I’ve been thinking a lot about these lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Rearmament”:

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future…I should do so foolishly.

I notice something different whenever I return to them. Right now, I’m struck by the ambiguity of the poet’s actual relationship to the future. There’s a never-resolved tension over precisely why burning his hand would be foolish. Is this an expression of simple hopelessness, that offering one’s hand to the fire would change nothing? Or does the poet’s foolishness actually stem from his power? Perhaps placing his hand in the fire would alter the future, but in ways that are catastrophically worse and impossible to forsee?