The Coast-Road

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962 Robinson Jeffers

A horseman high-alone as an eagle on the spur of the mountain over Mirmas Canyon draws rein, looks down

At the bridge-builders, men, trucks, the power-shovels, the teeming end of the new coast-road at the mountain’s base.

He sees the loops of the road go northward, headland beyond headland, into gray mist over Fraser’s Point,

He shakes his fist and makes the gesture of wringing a chicken’s neck, scowls and rides higher.

I too

Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote

Rock-narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life. At the far end of those loops of road

Is what will come and destroy it, a rich and vulgar and bewildered civilization dying at the core,

A world that is feverishly preparing new wars, peculiarly vicious ones, and heavier tyrannies, a strangely

Missionary world, road-builder, wind-rider, educator, printer and picture-maker and broad-caster

So eager, like an old drunken whore, pathetically eager to impose the seduction of her fled charms

On all that through ignorance or isolation might have escaped them. I hope the weathered horseman up yonder

Will die before he knows what this eager world will do to his children. More tough-minded men

Can repulse an old whore, or cynically accept her drunken kindnesses for what they are worth,

But the innocent and credulous are soon corrupted.

Where is our consolation? Beautiful beyond belief

The heights glimmer in the sliding cloud, the great bronze gorge-cut sides of the mountain tower up invincibly,

Not the least hurt by this ribbon of road carved on their sea-foot.

Robinson Jeffers, “The Coast-Road” 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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