October 27, 2009

The Slow Pacific Swell

tumblr_ks3u8g95rf1qz4s6ho1_400.jpg

By night a chaos of commingling power,

The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.

The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,

Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,

Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;

Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

Yvor Winters

Posted by Vanderleun at October 27, 2009 8:52 PM
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Nice. Here's my favorite poem on the subject:

The Eye
by Robinson Jeffers

The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths--
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water: it is half the
planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never
close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

Posted by: Aquila at October 28, 2009 8:32 AM

Thanks for that. I know that Jeffers poem and also admire it greatly.

"...and what it watches is not out wars."

Posted by: vanderleun at October 28, 2009 11:58 AM

The poem and picture both gave me chills -- reminiscent of the one time I watched the sun set into the Pacific and imagined I could feel the rotation of the Earth. Can you say what is the source of that picture? Thanks.

Posted by: Chris L. at October 28, 2009 8:13 PM

Sorry, but I've lost the source of that. I keep over 145,000 images and I didn't note the origin.

Posted by: vanderleun at October 28, 2009 9:59 PM

I enjoy the photos and art here much more than I ever did at LGF. Keep up the good work.

Posted by: RKV at October 29, 2009 5:48 AM