Poetry: ‘Second Best’ by Robinson Jeffers
A Celtic spearman forcing the cromlech-builder's brown
daughter;
A blond Saxon, a slayer of Britons,
Building his farm outside the village he'd burned; a Norse
Voyager, wielder of oars and a sword,
Thridding the rocks at the fjord sea-end, hungry as a hawk;
A hungry Gaelic chiefling in Ulster,
Whose blood with the Norseman's rotted in the rain on a heather hill:
These by the world's time were very recent
Forefathers of yours. And you are a maker of verses. The pallid
Pursuit of the world's beauty on paper,
Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime.
If, burnished new from God's eyes, an angel:
And the ardors of the simple blood showing clearly a little
ridiculous
In this changed world: write and be quiet.
As part of our weekly Poetry series, we present ‘Second Best’ by Robinson Jeffers.
Equally exposition and tribute, Jeffers, an Ulster-Scot by ancestry, uses the meridian soil of Ulster, and its furnishers turned blood tributes, as the launching pad toward a pithy elaboration of his anti-humanist, anti-intellectual, and heroic worldview.
Other poems by Jeffers related to Ulster:
‘Shane O’Neill’s Cairn’
‘In The Hill At New Grange’
Poems pertinent to his philosophy:
‘Hurt Hawk’
‘The Bloody Sire’