Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

POETICAL EXCURSION #10

"The Bloody Sire", by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962).

It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.

What but the wolf's tooth chiseled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds and hunger
Gemmed with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.

Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence has been the sire of all the world's values.

Never weep, let them play,
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

:: After reading this poem a week or so ago, I've been wondering a lot: how true is that Jeffers says here? How true is it that what we humans value, what we deem worthy, is shaped by violence and war? This poem suggests a sort of "catastrophistic" view of human nature: that our paradigms, our values, are born in moments of violence and blood-letting. Saddeningly, maddeningly, this may in fact be the case; and it leaves me wondering, on the eve of war, just what new values will be thus born.