Granddaughter

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962 Robinson Jeffers

And here’s a portrait of my granddaughter Una

When she was two years old: a remarkable painter,

A perfect likeness: nothing tricky nor modernist,

Nothing of the artist fudging his art into the picture,

But simple and true. She stands in a glade of trees with a still inlet

Of blue ocean behind her. Thus exactly she looked then,

A forgotten flower in her hand, those great blue eyes

Asking and wondering.

Now she is five years old

And found herself; she does not ask any more but commands,

Sweet and fierce-tempered; that light red hair of hers

Is the fuse for explosions. When she is eighteen

I’ll not be here. I hope she will find her natural elements,

Laughter and violence; and in her quiet times

The beauty of things—the beauty of transhuman things,

Without which we are all lost. I hope she will find

Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to cover her.

Robinson Jeffers, “Granddaughter” 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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