Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NOT OUR GOOD LUCK by ROBINSON JEFFERS

Poet Analysis

First Line: NOT OUR GOOD LUCK NOR THE INSTANT PEAK AND FULFILLMENT OF TIME GIVES US TO SEE
Last Line: OF THE FAR STARS, REMEMBER WE ALSO HAVE KNOWN BEAUTY.
Subject(s): BEAUTY;
Not our good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time gives us to see
The beauty of things: nothing can bridle it.
God who walks lightning-naked on the Pacific has never been hidden from any
Puddle or hillock of the earth behind us.
Between the mean mud tenements and huddle of the filth of Babylon, the river
Euphrates;
And over the tiled brick temple buttresses
And the folly of a garden on arches, the ancienter simple and silent tribe of
the stars
Filed, and for all her gods and the priests' mouths
God also moved on the city....

Dark ships drawing in from the sundown and the islands of the south, great waves
with gray vapor in your hollows
And whitening of high heads coming home from the west,
From Formosa or the skerries of Siberia and the sight of the eyes that have
widened for the sky-peaks of Asia:
That he touched you is no wonder, that you slid from his hand
Is an old known tale to our foreland cypresses, no news to the Lobos granite, no
marvel
To Point Pinos Light and the beacon at Point Sur.
But here is the marvel: he is nowhere not present: his beauty, it is burning in
the midland villages
And tortures men's eyes in the alleys of cities.

Far-flown ones, you children of the hawk's dream future, when you lean from a
crag of the last planet on the ocean
Of the far stars, remember we also have known beauty.



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