1925, Reading from Selected Poems 1963, page 38
The theme of man’s fleeting impermanence, so common in Jeffers work, is accentuated here in a rebuke of modern architecture, a common critique of modern society, that it builds quickly, cheaply and will leave barely a trace once the dams and levees break.
“…the Iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of Iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster…”
I never tire of Jeffers vision, as if he were a tiny observe sent by Time to record anomalies while it blinked.
He: Gilgamesh: Into the Face of Time
