The Truce and the Peace

^{(November, 1918)}

                                             1

Peace now for every fury has had her day,
Their natural make is moribund, they cease,
They carry the inward seeds of quick decay,
Build breakwaters for storm but build on peace. 
The mountains’ peace answers the peace of the stars, 
Our petulances are cracked against their term. 
God built our peace and plastered it with wars, 
Those frescoes fade, flake off, peace remains firm. 
In the beginning before light began
We lay or fluttered blind in burdened wombs, 
And like that first so is the last of man,
When under death for husband the amorous tombs 
Are covered and conceive; nine months go by
No midwife called, nine years no baby’s cry.

                                             2

Peace now, though purgatory fires were hot 
They always had a heart something like ice 
That coldly peered and wondered, suffering not 
Nor pleased in any park, nor paradise 
Of slightly swelling breasts and beautiful arms 
And throat engorged with very carnal blood. 
It coldly peered and wondered, “Strong God your charms 
Are glorious, I remember solitude. 
Before youth towered we knew a time of truth 
To have eyes was nearly rapture.” Peace now, for war 
Will find the cave that childhood found and youth.
Ten million lives are stolen and not one star 
Dulled; wars die out, life will die out, death cease, 
Beauty lives always and the beauty of peace.

                                             3

Peace to the world in time or in a year,
In the inner world I have touched the instant peace. 
Man’s soul’s a flawless crystal coldly clear,
A cool white mansion that he yields in lease
To tenant dreams and tyrants from the brain 
And riotous burnings of the lovelier flesh.
We pour strange wines and purples all in vain. 
The crystal remains pure, the mansion flesh.
All the Asian bacchanals and those from Thrace 
Lived there and left no wine-mark on the walls. 
What were they doing in that more sacred place 
All the Asian and the Thracian bacchanals? 
Peace to the world to-morrow or in a year, 
Peace in that mansion white, that crystal clear.

                                             4

Peace now poor earth. They fought for freedom’s sake, 
She was starving in a corner while they fought. 
They knew not whom they stabbed by Onega Lake, 
Whom lashed from Archangel, whom loved, whom sought. 
How can she die, she is the blood unborn, 
The energy in earth’s arteries beating red, 
The world will flame with her in some great morn, 
The whole great world flame with her, and we be dead. 
Here in the west it grows by dim degrees, 
In the east flashed and will flame terror and light. 
Peace now poor earth, peace to that holier peace 
Deep in the soul held secret from all sight. 
That crystal, the pure home, the holier peace, 
Fires flaw not, scars the cruelest cannot crease.

                                             5

South of the Big Sur River up the hill
Three graves are marked thick weeds and grasses heap, 
Under the forest there I have stood still
Hours, thinking it the sweetest place to sleep … 
Strewing all-sufficient death with compliments
Sincere and unrequired, coveting peace.
Boards at the head not stones, the text’s rude paints 
Mossed, rain-rubbed … wasting hours of scanty lease 
To admire their peace made perfect. From that height 
But for the trees the whole valley might be seen,
But for the heavy dirt, the eye-pits no light
Enters, the heavy dirt, the grass growing green
Over the dirt, the molelike secretness,
The immense withdrawal, the dirt, the quiet, the peace.

                                             6

Women cried that morning, bells rocked with mirth,
We all were glad a long while afterward,
But still in dreary places of the earth
A hundred hardly fed shall labor hard
To clothe one belly and stuff it with soft meat,
Blood paid for peace but still those poor shall buy it, 
This sweat of slaves is no good wine but yet 
Sometimes it climbs to the brain. Be happy and quiet, 
Be happy and live, be quiet or God might wake.
He sleeps in the mountain that is heart of man’s heart, 
He also in promontory fists, and make
Of stubborn-muscled limbs, he will not start
For a little thing … his great hands grope, unclose, 
Feel out for the main pillars … pull down the house …

                                             7

After all, after all we endured, who has grown wise? 
We take our mortal momentary hour
With too much gesture, the derisive skies
Twinkle against our wrongs, our rights, our power.
Look up the night, starlight’s a steadying draught
For nerves at angry tension. They have all meant well,
Our enemies and the knaves at whom we’ve laughed,
The liars, the clowns in office, the kings in hell,
They have all meant well in the main… some of them tried
The mountain road of tolerance … They have made war,
Conspired, oppressed, robbed, murdered, lied and lied,
Meant well, played the loud fool … and star by star
Winter Orion pursues the Pleiades
In pale and huge parade, silence and peace.

