The Dead To Clemenceau:

Robinson Jeffers 1887 (Allegheny) – 1962 (Carmel-by-the-Sea)



NOVEMBER, 1929
Come (we say) Clemenceau.
Why should you live longer than others? The vacuum that sucked
Us down, and the former stars, draws at you also.

No wrench for a man near ninety.
They were younger who crowded us out of distinction the year you drove them
Like flies on a fire. We don't say it was wrong.

We don't say it was right.
These heavy choices are less than verbal, down here, to us dead.
Never a thorn in the crown of greatness down here.

Not even Wilson laments here
The cuckoo brood of design. This is the cave you conjectured;
Nothing in death, as nothing in life, surprises you.

You were not surprised when France
Put you aside, when the war was finished, as a sick man mending
Puts aside the strong poison that turned his fever.

You'd not be surprised to hear
Your enemies praising your name and the Paris cannon applaud you;
Not surprised, nor much pleased, nor envious of more.

Your negative straightness of mind
And bleached like a drowned man's cast-up thigh-bone by eroding age-
Hardly required the clear corrections of death.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

58 sec read
48

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCB XXX XXD DCE BXA DEX XXX
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 1,039
Words 191
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3

Robinson Jeffers

John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. more…

All Robinson Jeffers poems | Robinson Jeffers Books

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