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For Una

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962 Robinson Jeffers

I built her a tower when I was young—

Sometime she will die—

I built it with my hands, I hung

Stones in the sky.

Old but still strong I climb the stone—

Sometime she will die—

Climb the steep rough steps alone,

And weep in the sky.

Never weep, never weep.

Never be astonished, dear.

Expect change,

Nothing is strange.

We have seen the human race

Capture all its dreams,

All except peace.

We have watched mankind like Christ

Toil up and up,

To be hanged at the top.

No longer envying the birds,

That ancient prayer for

Wings granted: therefore

The heavy sky over London

Stallion-hoofed

Falls on the roofs.

These are the falling years,

They will go deep,

Never weep, never weep.

With clear eyes explore the pit.

Watch the great fall

With religious awe.

III

It is not Europe alone that is falling

Into blood and fire.

Decline and fall have been dancing in all men’s souls

For a long while.

Sometime at the last gasp comes peace

To every soul.

Never to mine until I find out and speak

The things that I know.

To-morrow I will take up that heavy poem again

About Ferguson, deceived and jealous man

Who bawled for the truth, the truth, and failed to endure

Its first least gleam. That poem bores me, and I hope will bore

Any sweet soul that reads it, being some ways

My very self but mostly my antipodes;

But having waved the heavy artillery to fire

I must hammer on to an end.

To-night, dear,

Let’s forget all that, that and the war,

And enisle ourselves a little beyond time,

You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine

While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,

And sometime after midnight I’ll pluck you a wreath

Of chosen ones; we’ll talk about love and death,

Rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea,

Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real

While the stars go over the timeless ocean,

And when they vanish we’ll have spent the night well.

Robinson Jeffers, “For Una” 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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