Reading from Dear Judas and Other Poems, 1929, Horace Liveright, NY, page 121

“Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely contemptible, the dangled

Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice…”

In Birth-Dues Robinson Jeffers places his indictment of puny Man once-again before the earth-powers, the “treacherous” “God” of “unreason” which I take as nature, and this verse an indication that he—a theologian’s son—held out hope for a God of the mind, a cosmic dialogue with a specific, higher intelligence, as much a part of and apart from the natural order as Man. In Birth-Dues Jeffers gives Man more of a chance than in much of his work, though remains very much the anti-sentimental pastoralist:

“He has broken boundaries a little and that will estrange

him; he is monstrous, but not

To the measure of the God…”