Robinson Jeffers’ poems are known for their fierce intensity, stark natural imagery, and uncompromising philosophical vision. Writing mainly in the early–mid 20th century, Jeffers rejected human-centered thinking and developed a worldview he called “Inhumanism,” which urges readers to look beyond human concerns and recognize the vast, indifferent power of nature and the universe.
His poetry often portrays the rugged landscapes of the California coast—cliffs, oceans, storms, and stone—as living forces that dwarf human ambition and morality. In long narrative poems like “Tamar,” “Roan Stallion,” and “Thurso’s Landing,” Jeffers explores themes of violence, desire, guilt, and fate, showing how human passions can become destructive when set against the eternal rhythms of nature.
At the same time, his shorter lyrics and meditative poems reveal a cold, austere beauty, celebrating solitude, endurance, and the permanence of rock and sea. Jeffers’ language is direct, muscular, and prophetic in tone, often sounding like a moral warning or cosmic sermon.
Though controversial for his bleak view of humanity, Robinson Jeffers remains a powerful poetic voice—one who challenges readers to confront nature’s grandeur and humanity’s small, often tragic place within it.
A Little Scraping
True, the time, to one who does not love farce,
And if misery must be prefers it nobler, shows apparent vices;
At least it provides the cure for ambition.
One does not crave power in ant-hills, nor praise in a paper forest;
One must not even indulge the severe
Romance of separateness, as of Milton grown blind and old
In his broken temple against the drunkards:
The ants are good creatures, there is nothing to be heroic about.
But the time is not a strong prison either.
A little scraping the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete
Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom.
Shake the dust from your hair. This mountain sea-coast is real,
For it reaches out far into past and future;
It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things. A few
Lean cows drift high up the bronze hill;
The heavy-necked plow-team furrows the foreland, gulls tread the furrow;
Time ebbs and flows but the rock remains.
Two riders of tired horses canter on the cloudy ridge;
Topaz-eyed hawks have the white air;
Or a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand,
Goes through cold rain over gray grass.
God is here, too, secretly smiling, the beautiful power
That piles up cities for the poem of their fall
And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes.
Autumn Evening
Though the little clouds ran southward still, the quiet autumnal
Cool of the late September evening
Seemed promising rain, rain, the change of the year, the angel
Of the sad forest. A heron flew over
With that remote ridiculous cry, "Quawk," the cry
That seems to make silence more silent. A dozen
Flops of the wing, a drooping glide, at the end of the glide
The cry, and a dozen flops of the wing.
I watched him pass on the autumn-colored sky; beyond him
Jupiter shone for evening star.
The sea's voice worked into my mood, I thought "No matter
What happens to men . . . the world's well made though."
Cassandra
The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion—
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
Wisdom. Poor bitch be wise.
No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
And gods disgusting—you and I, Cassandra.
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean…
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.
The incredible beauty of joy
Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
Be joined, there is not a maiden
Burns and thirsts for love
More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
Weave like a web in the air
Divinely superfluous beauty.
An Artist
That sculptor we knew, the passionate-eyed son of a quarryman,
Who astonished Rome and Paris in his meteor youth, and then
was gone, at his high tide of triumphs,
Without reason or good-bye; I have seen him again lately, after
twenty years, but not in Europe.
In desert hills I rode a horse slack-kneed with thirst. Down a
steep slope a dancing swarm
Of yellow butterflies over a shining rock made me hope water.
We slid down to the place,
The spring was bitter but the horse drank. I imagined wearings
of an old path from that wet rock
Ran down the canyon; I followed, soon they were lost, I came
to a stone valley in which it seemed
No man nor his mount had ever ventured, you wondered
whether even a vulture'd ever spread sail there.
There were stones of strange form under a cleft in the far hill;
I tethered the horse to a rock
And scrambled over. A heap like a stone torrent, a moraine,
But monstrously formed limbs of broken carving appeared in
the rock-fall, enormous breasts, defaced heads
Of giants, the eyes calm through the brute veils of fracture. It
was natural then to climb higher and go in
Up the cleft gate. The canyon was a sheer-walled crack winding
at the entrance, but around its bend
The walls grew dreadful with stone giants, presences growing
out of the rigid precipice, that strove
In dream between stone and life, intense to cast their chaos . . .
or to enter and return . . . stone-fleshed, nerve-stretched
Great bodies ever more beautiful and more heavy with pain,
they seemed leading to some unbearable
Consummation of the ecstasy . . . but there, troll among
Titans, the bearded master of the place accosted me
In a cold anger, a mallet in his hand, filthy and ragged. There
was no kindness in that man's mind,
But after he had driven me down to the entrance he spoke a
little.
The merciless sun had found the slot now
To hide in, and lit for the wick of that stone lamp-bowl a sky
almost, I thought, abominably beautiful;
While our lost artist we used to admire: for now I knew him:
spoke of his passion.
He said, "Marble?
White marble is fit to model a snow-mountain: let man be
modest. Nor bronze: I am bound to have my tool
In my material, no irrelevances. I found this pit of dark-gray
freestone, fine-grained, and tough enough
To make sketches that under any weathering will last my lifetime…
The town is eight miles off, I can fetch food and no one follows
me home. I have water and a cave
Here; and no possible lack of material. I need, therefore, nothing.
As to companions, I make them.
And models? They are seldom wanted; I know a Basque shepherd
I sometimes use; and a woman of the town.
