilization was exemplary. He fought for nature.

[Jayson Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding poet. He wrote with passion and vitality. His poems capture the grand scheme of particular events. These were the last poems Jeffers wrote before his death but my frost collection by him. Needless to say I will be looking for more by him.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man’s arrogance humbled by nature…”Life from the Lifeless,” though. Perhaps the divine spark leads to the possibility that all of existence possesses a form of consciousness? Certainly energy, interconnectedness…

[Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not the best collection of Jeffers poems because the selection, I think, reflects more Jeffers thoughts and poems as he recedes towards old age.

[Eldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound. Prophetic. Gorgeous.

[Scott Ballard · Rating 5 out of 5]

“…it is curious that flower-soft verse / is sometimes harder than granite, tougher than a steel / cable, more alive than life” from HARDER THAN GRANITE

[Descending Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

His last poems. Jeffers was one of a kind.

[Sur Cur Lengel · Rating 4 out of 5]

THINKING OF YOU (1-84)

Your smile
Like a carousel,
Thrills!
I cling,
Grasping,
To a silken mane of laughter.

Your eyes
Brimming,
Like petals yielding,
Bid us embrace--
I'm marked for life.