Most of his poems are about the stark and awe-inspiring glories of nature – the “astonishing beauty of things”, as he called it. Jeffers also wrote much about human civilization, which he viewed, Thoreau-like, as decadent and corrupted, compared to the clean, fierce freshness of the wilderness. (The fact that he lived through two world wars seems to have given him a certain cynicism about the destructive tendencies of civilization.) His poetry is well-known in the modern environmental movement. Thanks for your Support! One-Time Contributions ➛ His published works include Californians (1916), The Women at Point Sur (1927), Be Angry at the Sun (1941) and The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963).Įvery contribution safeguards our editorial independence, empowers us to pursue stories that others won’t, and keeps our work open and available to all. Jeffers’ religious views were pantheistic. Rather than the anthropomorphic, miracle-working god of Christianity, he believed in a god that exists as the sum total of all natural forces – “the wild God of the world”, he wrote in his poem “Hurt Hawks”.
In “Roan Stallion”, he mused, “Not in a man’s shape / He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, / The heart of the atom with electrons”. Jeffers’ deity was “no God of love”, “no anthropoid God making commandments”, but rather “the God who does not care and will never cease”. (Read more here and here about Jeffers’ pantheist views.) Like nature itself, he shows no mercy and grants no afterlife, and is often violent and savage, but nevertheless spins out astonishing and luminous beauty to fill the world.
In today’s poem, Jeffers writes of his own home, Tor House, and contemplates whether the work of his hands will survive the passage of time.
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