Number 294 & 295
Summer/Fall 2005

More Than Human Things
ERIC GUDAS
Copyright © 2005 Poetry Flash

THE SELECTED POETRY OF ROBINSON JEFFERS, edited by Tim Hunt, Stanford University Press, 2001, 758 pages, $24.95 paper, $75.00 cloth.

Stubborn, grave, imbued with equal parts outrage and wonder, Robinson Jeffers’s poems persevere, much as “[t]he old trees, some of them scarred with fire” of his beloved central California Coast “endure the sea wind” (page 97). Perhaps it’s befitting that a poet who staked his world-view on brute survival—what he called “[t]he extraordinary patience of…the rock and ocean we were made from” (page 676)—should find his posthumous reputation so embattled. Jeffers, who took the long view of both civilizations’ rise and fall and the vicissitudes of literary status (a great poet, he declares, “intends to be understood a thousand years from now” [page 724]), would no doubt enjoy the contention about his place in American poetry since his death in 1962 at seventy-five. Scholar Tim Hunt’s mammoth Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (distilled from his three-volume Collected Poetry), which contains seven-hundred pages of poems and all of Jeffers’s important prose statements, seeks to settle this score. Like Stevens, Eliot, Williams, and Frost, Jeffers widened American poetry’s possibilities; it would be impossible to imagine the twentieth century with him. Jeffers’s achievement is threefold: his poems keenly evoke the California coast’s “fierce and solitary beauty” (page 98); while his prosodic innovations brought the long line of the King James Bible and Whitman into his century; and finally, his work is filled with a moral authority that, in its best poems, becomes prophetic—Hunt is right to champion him as “at root, a visionary poet” (page 8).
In “Chocura to its Neighbor,” Wallace Stevens cautions, “To say more than human things with human voice, / That cannot be”; yet this is precisely what Jeffers attempts to do. In a late poem, “The Ocean’s Tribute,” he writes with his characteristic, cantankerous bluntness, “…I think we are fools / To turn from the superhuman beauty of the world and dredge our own minds.” Jeffers drew inspiration from the attempt to “say more than human things” and this attempt’s inevitable failure is the springboard for his best poems’ pathos and deficiencies. In “Credo,” Jeffers could be arguing with Stevens when he challenges a “friend from Asia” who “believes that nothing is real except as we make it”; here is his gripping counter-claim:

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s; The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage; The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. (page 147)

There is something tremendously bracing about Jeffers’s insistence on the object world’s self-sufficiency, before which human subjectivity pales. The way the verb “come” disrupts the third line’s parallelism enacts sudden the intrusion of these “shocks and flashes” of—what to call this uniquely Jeffersian revelation? Pure objectivity? Consciousness of the futility of one’s own awareness? The revelation would seem almost Buddhist were it not for the last line’s quintessentially Western mourning of the very self-erasure they long for. What interests me in the paradoxical statement that “the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it” is not its bluster (the sentiment is, after all, fairly conventional), but the speaker’s barely acknowledged sorrow in making it. There is something terribly lonely in this longing for the world without oneself. Perhaps what is so “heart-breaking” for Jeffers is not the “beauty of things” in itself, but his inevitable separation from it. These lines from John Hall Wheelock’s “Complaint on the Indifference of Things” have long reminded me of Jeffers: “man envies the rock / Its strength, its self-sufficient calm / Outwardly at least, though it represents / The locked fury of billions of atoms— / He moves, lonely and a stranger, among / The things that surround him” (Wheelock, By Daylight and in Dream). How much are “env[y]” and “fury” at the object world’s obduracy an unacknowledged part of Jeffers’s “Credo” (and credo)?
Many of Jeffers’s best poems are the lyrics of his early books, Tamar, Roan Stallion, The Women at Point Sur, and Cawdor. The task Jeffers faced in the 1910s and ’20s involved a reckoning, Hunt writes, with “the impact [on him] of the Big Sur coast…landscape’s epic scale and the isolated lives of its ranching folk” in relation to “his scientific training, his Calvinist heritage, the initial explorations of Freud and Jung into the mechanisms of consciousness, the work of Sir James Frazier and the Cambridge anthropologists on myth and ritual and a conviction…that history was cyclical and that Western civilization was poised for inevitable slide into decadence and barbarism” (pages 4-5). What emerged from this tumult of landscape and ideas was what Robert Hass calls:

a series of insights that came to have the quality of a vision. There is first of all a sense of terrible and tormenting violence at the center of life, from the hawk’s claw to the fury of war to the slow decay of stone. And there was also a sense, sharply, of something pained, divided and deeply sick in the human heart, at the root of sexual desire and religious longing. And finally there was the leap—to the wholeness of things, a leap out of the human and its pained and diseased desiring into the permanence and superb indifference of nature. The possibility of this leap became at first the central wish and, finally, the doctrine of his poetry. (from the introduction, Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, edited by Robert Hass, 1987, page xxxi)