                                             8

That ice within the soul, the admonisher
Of madness when we’re wildest, the unwinking eye 
That measures all things with indifferent stare, 
Choosing far stars to check near objects by, 
That quiet lake inside and underneath,
Strong, undisturbed by any angel of strife,
Being so tranquil seems the presence of death, 
Being so central seems the essence of life.
Is it perhaps that death and life make truce
In neutral zone while their old feud beyond
Fires the towered cities? Surely for a strange use 
He sphered that eye of flawless diamond.
It does not serve him but with line and rod 
Measures him, how indeed should God serve God?

                                             9

It does not worship him, it will not serve.
And death and life within that Eye combine,
Within that only untorturable nerve
Of those that make a man, within that shrine
Which there is nothing ever can profane,
Where life and death are sister and brother and lovers,
The golden voice of Christ were heard in vain,
The holy spirit of God visibly hovers.
Small-breasted girls, lithe women heavy-haired,
Loves that once grew into our nerves and veins,
Yours Freedom was desire that deeper dared
To the citadel where mastery remains, 
Yours to the spirit … discount the penny that is 
Ungivable, this Eye, this God, this Peace.

                                             10

All in a simple innocence I strove
To give myself away to any power,
Wasting on women’s bodies wealth of love, 
Worshiping every sunrise mountain tower;
Some failure mocked me still denying perfection,
Parts of me might be spended not the whole,
I sought of wine surrender and self-correction,
I failed, I could not give away my soul.
Again seeking to give myself I sought
Outward in vain through all things, out through God, 
And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought. 
I found this wisdom on the wonderful road,
The essential Me cannot be given away,
The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.

                                             11

Peace to the world in time or in a year, 
But always all our lives this peace was ours. 
Peace is not hard to have, it lies more near 
Than breathing to the breast. When brigand powers 
Of anger or pain or the sick dream of sin 
Break our soul’s house outside the ruins we weep.
We look through the breached wall, why there within
All the red while our peace was lying asleep.
Smiling in dreams while the broad knives drank blood,
The robbers triumphed, the roof burned overhead,
The eternal living and untroubled God
Lying asleep upon a lily bed.
Men screamed, the bugles screamed, walls broke in the air, 
We never knew till then that He was there.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Truce and the Peace” appears in Robinson Jeffers’s fourth poetry collection, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (Boni & Liveright, 1925). In the summer of 1969, The Sewanee Review published an essay titled “A Sovereign Voice: The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers” by American essayist Robert Boyers. Boyers notes that, for poet and critic Randall Jarrell, “Jeffers’s poetry demonstrated that ‘the excesses of modernist poetry are the necessary concomitants of the excesses of late-capitalist society,’ and what is more set up ‘as a nostalgically awaited goal the war of all.’” Boyers goes on to say, “Clearly [Jeffers] did not linger over brief passages to the degree Ezra Pound might have urged him to, and he felt none of the urgency to revise and refine his work that is characteristic of modern poets as diverse as Eliot and Marianne Moore. Not that Jeffers is crude, or simple-minded, for he is not. Jeffers knew his gift and trusted his ability to give it adequate expression. As to whether that expression was sometimes more than adequate, he would leave it to others more anxious about such questions than he to decide. In fact, the ferocity of the critical reaction against Jeffers that really began to set in after the end of World War II is in certain respects explicable in terms of the adulatory sympathies his earlier verse inspired in a number of people who might have been expected to know better.”