Easily one of my favorite poems by, in the end, my favorite male twentieth-century poet. Yeats and Auden were better, but I love Jeffers more. This will be one of two poems I want read at my funeral (many years from now, deo volente; the other is here). My mother has already asked for it at hers.
The Shears
A great dawn-color rose widening the
Petals around her gold eye
Peers day and night in the window.
She watches us
Breakfasting, lighting lamps, reading,
and the children playing, and the dogs by the fire,
She watches earnestly, uncomprehending,
As we stare into the world of trees and roses uncomprehending,
There is a great gulf fixed.
But even while I gaze, and the rose at me,
my little flower-greedy daughter-in-law
Walks with shears, very blonde and housewifely
Through the small garden, and suddenly the rose finds herself
rootless in-doors.
Now she is part of the life she watched.
So we: death comes and plucks us: we become part of the living earth
And wind and water whom we so loved.
We are they.
Wow, I’ve loved Jeffers since 1964, two years after he died, and I did not know this poem. Thanks!
Thank you for the poems.