Before Jeffers’s “wish” hardened into “doctrine” (and even dogma), his poems are radiant with the presence of what he rather clumsily calls “[t]he omnisecular spirit,” which “keeps the old with the new also” (page 140). In his thirties and forties, Jeffers was able to hold both the timelessness he witnessed every day from Tor House and modernity in the same vision: “Lately,” he writes in “The Machine,” “the forms of things appear to me with time / One of their visible dimensions,” and this ability to envision the temporal and physical at the same time fuels some of Jeffers’s most forceful poems. “Great-enough both accepts and subdues,” he writes in “Phenomena” which, like “The Machine” manages to envision “the wholeness of things” with eloquent clarity:

Gulls; and the dingy freightship lurching south in the eye of a rain-wind; The air-plane dipping over the hill; hawks hovering The white grass of the headland; cormorants roosting upon the guano- Whitened skerries; pelicans awind; sea-slime Shining at night in the wave-stir like drowned men’s lanterns; smugglers signaling A cargo to land; or the old Point Pinos lighthouse Lawfully winking over dark water; the flight of the twilight herons, Lonely wings and a cry; or with motor-vibrations That hum in the rock like a new storm-tone of the ocean’s to turn eyes westward The navy’s new-bought Zeppelin going by in the twilight, Far out seaward; relative only to the evening star and the ocean It slides like a cloud over Point Lobos.

In the quiet certainty of his vision, Jeffers is able to imagine a “great frame” that both “accepts” the “new-bought Zeppelin” into the world of gulls, hawks, cormorants, and herons and “subdues” the Zeppelin’s potential intrusion into this changelessness: “all these forms of power placed without preference / In the grave arrangement of the evening.” “Phenomena” and poems of its caliber contain some of Jeffers’s best descriptive writing: the wonderful verbs (my favorite is “roosting”) give a sense of movement to the poem’s slow-motion world; while such scrupulous adjectives as “dingy” and “guano-whitened” are a needed counterweight to the loftier diction of “great frame.”
Jeffers’s mastery of the long line, the hallmark of his mature style, makes poems such as “Phenomena” such a pleasure to read. Like all great free verse poets in English, Jeffers is obsessed with creating a sense of rhythm and repetition different from, but equally skillful as, accentual-syllabic meter. In his preface to Tamar, he writes: “A tidal recurrence, whether of quantity or accent, or of both, or of syllables and rhyme as in French verse, or of syllables and rhyme and tone as in Chinese verse, or of phrase and thought as in old Hebrew verse, has always been the simplest and inevitable [sic] one of the qualities of poetry” (page 709). One important rhythmic aspect of “Phenomena” is Jeffers’s use of almost Hopkins-like sound effects to bind his lines together: in “sea slime / Shining at night in the wave-stir like drowned men’s lanterns; smugglers signaling,” for instance, strong sss sounds combine with syntax to create a powerful anaphoric effect. Jeffers’s characterization of recurrence as “tidal” suggests that the Pacific itself was an important influence on his prosody—and indeed there is a wave-like force and sway in

