I'm making a correction in the poem. I copied & pasted it from a website
and the website version had a spelling error which I have made right,
below. Jeffers often wrote of the Big Sur country of California. He
wrote "Carmel Valley" of course. Not "Caramel" as the website ad it
mis-typed.
al winslow wrote:
>
> Once upon a time I owned many volumes of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
>
> Bits and pieces of his work can be found on the web. I thought I'd send
> one since we seem to be in a mood for poetry. The cosmology expressed in
>
> "The Great Explosion" may or may not be fashionable. Still, this piece
> speaks to me.
>
> Al Winslow
> USA
> -----------------
> The Great Explosion
>
> The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
>
> It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
> Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
>
> It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust clouds
> and nebulae
> Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they
> stick in one lump
>
> And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no way to
> express that explosion; all that exists
> Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into
> all the sky, new universes
> Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like
> charging spearmen again
> Invade emptiness.
>
> No wonder we are so fascinated with
> fireworks
> And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling
>
> fireblast that we were born from.
> But the whole sum of the energies
> That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
> gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
> And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the whole
> universe beats like a heart.
> Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth,
> live and die, burn and be damned,
> The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His terrible life.
>
> He is beautiful beyond belief.
> And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty. We see it
> above our torment, that's what life's for.
>
> He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence,
>
> no anthropoid God
> Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care and will never
> cease. Look at the seas there
> Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the tide-stream
> stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
> Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley to meet the sea.
> These are real and we see their beauty.
>
> The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not --of
> faceless violence, the root of all things.
>
> --Robinson Jeffers
>
>
>
Al Winslow
USA
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