Although it was the sparsely populated coast that Jeffers preferred to live in and write about, he also portrayed his feeling about coastal cities (probably Los Angeles) in such a poem as "The Purse-Seine." This poem is about fishing, as other poems are about hunting, primitive actions of men that Jeffers admired more than their congregation into cities. In the poem, he describes the sardine-fishers going out at night in their boats to cast their huge seines for schools of fish, and he paints a thrillingly realistic picture of their prey caught in the net beneath the boat:

                                                    I cannot tell you

How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish

Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the

other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent

Water to a pool of flame. . . .

 

Jeffers transfers this scene to another setting, as he looks down from a mountaintop at night on a "wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light" and asks himself, "how could I help but recall the seine-net / Gathering the luminous fish?" The comparison of the people in the city to the sardines caught in the purse seine seems to him both beautiful and terrible, and he keeps his distance from them on his mountaintop, taking from the two spectacles the lesson that whether men prey on fish or on each other, the result is much the same: "surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death." The moral for Jeffers was simply that American and Western civilization was dying from its own rapacity, and that the right action to take in the midst of such decadence is to stand apart from it, like a southern Fugitive, or like one of Robinson's citizens of Tilbury Town or one of Frost's New England farmers.