That hum in the rock like a new storm-tone of the ocean’s to turn eyes westward

which juxtaposes anapestic prepositional phrases (“in the ROCK”) and pile-ups of strong stresses (“STORM-TONE,” “TURN EYES WEST”) in a pattern that is recognizably regular but not, given the preponderance of anapests, sing-song-y. Hass suggests that Jeffers’s long line is “is a much more a sobering up of Victorian verse, a suppression of those rocking-horse rhythms that the prepositional phrase invites into the English language, than it is a leap to Whitman’s exhilarated and playful long line” (Rock and Hawk, page xxx). Although Whitman is as much a master of the trisyllabic foot as Swinburne (reading the former’s line, “Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,” first taught me to hear anapests), Hass’s emphasis on antecedents other than Whitman for Jeffers’s long line is refreshingly useful. Jeffers’s cataloging and his frequently journalistic narration make him, of course, a child of Whitman. Unlike Whitman, however, Jeffers relies on enjambment to help propel his lines forward: the way that line breaks separate nouns from verbs and subjects from objects in “Phenomena,” for instance, is notably un-Whitmanic. Jeffers’s use of frequently enjambed long lines seems to me both a particularly twentieth-century innovation and an embodiment of his restless, brooding temperament as a poet. If the juxtaposition of trisyllabic and spondaic feet lends his long lines a thunderous, “inevitable quality,” the way these lines jaggedly enjamb themselves forces the reader to make a breathless leap forward that is both jarring and as bracing as the sea air “over Point Lobos.” Jeffers also forsakes Whitmanic anaphora for a more complicated and clotted syntax that is made all the more disorienting by enjambment: near the end of “Phenomena,” the Zeppelin’s “motor vibrations” are syntactically confused with “a new storm-tone of the ocean’s” in just the way that Jeffers wants us to hear the machine-sound as half-mechanical and half-organic. Even Jeffers’s catalogs are different from Whitman’s: “Phenomena”’s use of the list is more muted than Whitman’s because Whitman would equate himself with “great-enough,” while for Jeffers, “[g]reat-enough both accepts and subdues” even (or especially) the human element into its scope. The gravity and outward calm of Jeffers’s cataloging reveals not just a stylistic but a temperamental difference from Whitman. Where for Whitman, the long line embodies an unlimited enthusiasm for all aspects of experience, for Jeffers it serves to reinforce a desire to emulate the object world’s solidity and permanence.
Over a lifetime, Jeffers constructed the doctrine he called “inhumanism,” which “is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness…. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious…but it involves a certain detachment” (page 719). As appealingly lucid as such a statement may be, Jeffers’s ultimate inability to “rational[ly]” achieve the “detachment” he sought is far more forceful—the trace-elements of self in his best poems are the basis of their “heart-breaking beauty.” “Oh Lovely Rock” is the Jeffers poem to which I most often return:

it was the rock wall that That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it, Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily And living rock. Nothing strange…I cannot Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die, And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago, Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock. (pages 529 – 530)

What brilliant and passionate writing! The paradox of these lines—“lonely”/“lovely,” “Nothing strange…I cannot / Tell you how strange”—is even more compelling than that in “Credo”: the rock wall’s “loveliness” increases in direct proportion to the speaker’s awareness of his own loneliness, his separateness from the rock. The sense of a “fate going on / Outside our fates” elicits both wonder and deep sorrow, which are somehow bound up with Jeffers’s love for his son, the “child” who will “live and die” after his own death. For once, Jeffers considers human subjectivity—“I, many packed centuries ago”—to be coequal with the “intense reality” of the inanimate world. “[T]he manner in which Jeffers espouses rock,” writes Louise Glück, “is immensely human: exposed, rash, extreme, vulnerable” (Proofs & Theories, page 66), and this “immensely human” aspect of Jeffers’s best poems thankfully gives the lie to his professed doctrine.
The insight Jeffers attained in his thirties was almost unbearably personal: it involved himself, the land and seascape around him, his sense of time—and no one else. (A poem like “Phenomena” acknowledges the presence of “drowned men” and “smugglers,” but their function seems archetypal; the birds, clouds, and lighthouse are far more vividly imagined.) This powerfully solitary aspect of his sensibility may account for the pathos of poems like “Credo” and “Oh Lovely Rock”; in many of his poems of the 1930s and ’40s, however, it becomes a positive disdain for humanity (“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” he writes in “Hurt Hawks”) that over the years has alienated many readers. In her poem “Yom Kippur 1984,” Adrienne Rich argues with these deliciously churlish lines from “Preludes”: “the hateful-eyed / And human-bodied are all about me: you that love that multitude may have them” (page 148); “Robinson Jeffers,” she snarls in reply, “multitude / is…the separate persons, stooped / over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest / who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams / Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other.” Rich has a point, of course; but I don’t know how useful it is to upbraid Jeffers for not writing more like John Steinbeck. There is such a powerful skein of—if not outright misanthropy, then a lack of interest in human relationships—in the Four Quartets (which Randall Jarrell calls the work “of a poet so temperamentally isolated that he does not even put another…human being treated at length into the whole poem” [Jarrell, Poetry and the Age, page 240]), the Cantos, the Duino Elegies, and practically all of Stevens, that I wonder if this aspect of Jeffers merits the censure it has received. What does set him apart from his Modernist cohort is Jeffers’s self-consciousness about his difficulty in reconciling a vision of isolation with a vision of communality. “Meditation on Saviors” confronts this issue head-on: “I pledged myself long ago not to seek refuge, neither in death nor in a walled garden, / In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that easily lock the world out of doors” (page 172); but “[a]s for the people,” the speaker goes on to argue with himself, “I have found my rock, let them find theirs” (page 174). This is the cavalier and belligerent dismissiveness most readers associate with Jeffers; but his sensibility will not be pinned down so narrowly. The contradictions inherent in his “Meditation” raise the poem to a nearly prophetic level:

