'To the Stonecutters' by Robinson Jeffers

Ricky Portier
May 22, 2011
The poem “To the Stonecutters” by Robinson Jeffers, the speaker of the poem addresses the stonecutters. He talks greatly of change and the passage of time, particularly with in particular, socio-political change ? Where is this idea coming from?, which he yearns for. It talks greatly about manual labor, and how workersthese workers have been defeated. Fragment: Moreover, the poems reflect on howhow change is apparent over time, yet how the products of labor have surpassed man and endured. In William Shakespeare’s poem “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”, the prevailing theme also appears to be that of the passage of time. However, the change that the speaker talks about is less physical about the physical decay of the body and more of the aging and death of youth and desires. How is the “aging of youth” “less physical”? Less physical than what? Unclear what this means. Like in the poem “To the Stonecutters” this poem addresses a particular person, in this case, a young man. An analysis of the diction, imagery, and sound reveals a somber tone that is prevalent in both poems, which lends to the shared theme of the passage of time.
The diction used by Jeffers reflects the somber mood of the poem, and thus adds to the indication of the passage of time. First of all, we can see how the poet’s choice use of sound impact the choices of words he put in the poem. Jeffers uses formal diction, his words are more extravagant and polysyllabic. Furthermore, the sounds of the words he chooses are specifically chosen to have a certain effect on the tone. Tthe words he uses have hard consonants that produce a firm and definite sound: “fighting…foredefeated…challengers of oblivion…square-limbed roman letters…”(762) these words are produce hard sounds which contribute to the morbid somber tone, which reflects the theme of death and change. The “hard sounds” of consonants is not a reflection of diction, but of sound. Please review term in textbook. Relevance to diction unclear:These themessounds ? imply that time had passed and created these changes that the speaker talks about in the poem. The use of the word ”fighting”(1) is significant in that it gives an image of a stonecutter attacking and working on a piece of marble, as opposed to if the author had said that the stone cutter was working on his masterpiece as an artist. The single use of the word contributes to the entire poem because it already put to mind images of battle, harsh and brutal, as opposed to a man simply working on his project. This idea is magnified by the use of the words “challengers of oblivion”(2) which he uses to refer to the stonecutters. With these words the stonecutters become almost rebellious. They become somewhat like soldiers going off to battle. When the author relates the stonecutters to poets, he uses the words “builds his monument”(6) to bridge a relation between the two. The use of the terms “build”(6) and “monument”(6) are both words that describe the work of the stonecutters. It implies labor and work, which is ironic because what poets produce are mental labor and have little to do with manually sculpting or creating something tangible, as the phrase sugge...