“Night comes; night will claim all.

The world is not changed, only more naked:

The strong struggle for power, and the weak

Warm their poor hearts with hate.”

This third of five verses is the choice of a powerful poem in which Jeffers paints a word picture of War from the vantage of the empathist forever afflicted with an acuity that would drive most minds to the breaking point. Such a view of the sacred cataclysms of the Modern Age would drive most minds to break. Therefore the weak herd, as he notes, nourishes their tamped souls at the well of hate.

For counter culture thinkers of the Postmodern Age, busy as they are arguing with those seemingly ignorant of reality, it is difficult to fathom that this willful ignorance is a frantically sought and jealously guarded refuge from that state most feared by the mass of humans, an awakened mind, unable to sleep through a suddenly nightmare world. The power of Jeffers as a poet was his ability to whisper these things to the sleeping reader, to plant a desire that might grow to replace the fear and if failing in this, to disappear.

A Partial Exhumation of the American Dream