"Visionless men, blind hearts, blind mouths,
live still."
And:
"As to
betrayals: there are so many
Betrayals,
the Russians and the Germans know."
He was writing, of course, about the infamous
Versailles Treaty, when Wilson had the rug pulled out from under him, his noble
"14 Points" bartered for the scurrilous "peace" Britain and France exacted from
no-more war-guilty Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans and Russia.
"Victory/
you know requires
Force to
sustain victory, the burden is never lightened. --
1924. " 2013. " The "Great War" then. The
"War on Terror" now. "The burden is never lightened."
The Depression deepened. Top-hatted Fred
Astaire whirled sparkling Ginger Rogers and the masses escaped into a celluloid
realm of riches; and behind it all, more clamoring for war. In 1938, in "Shine,
Republic," he takes his earlier poem a warier step further: "The love of
freedom has been the quality of Western man," he proclaims. And, "you, America,
that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love
freedom." And, "we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also."
That same year, a year after Picasso's
"Guernica" had vivified the torturous horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Jeffers
wrote in "Contemplation of the Sword": "Reason will not decide at last; the
sword will decide." Increasingly, his father's faith wavered in him. He called
his own philosophy/religion "inhumanism," focussing on his belief
that "the man-brained and man-handed ground ape" was far too
self-absorbed "to feel/ Greatly, and understand greatly, and express
greatly, the natural/ Beauty." An earlier age might have called him a
pagan. But his was no blind, Romanticist faith in the beauty of Nature. More
like humble awe before infinite mysteries. With world war approaching again, he
writes:
"Dear God, who are the whole splendor of
things and the/ sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the/ treacheries/
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near
us again I am finding it hard
To praise you."
And, in the same poem:
"You are the one
that tortures himself to discover himself: I am
One that watches you and discovers you, and
praises you
in little
parables, idyl or tragedy, beautiful
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