The extraordinary patience of things! 
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.


Robinson Jeffers was an American poet who wrote in the first half of the twentieth-century. He was known, in part, for writing about the central Californian coast and for his harsh views of humanity. Jeffers' philosophy of "inhumanism" posited that humanity was too self-absorbed and indifferent to the natural world. He was an early environmentalist.