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    • May 2013

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It is not bad.  Let them play.

Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane

Speak his prodigious blasphemies.

It is not bad, it is high time,

Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine

The fleet limbs of the antelope?

What but fear winged the birds, and hunger

Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Who would remember Helen’s face

Lacking the terrible halo of spears?

Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,

The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?

Violence, the bloody sire of all the world’s values.

Never weep, let them play,

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

Robinson Jeffers, “The Bloody Sire” from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Copyright by the Jeffers Literary Properties. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

Source: Poetry (December 1940).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the December 1940 issue of Poetry magazine

• Finland Is Down
  by Robinson Jeffers
• Ring Out, Ring In
  by Charles Norman
• The Questioners
  by E. L. Mayo

• December 1940 Table of Contents
• Subscribe to Poetry magazine
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More about this poem

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 . . .

Continue reading this biography

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Poems by Robinson Jeffers

• Bixby’s Landing
• Carmel Point
• Credo
• For Una
• Granddaughter

• More poems by Robinson Jeffers (29 poems)
  • Gray Weather
  • Hands
  • Hooded Night
  • Hurt Hawks
  • Inscription for a Gravestone
  • Love the Wild Swan
  • Night Without Sleep
  • Oh Lovely Rock
  • Original Sin
  • Rock and Hawk
  • Shine, Perishing Republic
  • Shine, Republic
  • The Answer
  • The Beauty of Things
  • The Coast-Road
  • The Continent’s End
  • The Day is a Poem
  • The Deer Lay Down Their Bones
  • The Place for No Story
  • The Stone Axe
  • The Treasure
  • To The House
  • To The Stone-Cutters
  • Tor House

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Social Commentaries, History & Politics, War & Conflict

POET’S REGION U.S., Western

SCHOOL / PERIOD Modern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Related

Audio

• Poem of the Day: The Bloody Sire
• Poem of the Day: The Day is a Poem
• Poem of the Day: Grass on the Cliff
• Poem of the Day: Hurt Hawks
• Poem of the Day: Night Without Sleep
• Poem of the Day: Oh Lovely Rock
• Poem of the Day: The Place for No Story
• Essential American Poets: Robinson Jeffers: Essential American Poets

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