[wordup] Rearmament

[Adam Shand]

Via: http://dark-mountain.net/about/faqs/rearmament/

Written during the run-up to World War Two. Jeffers saw the coming war as inevitable, tragic and world-changing. He believed it would be a disaster, but he also knew he could do nothing to stop it.

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These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

— Robinson Jeffers, 1935