What more? Sympathy? Praise? I have never desired them and
also I have never deserved them. I will not show you
More than the spalls you saw by accident.
What I see is the enormous
beauty of things, but what I attempt
Is nothing to that. I am helpless toward that.
It is only to form in stone the mould of some ideal humanity
that might be worthy to be
Under that lightning. Animalcules that God (if he were given
to laughter) might omit to laugh at.
Those children of my hands are tortured, because they feel,"
he said, "the storm of the outer magnificence.
They are giants in agony. They have seen from my eyes
The man-destroying beauty of the dawns over their notch
yonder, and all the obliterating stars.
But in their eyes they have peace. I have lived a little and I
think
Peace marrying pain alone can breed that excellence in the
luckless race, might make it decent
To exist at all on the star-lit stone breast.
I hope," he said, "that
when I grow old and the chisel drops,
I may crawl out on a ledge of the rock and die like a wolf."
These
fragments are all I can remember,
These in the flare of the desert evening. Having been driven
so brutally forth I never returned;
Yet I respect him enough to keep his name and the place secret.
I hope that some other traveller
May stumble on that ravine of Titans after their maker has
died. While he lives, let him alone.
Boats In A Fog
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone's throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and
cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.
Delusion Of Saints
The old pagan burials, uninscribed rock,
Secret-keeping mounds,
Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,
They stand inhumanly
Clean and massive; they have lost their priests.
But the cross-bearing stones
Still foot corruption, and their faces carved
With hopes and terrors
At length too savagely annulled to be left
Even ridiculous.
Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,
You have won your reward:
You sleep now as easily as any dead murderer
Or worn-out lecher.
To have found your faith a liar is no thorn
In the narrow beds,
Nor laughter of unfriends nor rumor of the ruinous
Churches will reach you.
As at Clonmacnoise I saw them all ruined,
And at Cong, at Glendalough,
At Monasterboice; and at Kilrnacduagh
All ruined, all roofless
But the great cyclopean-stoned spire
That leans toward its fall.
A place perfectly abandoned of life,
Except that we heard
One old horse neighing across the stone hedges
In the flooded fields.
Ghost
Above the gray-mouthed Pacific, cottages and a thick-walled tower, all made of rough sea rock
And Portland cement. I imagine, fifty years from now,
A mist-gray figure moping about this place in mad moonlight, examining the mortar-joints, pawing the
Parasite ivy: "Does the place stand? How did it take that last earthquake?" Then someone comes
From the house-door, taking a poodle for his bedtime walk. The dog snarls and retreats; the man
Stands rigid, saying "Who are you? What are you doing here?" "Nothing to hurt you," it answers, "I am just looking
At the walls that I built. I see that you have played hell
With the trees that I planted." "There has to be room for people," he answers. "My God," he says, "That still!"
Ghosts In England
At East Lulworth the dead were friendly and pitiful, I saw them
peek from their ancient earthworks on the coast hills
At the camps of the living men in the valley, the army-mechanics'
barracks, the roads where they try the tanks
And the armored cars: "We also," they say, "trembled in our
time. We felt the world change in the rain,
Our people like yours were falling under the wheel. Great
past and declining present are a pitiful burden
For living men; but failure is not the worm that worries
the dead, you will not weep when you come,"
Said the soft mournful shadows on the Dorset shore. And those
on the Rollright ridge by the time-eaten stone-circle
Said nothing and had no wish in the world, having blessedly aged
out of humanity, stared with great eyes
White as the hollowed limestone, not caring but seeing, inhuman
as the wind.
But the other ghosts were not good,
But like a moon of jackals around a sick stag.
At Zennor in the tumbled granite chaos, at Marazion and the
angel's Mount, from the hoar tide-lines:
"Be patient, dead men, the tides of their day have turned," from
the stone rings of the dead huts on Dartmoor,
The prison town like a stain of dirt on the distant hill: "We not
the last," they said, "shall be hopeless,
We not alone hunger in the rain." From Avebury in the high
heart of England, in the ancient temple,
When all the cottages darkened themselves to sleep: "Send it
along the ridge-ways and say it on the hilltops
That the bone is broken and the meat will fall."
There was also a
ghost of a king, his cheeks hollow as the brows
Of an old horse, was paddling his hands in the reeds of Dozmare
Pool, in the shallow, in the rainy twilight,
Feeling for the hilt of a ruinous and rusted sword. But they said
"Be patient a little, you king of shadows,
But only wait, they will waste like snow." Then Arthur left
hunting for the lost sword, he grinned and stood up
Gaunt as a wolf; but soon resumed the old labor, shaking the
reeds with his hands.
Northeastward to Wantage
On the chalk downs the Saxon Alfred
Witlessly walks with his hands lamenting. "Who are the people
and who are the enemy?" He says bewildered,
"Who are the living, who are the dead?" The more ancient dead
Watch him from the wide earthworks on White Horse Hill,
peer from the Ridgeway barrows, goggle from the broken
Mound and the scattered stones in the oval wood above Ashbury.
They whisper and exult.
In the north also
I saw them, from the Picts' houses in the black Caithness heather
to the bleak stones on Culloden Moor,
The rags of lost races and beaten clans, nudging each other, the
blue lips cracking with joy, the fleshless
Anticipatory fingers jabbing at the south. And on the Welsh
borders
Were dead men skipping and fleering behind all the hedges. An
island of ghosts. They seemed merry, and to feel
No pity for the great pillar of empire settling to a fall, the pride
and the power slowly dissolving.
