“The Bloody Sire” by Robinson Jeffers

Staircase Inside Hawk Tower,

built by poet Robinson Jeffers by hand stone by stone

for his wife Una

Dear Friends,

As part of the 2024 eight-day North American Section Conference, an intrepid band of literary explorers trekked to Big Sur to visit the Robinson Jeffers Tor House and Hawk Tower in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Poet and Tor House Foundation Director Eliot Ruchowitz-Roberts led us on a tour.

Robinson Jeffers is perhaps the least well known famous modernist American poet of the past century. Our band of literary pioneers explored his voice and legacy, which rooted itself so closely to the ocean and so intimately amid the rocks of Big Sur. 

Here is a poem read by Jeffers.

“The Bloody Sire”

 

It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Who would remember Helen’s face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence, the bloody sire of all the world’s values.

Never weep, let them play,
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

View from top of Hawk Tower

Inside Hawk Tower

Bedroom where the poet died.

“The Bed by the Window”

 

I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
When we built the house, it is ready waiting,
Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects
Its latter purpose. I often regard it,
With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equalled
That they kill each other and a crystalline interest
Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
And then it will sound rather like music
When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come, Jeffers.”

Your Intrepid Section Tour Guides, Bruce & Marion

9.18.24