Californians by Robert Jeffers

Californians by Robinson Jeffers

I found a fine collection of poems today by a poet who, from what I hear, is a farmer. Californians by American outdoorsman, Robinson Jeffers, is a work more in the Whitmanian tradition rather than a work in the more avant-garde category of poets like Ezra Pound and the Imagists and all the other new strange art forms ( I’m thinking of Dadaism here) arising nowadays. But I am particularly fond of Jeffers and I think Pound would be too. His poems are clear and concise and though they’re highly romantic, they are direct and give lasting impressions of man’s emotion and its relation to the physical world. And what’s amazing is Jeffers does this so seamlessly that, instead of seeming like he’s trying to desperately be new and original like some of the other poets today, his poems read like nothing I’ve read before while still conveying deep emotion. This poem by Jeffers is a great example of what I’m trying to describe. The speaker’s notion in the poem of the beauty in the image he’s describing being attached to so many things in the physical world is a good an example of the relation of man’s emotion to the world I was talking about earlier that Jeffers elucidates so clearly.

TO AN OLD SQUARE PIANO 

(Purchased from the caretaker of an estate in Monterey.) 

WHOSE fingers wore your ivory keys 

So thin as tempest and tide-flow 

Some pearly shell, the castaway 

Of indefatigable seas 

On a low shingle far away 

You will not tell, we cannot know. 

Only, we know that you are come, 

Full of strange ghosts melodious 

The old years forget the echoes of, 

From the ancient house into our home; 

And you will sing of old-world love, 

And of ours too, and live with us. 

Sweet sounds will feed you here : our woods 

Are vocal with the seawind’s breath; 

Nor want they wing-borne choristers, 

Nor the ocean’s organ-interludes. 

Be true beneath her hands, even hers 

Who is more to me than life or death.