POETRY AND HEALING

Men and Nature: Czeslaw Milosz and Robinson Jeffers

by David Shaddock

We look to poetry to illuminate issues relevant to health, mental health, and coping with our lives today.

The great world lives; the weather-man dies or not.

The beauty of things is not harnessed to human eyes

And the little active minds: it is absolute.

— Robinson Jeffers, "The Inhumanist"

In sculptures and canvases our individuality

Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes.

— Czeslaw Milosz, "Treatise on Poetry"

HAVING JUST WRITTEN a column on Susan Griffin's Women and Nature, which argues for our interconnectedness with nature, I thought I'd turn to two male poets from the last century whose work also grapples with our relation to nature: Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz. As I set out to begin, I'm in the Southern California desert, sitting across from a mountain in the San Jacinto range that seems to contain the face of an ancient patriarch. Sometimes, as the light changes, his face goes from a scowl to a frown. As a cloud shadow covers him, the corners of his mouth turn further downward, as if he were going to cry.

I take out my phone and snap a photo. The outlines of the face are there, but the image on the screen contains no magic. I would like to pray to the face for an end to the horrors in the Middle East and Ukraine, for an end to firestorms and sea rise, for an end to the 1933-redux vibe we're facing. But today no prayers come, and I sit for a long time, trying to absorb the desert silence.

"What are you doing here, Poet?" Milosz asks himself in 1945, surveying a destroyed cathedral, walking a landscape where "the foot knocks against the unburied bones of kin." Jeffers, thousands of miles away on the Big Sur Coast, is thinking about the same devastation: "Famine that dries the children to little bones and huge eyes; high explosive that fountains dirt, flesh and bone splinters." Milosz, through labyrinths of self-doubt, finally affirms the existence of a "second space" of faith and imagination: "How spacious the heavenly halls are! / Approach them on aerial stairs / Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise."

By contrast, Jeffers' answer is a philosophy that he called Inhumanism: "Sane and intact the seasons pursue their course, autumn slopes to December, the rains will fall / and the grass flourish, with flower in it: as if man's world were perfectly separate from nature's, private and mad." "We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;" he writes. "We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from." One poem imagines transcendence beyond nature and the other transcendence beyond the human. Neither celebrates our life embedded in a living ecosystem.

Milosz is fascinated by Jeffers, even as he acknowledges their profound differences. He writes: "Above your head, no face, neither the sun's nor the moon's / only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable / violence of new beginnings, of new destruction." And, in a prose essay that accompanies his Jeffers poem: "The ocean, to him the fullest incarnation of harmony, was, I admit, horrifying to me." The Darwinian world of pure causality that Jeffers celebrates appalled him. "Impaled on the nail of a blackthorn, a grasshopper / Leeks black fluid from his twitching snout," he writes in "Treatise on Poetry." And, at the end of his life, in "Treatise on Religion": "Everything that creeps, runs, flies and dies is an argument against the divinity of man."

In response to a war in which fifty million perish, Milosz turns from the world in horror and imagines a fate for man beyond time. Jeffers turns from humankind in horror and celebrates a view of time that is indifferent to man. To my ear, both poets evince a trauma response, a search for respite from a specific moment of horror. Trauma necessitates an elsewhere, a withdrawal from the unbearable moment.

Jeffers:

And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle

Hunts the same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and is never tired; dream the same dreams,

Milosz:

…the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the dark-blue mountains meet.

Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green.

All that, hasn't it been invoked for centuries

As a mystery which in one instant will be suddenly revealed?

And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand

One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower.

Both poets look to nature for respite from the all-but-unendurable trauma of history. Jeffers in the continuance and indifference of natural beauty, Milosz in the way beauty suggests transcendence.

After a break for breakfast, I submit the face in the rock to my poet's colloquy:

"The face is a portal to another world," Milosz whispers.

"The face is evidence of an unimaginably vast process of geologic creation and destruction," Jeffers responds.

And Griffin: "The face is your face, there is no separation. Every sinew and bone and thought you have is part of nature."

It seems I've worked on this essay straight through the afternoon. The sun has backed around to the west; the declivities that suggested a face all but erased in the low, direct sunlight.

David Shaddock PhD is a poet and psychotherapist. His new poetry book is Tehachapi Pass; his previous collection is A Book of Splendor: New and Selected Poems on Spiritual Themes. He is also the author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field, from Routledge, and two books on relationships and couple therapy. He lectures widely on those topics, and maintains a private practice in Berkeley.

— posted July 2026