How should anyone caught in the stone of his own person dare tell the people anything but relative to that? But if a man could hold in his mind all the conditions at once, of man and woman, of civilized And barbarous, of sick and well, of happy and under torture, of living and dead, of human and not Human, and dimly all the human future: – what should persuade him to speak? and what could his words change? (page 175)

Jeffers’s tortured awareness of the extent to which he is “caught in the stone of his own person” lends his best poems an emotional gravity that transcends mere misanthropy and approaches tragedy.
As Europe and America lurched toward war in the 1930s, Jeffers’s isolationist tendencies became explicitly political; the decline of his reputation during his lifetime was at least in part due to his opposition to America’s participation in the Second World War. While his poems from that era for the most part don’t hold up very well, they do contain some lovely passages, as in “Contemplation of the Sword (April, 1938)”:

In the end, however, Jeffers’s inability to achieve an explicitly communal vision has less to do with his feelings about Roosevelt, or even his proto-environmentalist tendencies, than with the profoundly solitary aspect of his personality and literary sensibility that makes his best work worth reading. Whenever I read George Oppen’s line (itself a quotation from the young Rachel Blau DuPlessis), “‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase,’” (Oppen, New Selected Poems, page 167) I think of Jeffers, whose admiration for the Central Coast cattle ranchers alongside of whom he lived was equal only to his sense of separation from them. In many of his best lyrics and, less successfully, in his long narrative poems, he celebrates the lives of “[m]en…riding after cattle or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years…unencumbered by the mass of poetically irrelevant details and complexities that make a civilization” (page 715). Of course Jeffers himself was too burdened with precisely the same “details and complexities” from which he longed to escape to do any more than honor back-country life from the outside, as in “The Wind-struck Music”:

The “intensity of seeing” had “increase[d]” too much for Jeffers to share the “narrow” agrarian life that so compelled him. The only other twentieth-century poet I can think of whose temperament approaches Jeffers’s in this way is R.S. Thomas, a university-educated Welsh Anglican minister whose poems of preaching among unschooled peasant farmers, who, as in his poem “The Chapel,” “sang their amens / fiercely, narrow but saved / in a way that men are not now.” This work rivals Jeffers’s poems about ranchers and wranglers.
Jeffers’s inability to compellingly portray other people outside of his immediate family is nowhere more evident than in the long narrative poems that, for better or worse, make up the bulk of Hunt’s Selected. Although many readers would no doubt disagree with me, I consider this part of Jeffers’s oeuvre a colossal failure. Like his beloved Thomas Hardy, Jeffers aspired to use the country where he lived as the backdrop for drama on a positively Greek scale: “This coast [cries] out for tragedy like all beautiful places” (page 142); but unlike Hardy, Jeffers could not strike a balance between his own vision of tragedy and the requirements of narrative writing. As much as Tess Durbeyfield and Michael Henchard are products of Hardy’s particular preoccupations, they are also vividly imagined people. Jeffers’s narratives, on the other hand, are populated with puppets whose impulses and actions are, at best, obscure, and into whose mouth he crams long, heavy-handed speeches. Having disparaged Jeffers’s narratives so harshly, I must immediately concede their tremendous (if intermittent) pleasures. If they fail on their own grand terms—to “reclaim substance and sense, and physical and psychological reality” (page 714) for modern poetry—the long poems contain many wild and brilliant passages that are not to be found in the lyrics. Much of Jeffers’s best descriptive writing can be found here: in “Tamar,” readers can stumble upon a “winter pasture up in the hills” with its “new beauty of canyon wildflowers, water / Dashing its ferns, or oaktrees thrusting elbows at the wind, black-oaks smouldering with foliage / And the streaked beauty of white-oak trunks, and redwood glens” (page 30). In “Cawdor,” a suspicious household memorably “watch[es]” the title character’s “face for weakness, as the blackbirds / In Carmel valley watch the green fruit for softness” (page 274). The workaday violence of rural life is also in evidence, as when young men find their lost farm-dog “[s]o opened with one stroke of an armed paw / That the purple entrails had come out, and lay / On the stone step, speckled with redwood needles” (page 201); only a poet who “knew / His hills as if he had nerves under the grass” (page 203) would remember to anchor such brutality with those commonplace needles. Indeed, the subject of brutality fuels much of Jeffers’s best narrative writing (and of course, as in “Birds and Fishes,” his lyrics, too), as when two young girls feed “a live ground squirrel / Dangl[ing] from [a trap] by its crushed paws” to the broken-winged, caged hawk whose presence haunts “Cawdor”:

