Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TAMAR, by ROBINSON JEFFERS Poem Explanation Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: A night the half-moon was like a dancing-girl Subject(s): Nature | ||||||||
I A night the half-moon was like a dancing-girl, No, like a drunkard's last half-dollar Shoved on the polished bar of the eastern hill-range, Young Cauldwell rode his pony along the sea-cliff; When she stopped, spurred; when she trembled, drove The teeth of the little jagged wheels so deep They tasted blood; the mare with four slim hooves On a foot of ground pivoted like a top, Jumped from the crumble of sod, went down, caught, slipped; Then, the quick frenzy finished, stiffening herself Slid with her drunken rider down the ledges, Shot from sheer rock and broke Her life out on the rounded tidal boulders. The night you know accepted with no show of emotion the little accident; grave Orion Moved northwest from the naked shore, the moon moved to meridian, the slow pulse of the ocean Beat, the slow tide came in across the slippery stones; it drowned the dead mare's muzzle and sluggishly Felt for the rider; Cauldwell-s sleepy soul came back from the blind course curious to know What sea-cold fingers tapped the walls of its deserted ruin. Pain, pain and faintness, crushing Weights, and a vain desire to vomit, and soon again die icy fingers, they had crept over the loose hand and lay in the hair now. He rolled sidewise Against mountains of weight and for another half-hour lay still. With a gush of liquid noises The wave covered him head and all, his body Crawled without consciousness and like a creature with no bones, a seaworm, lifted its face Above the sea-wrack of a stone; then a white twilight grew about the moon, and above The ancient water, the everlasting repetition of the dawn. You shipwrecked horseman So many and still so many and now for you the last. But when it grew daylight He grew quite conscious; broken ends of bone ground on each other among the working fibers While by half-inches he was drawing himself out of the seawrack up to sandy granite, Out of the tide's path. Where the thin ledge tailed into flat cliff he fell asleep. . . . Far seaward The daylight moon hung like a slip of cloud against the horizon. The tide was ebbing From the dead horse and the black belt of sea-growth. Cauldwell seemed to have felt her crying beside him, His mother, who was dead. He thought 'If I had a month or two of life yet I would remember to be decent, only it's now too late, I'm finished, mother, mother, I'm sorry.' After that he thought only of pain and raging thirst until the sundown Reddened the sea, and hands were reaching for him and drawing him up the cliff. His sister Tamar Nursed him in the big westward bedroom Of the old house on Point Lobos. After fever A wonderful day of peace and pleasant weakness Brought home to his heart the beauty of things. 'O Tamar I've thrown away years like rubbish. Listen, Tamar, It would be better for me to be a cripple, Sit on the steps and watch the forest grow up the hill Or a new speck of moss on some old rock That takes ten years agrowing, than waste Shame and my spirit on Monterey rye whiskey, And worse, and worse. I shan't be a cripple, Tamar. We'll walk along the blessed old gray sea, And up in the hills and watch the spring come home.' Youth is a troublesome but a magical thing, There is little more to say for it when you've said Young bones knit easily; he that fell in December Walked in the February fields. His sister Tamar Was with him, and his mind ran on her name, But she was saying, 'We laugh at poor Aunt Stella With her spirit visitors: Lee, something told her truth. Last August, you were hunting deer, you had been gone Ten days or twelve, we heard her scream at night, I went to the room, she told me She'd seen you lying all bloody on the sea-beach By a dead deer, its blood dabbling the black weeds of the ebb.' 'I was up Tassajara way,' he answered, 'Far from the sea.' 'We were glad when you rode home Safe, with the two bucks on the packhorse. But listen, She said she watched the stars flying over you In her vision, Orion she said, and made me look Out of her window southward, where I saw The stars they call the Scorpion, the red bead With the curling tail. Then it will be in winter,' She whispered to me, 'Orion is winter.' 