Compensation

Solitude that unmakes me one of men

In snowwhite hands bring singular recompense,

Evening me with kindlier natures when

On the needled pinewood the cold dews condense

About the hour of Rigel fallen from heaven

In wintertime, or when the long night tides

Sigh blindly from the sand dune backward driven,

Or when on stormwings of the northwind rides

The foamscud with the cormorants, or when passes 

A horse or dog with brown affectionate eyes,

Or autumn frosts are pricked by earliest grasses,

Or whirring from her covert a quail flies.

Why, even in humanity beauty and good

Show, from the mountainside of solitude.

 

~Robinson Jeffers

Modern American and British Poetry, p. 223

edited by Louis Untermeyer