Walking Shadows

Golem received a lovely communication from Dr. Neal Whitman who, in addition to managing a career devoted to education,  finds the time to be a docent at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House (pictured) and to make regular contributions to the fine poetry blog Getting Something Read (he’s the Poetry Prof).  Noting the Golem’s recent commemoration of Jeffers’ birthday (here), Whitman points up a quality of the poem (and literature in general)–it’s not just read, but re-read again and again.   I was moved to remember how I “discovered” Jeffers in my youth, and how my relationship with the poet has evolved since.  Truly, the greats are born and never die.

Enjoy Whitman’s recent post on Jeffers here.

(Note to golem: must get to Carmel!)

Robinson Jeffers: “Credo”

CREDO

My, friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

–Robinson Jeffers (b. 10 January 1887)