Prescription of Painful Ends
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)