These four- to six-beat lines, which “hover” around Shakespearean blank verse, are imbued with a sense of inevitable and necessary violence that for once is adequate to the grandeur of Jeffers’s tragic vision; I would readily trade such passages for the long poems’ more plentiful didactic sections. Another virtue of the long poems is the hallucinatory fever pitch they occasionally reach; such “moments of intense, redemptive consciousness,” as Hunt characterizes them (page 9), may require a scope and length that the lyric is unable to provide. Jeffers’s lifelong attempt to find a language adequate to describe the absence of human consciousness reaches a high point in “Cawdor,” with its imagining of a brain immediately after his death:

Even in such a far-out realm, Jeffers’s naturalist-eye is keen and accurate; and perhaps the strangeness of such a “night forest” is what set the poet to thinking about this liminal real of consciousness in the first place.
Readers who want to test the waters of Jeffers’s narratives can start with the early “Roan Stallion” or the late “Hungerfield,” both of which are short enough to be read in one sitting; more adventurous readers can jump in to “Tamar” or “The Loving Shepherdess” and hang on. If I had to recommend only one of Jeffers’s narratives it would be “Hungerfield,” whose searing introductory section grounds the narrative in Jeffers’s grief after his wife Una’s death:

In addition to the lyrics of his early books, Jeffers’s poems of old age, contained in Hungerfield & Other Poems and the “Last Poems” section of Hunt’s Selected, comprise the core of his best work. Such poems as “Hungerfield,” “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” “The Shears,” and “Vulture” approach the “pure rage” and anguish of King Lear. It is heartbreaking to witness a poet who as a younger man wrote such ecstatic paeans to death as “Gale in April”—“Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness, / Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed / From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor”—struggling to stay alive in the face of seeing his beloved coastline “defaced with a crop of suburban houses” and his wife’s death. The well-known “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones” expresses this impulse most fully; stumbling across “a refuge for wounded deer…to die in,” Jeffers initially “wish[es his] bones were with theirs,” but rouses himself for this characteristically grim affirmation:

In the face of such severe and passionate life force, Jeffers’s lifelong desire for self-effacement within nature becomes all the more poignant. “Vulture” articulates disappointment at not being consumed as carrion: “To be eaten by that beak and / become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes – / What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death” (page 697). The ending of this poem—with its brilliant invented word “enskyment”—embodies the Jeffersian “sublime” as much as “Oh Lovely Rock”; both poems articulate what Hunt calls a “complex participation in yet transcendence of time” (page 8) so characteristic, not only of Jeffers, but of late Eliot and Stevens also.
Hunt’s immensely valuable Selected offers readers a chance to range through Jeffers’s oeuvre and discover such first-rate overlooked or unpublished poems as “Memoir” and “Doors to Peace” set down beside such much-anthologized warhorses as “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “The Purse-Seine,” “Rock and Hawk,” and “Continent’s End.” Readers unwilling to confront the longest of the long poems can simply skip them altogether (or they can seek out Hass’s regrettably out-of-print selection of shorter poems, Rock and Hawk). Reading and re-reading this Selected has both infuriated and captivated this reader. One must be willing to accept Jeffers’s many faults: he is simply not interested in writing crystalline, flawless lyric poems (although this may not be so much a fault as a question of temperament); his intractability can be as maddening as it is compelling; his avowed preference for straightforward language too often manifests itself in unbearably flat lines (“The love of freedom has been the quality of western man,” page 503, is by no means atypical), while his reliance on stock superlatives such as “beautiful” and “magnificent” makes one long for Whitman’s boundless vocabulary; and he often disproves his own maxim that “[p]oetry…is not necessarily a moralizer” (page 726). These flaws, severe as they may be, are incidental to Jeffers’s achievement; as Jarrell writes of Stevens, “I have felt as free as posterity to talk in this way of [his] weaknesses since he seems to me…one of the true poets of [the twentieth] century” (Poetry and the Age, page 133). Considering Jeffers’s voluminous output, even a Selected as ample and judicious as Hunt’s is bound to leave out some excellent poems; here is one of my favorites, the out-of-the-way “George Sterling’s Death” (Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 1):

Eric Gudas’s poems, essays, and literary reviews have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and in the anthology Mark My Words: Five Emerging Poets. His chapbook of poems is Beautiful Monster, Swan Scythe Press. He lives in Pasadena; his e-mail is gudas@ucla.edu.