Reading from Dear Judas and other Poems, 1929, Horace Liveright, NY, page 128

Jeffers’ sense of time reminds me of a saying by Hendrick Von Loon, about Eternity, that if a bird comes to a miles-wide rock every thousand years and sharpens its beak, when the rock is worn away than a single day of eternity shall have passed. Spengler, Howard and Lovecraft, all writing at this same time, also had this tremendous sense of man’s puniness before Time—a sense we have lost and I wonder why, not having a clue but looking for one.

Hands begins as a description of ancient rock art inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara, where ancient men had painted their handprints upon the rocks. His verse is elegantly concise and finishes with these lines:

“You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters

In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty,

and come down

And be supplanted; for you also are human.”

Robinson Jeffers is a poet of brutally beautiful elegance.