The Place for No Story

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962 Robinson Jeffers

The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;

No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin

Over rock shaped like flame;

The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast

Gray extension beyond the long white violence;

A herd of cows and the bull

Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;

And the gray air haunted with hawks:

This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable

Human presence here could do anything

But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.

Robinson Jeffers, “The Place for No Story” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988).© 1938, Robinson Jeffers, renewed 1966 and copyright © Jeffers Literary Properties. Used by permission Stanford University Press.

Source: The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford University Press, 1988)

Biography

Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical languages. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania; when his family moved to . . .

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