Purse Seine by Robinson Jeffers

Today, I am posting one of my favorite poems, entitled Purse-Seine by Robinson Jeffers.  It compares the flailing of sardines in a net as they know they are caught and try to escape with the helplessness of modern man, trapped in cities, totally dependent on each other.  Consider the lines "We have geared the machines and locked all together into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated.  

Jeffers was not a popular man during his lifetime.  He was an isolationist when that was unfashionable.  Yet, reading this poem, he seems like a prophet.  After all, we are watching the collapse of the western economy and the American empire.  The bailout will buy us time but not fix the problem. 

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Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark


of the moon; daylight or moonlight

They could not tell where to spread the net,

unable to see the phosphorescence of the

shoals of fish.

They work northward from Monterey, coasting

Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off

Pigeon Point

The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color

light on the sea's night-purple; he points,

and the helmsman

Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the

gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.

They close the circle

And purse the bottom of the net, then with great

labor haul it in.



I cannot tell you

How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,

then, when the crowded fish

Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall

to the other of their closing destiny the

phosphorescent

Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body

sheeted with flame, like a live rocket

A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside

the narrowing

Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up

to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls

of night

Stand erect to the stars.



Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top

On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:

how could I help but recall the seine-net

Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how

beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.

I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together

into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now

There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable

of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all

dependent. The circle is closed, and the net

Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet

they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters

Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we

and our children

Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all

powers--or revolution, and the new government

Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy,

the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;

Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps

its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow

In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,

splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are

quite wrong.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew

that cultures decay, and life's end is death.