The Beginning and the End & Other Poems (Ed. Melba Barry Bennett. New York: Random House, 1963)

SERIES I.          The Root of All Things

The Great Explosion
The Beginning and the End
The Great Wound
Passenger Pigeons
Ode to Hengist and Horsa
Star-Swirls
Unnatural Powers
End of the World

SERIES II.          Do You Still Make War?

Do You Still Make War?
The Epic Stars
Monument
Prophets
To Kill in War Is Not Murder
How Beautiful It Is
Birth and Death
The Beautiful Captive

SERIES III.          Memoranda

Let Them Alone
To the Story-Tellers
Eager to Be Praised
On an Anthology of Chinese Poems
Tear Life to Pieces
Believe History
Full Moon
The Dog in the Sky
The Monstrous Drought
Oysters
Savagely Individual
The Silent Shepherds
Storm Dance of the Sea Gulls
My Loved Subject
He Is All
Look How Beautiful

SERIES IV:          Autobiographical

Patronymic
Fierce Music
Harder than Granite
Cremation
Granddaughter
Nightpiece
Vulture
Salvage
But I Am Growing Old and Indolent
Hand
See the Human Figure
My Burial Place
Ghost

APPENDIX:          Three Uncollected Poems

Animula
The Shears
Birds and Fishes

[Note: In preparing this material for publication, Melba Berry Bennett assigned titles to various poems that Jeffers had not yet titled, combined units from different drafts to construct poems from works that seem to have been left unfinished or were still in progress when Jeffers died, and treated several fragments as completed poems. Her versions are noted here because they are widely circulated. Volume 3 of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers presents this material as Jeffers left it, and textual entries in Volume 5 for the last poems offers additional information. “Problematic Authority: The Beginning and the End as an Edition of Jeffers’ Last Poems” considers the implications of some of Bennett’s adjustments to the manuscripts.]