Wednesday, 06 June 2012
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Carmel Point by Robinson Jeffers
I've got another poem for you from A Book of Luminous Things. This one comes from Robinson Jeffers.
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses--
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads--
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. -- As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.Milosz's commentary: "It advises inhumanization, that is, getting rid of human measurements, which deceive us because everything then refers to man, without whom the universe can perfectly exist."
I always wondered where I got the idea that the world would be just perfect without humanity. Now I think I know. It's an interesting idea, no?
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