'Tamar, Tamar, Winter is over, visions are over and vanished, The fields are winking full of poppies, In a week or two I'll fill your arms with shining irises.' The winter sun went under and all that night there came a roaring from the south; Lee Cauldwell Lay awake and heard the tough old house creak all her timbers; he was miserably lonely and vacant, He'd put away the boyish jets of wickedness, loves with dark eyes in Monterey back-streets, liquor And all its fellowship, what was left to live for but the farmwork, rain would come and hinder? He heard the cypress trees that seemed to scream in the wind, and felt the ocean pounding granite. His father and Tamar's, the old man David Cauldwell, lay in the eastern chamber; when the storm Wakened him from the heartless fugitive slumber of age he rose and made a light, and lighted The lamp not cold yet; night and day were nearly equal to him, he had seen too many; he dressed Slowly and opened his Bible. In the neighboring rooms he heard on one side Stella Moreland, His dead wife's sister, quieting his own sister, the idiot Jinny Cauldwell, who laughed and chuckled Often for half the night long, an old woman with a child's mind and mostly sleepless; in the other Chamber Tamar was moaning, for it seemed that nightmare Within the house answered to storm without. To Tamar it seemed that she was walking by the seaside With her dear brother, who said 'Here's where I fell, A bad girl that I knew in Monterey pushed me over the cliff, You can see blood still on the boulders.' Where he vanished to She could not tell, nor why she was crying 'Lee. No. No dearest brother, dearest brother no.' But she cried vainly, Lee was not there to help her, a wild white horse Came out of the wave and trampled her with his hooves, The horror that she had dreaded through her dreaming With mystical foreknowledge. When it wakened her, She like her father heard old Jinny chuckling And Stella sighing and soothing her, and the southwind Raging around the gables of the house and through the forest of the cypresses. 'When it rains it will be quieter,' Tamar thought. She slept again, all night not a drop fell. Old Cauldwell from his window saw the cloudy light seep up the sky from the overhanging Hilltops, the dawn was dammed behind the hills but overflowed at last and ran down on the sea. II Lee Cauldwell rode across the roaring southwind to the winter pasture up in the hills. A hundred times he wanted Tamar, to show her some new beauty of canyon wildflowers, water Dashing its ferns, or oaktrees thrusting elbows at the wind, blackoaks smoldering with foliage And the streaked beauty of white-oak trunks, and redwood glens; he rode up higher across the rainwind And found his father's cattle in a quiet hollow among the hills, their horns to the wind, Quietly grazing. He returned another way, from the headland over Wildcat Canyon, Saw the immense water possessing all the west and saw Point Lobos Gemmed in it, and the barn-roofs and the house-roof Like ships' keels in the cypress tops, and thought of Tamar. Toward sundown he approached the house; Will Andrews Was leaving it and young Cauldwell said, 'Listen, Bill Andrews, We've had gay times together and ridden at night. I've quit it, I don't want my old friends to visit my sister. Better keep off the place.' 'I will,' said the other, 'When Tamar tells me to.' 'You think my bones Aren't mended yet, better keep off.' Lee Cauldwell Rode by to the stable wondering why his lips Twitched with such bitter anger; Tamar wondered Why he went upstairs without a word or smile Of pleasure in her. The old man David Cauldwell, When Lee had told him news of the her | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...INTERRUPTED MEDITATION by ROBERT HASS TWO VIEWS OF BUSON by ROBERT HASS THE FATALIST: HOME by LYN HEJINIAN WRITING IS AN AID TO MEMORY: 17 by LYN HEJINIAN LET US GATHER IN A FLOURISHING WAY by JUAN FELIPE HERRERA IN MICHAEL ROBINS?ÇÖS CLASS MINUS ONE by HICOK. BOB BREADTH. CIRCLE. DESERT. MONARCH. MONTH. WISDOM by JOHN HOLLANDER VARIATIONS: 16 by CONRAD AIKEN UNHOLY SONNET 13 by MARK JARMAN BOATS IN A FOG by ROBINSON JEFFERS |
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