Poem of the Day: ‘Mountain Pines’

Readers of Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) usually associate his name with the raw, sprawling, unrhymed lines of such poems as “Hurt Hawks,” echoing the brutal austerity of the California coast whose poetic voice he became. Perhaps that’s why today’s Poem of the Day, “Mountain Pines,” an early formal sonnet from the poet, does not sound much like the Robinson Jeffers that American readers would come to know. In fact, however, his (self-funded) first book “Flagons and Apples,” published in 1912 under his full name, John Robinson Jeffers, might have been by almost any poet of the same period. With its lingering Yeatsian odors, it’s the work of a young man who has yet to find his subject and his voice.His next book, “Californians” (1916), turned its gaze more intensely on the Pacific-coast landscape, and Jeffers began to experiment with longer narrative forms. His subject matter was beginning to crystallize, if not his poetics. By 1924, at thirty-seven, he had completed “Tamar and Other Poems.” Long, unrhymed, narrative epics occur alongside more lyric meditations on the rough coastal landscape. In that landscape, Jeffers would develop the philosophy he called “inhumanism,” whose central tenet was “the rejection of human solipsism,” and whose sole proponent he was. He would write such lines as: “Dark and enormous / Rolls the surf of the far storms of the heart of the ocean” — lines composed of “rolling stresses” with their own battering, tidal rhythms. He was writing, in other words, the kind of poems we think of as his. Despite its early formalism, however, today’s poem, “Mountain Pines,” prefigures the poet Jeffers would become. Its structure is still the received form of a Petrarchan sonnet, the sort of thing that Jeffers would later reject as a solipsistic human imposition on the life force that was poetry. But the internal images point the way he would later go, with the mountain pines considering themselves “no kin of anything.” Within the strict boundaries of the young poet’s imposed form, the world we think of as Jeffers’s can be glimpsed, in the language we think of as his, with the imagery of human physicality making vivid the non-human shapes and movements of trees, wind, and moonlight. Mountain Pines by Robinson Jeffers In scornful upright loneliness they stand, Counting themselves no kin of anything Whether of earth or sky. Their gnarled roots cling Like wasted fingers of a clutching hand In the grim rock. A silent spectral band They watch the old sky, but hold no communing With aught. Only, when some lone eagle’s wing Flaps past above their grey and desolate land, Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen, Bending them down as with an age of thought, Or when, ‘mid flying clouds that can not dull Her constant light, the moon shines silver, then They find a soul, and their dim moan is wrought Into a singing sad and beautiful. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Mountain Pines’

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