Prescription of Painful Ends

An Ode to the Fourth of July

Lucretius felt the change of the world in his time, the

great republic riding to the height

Whence every road leads downward; Plato in his time

watched Athens

Dance the down path. The future is a misted landscape,

no man sees clearly, but at cyclic turns

There is a change felt in the rhythm of events, as when

an exhausted horse

Falters & recovers, then the rhythm of the running

hoofbeats is changed: he will run miles yet,

But he must fall: we have felt it again in our own life

time, slip, shift, speed up

In the gallop of the word; and now perceive that, come

peace or war, the progress of Europe and America

Becomes a long process of deterioration — starred with

famous Byzantiums & Alexandrias,

Surely — but downward. One desires at such times

To gather the insights of the age summit against future

loss, against the narrowing mind and the tyrants,

The pedants, the mystagogues, the barbarians: one

builds poems for treasuries, time-conscious poems:

Lucretius

Sings his great theory of natural origins and wise

conduct; Plato smiling carves dreams, bright cells

Of incorruptible wax to give Greek honey.

Our own

time, much greater and far less fortunate,

Has acids for honey, and for fine dreams

The immense vulgarities of misapplied science and

decaying Christianity: therefore one christens each

poem, in dutiful

Hope of burning off at least the top layer of the time’s

uncleanliness, from the acid- bottles.

— Robinson Jeffers “Prescription of Painful Ends” (1939)