Reading from Dear Judas and other Poems, 1929, Horace Liveright, NY, page 129

In the mind’s eye of Robinson Jeffers the lights die, the darkness moves, the ocean sleeps and the fog is its breath. Inspired, like much of his work, be Western scenery, particularly of the Pacific coastal region, Hooded Night, maintains his dominant short poetic theme; that Nature looks grimly down upon puny Man and his pathetic scratching.

“Before the first man

Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses,

And the pallid region in the stone-rough dome of the fog where the moon

Falls on the west. Here is reality.”