Great Throughts Treasury

"Men suffer want and become curiously ignoble; as prosperity made them curiously vile but look how noble the world is, the lonely-flowing waters, the secret-keeping stones, the flowing sky."

"Meteors are not needed less than mountains."

"Mountains and ocean, rock, water, and beasts and trees are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters."

"Mother, though my song's measure is like your surf-beat's ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain."

"Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth. Under men's hands and their minds, the beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city. The spreading fungus, the slime-threads and spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther future, and the last man dying without succession under the confident eyes of the stars. It was only a moment's accident, the race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal splendor."

"Names foul in the mouthing. The human race is bound to defile. I've often noticed it. Whatever they can reach or name. They'd shit on the morning star if they could reach... Time will come no doubt when the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze, And the air on them; frozen gases, white flakes of air will be the dust; which no wind will ever stir: this very dust in dim starlight glistening is dead wind, the white corpse of wind. Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way, our universe, all the stars that have names are dead."

"Nothing human remains. You are earth and air; you are in the beauty of the ocean and the great streaming triumphs of sundown; you are alive and well in the tender young grass rejoicing when soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds float on the dawn."

"Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty lives in the very grain of the granite, safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. ? As for us: we must uncenter our minds from ourselves; we must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from."

"On the little stone-girdled platform over the earth and the ocean, I seem to have stood a long time and watched the stars pass. They also shall perish I believe. Here to-day, gone to-morrow, desperate wee galaxies scattering themselves and shining their substance away like a passionate thought. It is very well ordered."

"One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flow"

"Never blame the man: his hard-pressed ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe in the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed in a million years: but the race of man was made by shock and agony? a wound was made in the brain when life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood-sacrifice, it is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, and hate the world."

"O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward, the splendor without rays, the shining shadow, peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining."

"Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed."

"People need no savior, salvation comes and takes them by force, it gathers them into the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the blown storms, the stream's-end ocean."

"Perhaps we desire death or why is poison so sweet? Why do little Sirens make kindlier music for a man caught in the net of the world between news-cast and work-desk?"

"Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life."

"Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide. The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel, formerly used to kill men, but here In the sense of a symbol."

"Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers, the exuberant voices of music, have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness that makes beauty; the mind knows, grown adult."

"Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated challengers of oblivion eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, the square-limbed Roman letters scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well builds his monument mockingly; for man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun die blind and blacken to the heart: yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems."

"The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it."

"The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean, the blue pool in the old garden, more than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific: the ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant. Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs nor any future world-quarrel of westering and eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons, are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan. Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey sea-smoke into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging eyeball of water, arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars."

"The dive-bomber's screaming orgasm as beautiful as other passions."

"The broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth under men's hands and their minds, the beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city."

"The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, the wing trails like a banner in defeat, no more to use the sky forever but live with famine and pain a few days: cat nor coyote will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits the lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom and flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment him at distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, the intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those that ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail had nothing left but unable misery from the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, he wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, not like a beggar, still eyed with the old implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising before it was quite unsheathed from reality"

"The enormous invulnerable beauty of things is the face of God."

"The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses ? How beautiful when we first beheld it, unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; no intrusion but two or three horses pasturing..."

"The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty."

"The ghosts of the tribe crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire, they try to remember the sunlight, light has died out of their skies."

"The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it, but at cyclical turns there is a change felt in the rhythm of events."

"The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man."

"The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man. Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken."

"The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels with her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun and saying that when she was first married she lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen but the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; the place is now more solitary than ever before.) When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake and brought it; I put its mouth to the breast rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others. Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road with market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, the stir of the world, the music of the mountain."

"The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers hooked in the stones of the wall."

"The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers. From different throats intone one language. So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without divisions of desire and terror to the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities, those voices also would be found clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone by the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers."

"The rock-cheeks have red fire-stains. But the place was maiden, no previous building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements, rock, wind, and sea; in moon-struck nights the mountain coyotes howled in our dooryard; or doe and fawn stared in the lamplit window, We raised two boys here all that we saw or heard was beautiful and hardly human. Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin. They have built streets around us, new houses line them and cars obsess them ? and my dearest has died. The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons."

"There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death."

"There is the great humaneness at the heart of things the extravagant kindness, the fountain humanity can understand."

"There is this infinite energy, the power of God, forever working--toward what purpose?"

"This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places."

"They dance with reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them."

"This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game. Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan."

"To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped by dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled."

"To the end of this age. Oh, a thousand years will hardly leach, he thought, this dust of that fire."

"Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity. Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow, lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man. Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes; things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain, for what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature."

"Tonight, dear, let?s forget all that, that and the war, and enisle ourselves a little beyond time, you with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine, while the stars go over the sleepless ocean, and sometime after midnight I?ll pluck you a wreath of chosen ones; we?ll talk about love and death, rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea. Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real. While the stars go over the timeless ocean, and when they vanish we?ll have spent the night well."

"Truly men hate the truth; they'd liefer meet a tiger on the road. Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion- Vendors and political men pour from the barrel, new lies on the old."

"Unhappy, eagle wings and bleak, chicken brain."

"We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,"

"Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no thought apparent but burns darkly smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: no thought outside; a certain measure in phenomena: the fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn."

"Unhappy country what wings you have."