Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime 9780804781022

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Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

Robi nson J ef f ers and the A m er ic a n Su bl i m e Robert Zaller

stanford universit y press Stanford, California

This book has been published with the assistance of Drexel University. Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. An earlier version of Chapter 1 of appeared under its present title in Jeffers Studies (1999). Sections of Chapter 4 appeared as “Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime” and “Landscape as Divination: Reading ‘Apology for Bad Dreams,’” in Jeffers Studies (1997, 2004). No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zaller, Robert, author    Robinson Jeffers and the American sublime / Robert Zaller.       pages cm.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    isbn 978-0-8047-7563-2 (cloth : alk. paper)    1.  Jeffers, Robinson, 1887–1962—Criticism and interpretation.  2.  American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.  3.  Sublime, The, in literature.  I. Title. ps3519.e27z964 2012 811'.52—dc23       2011036727 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion.

For lili, kimon, theresa, and athena and to the memory of philip

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Framing the American Sublime

ix

1



1 Heavenly Meditations

13



2 Transcendental Etudes

46



3 Darwinian Redemptions

96



4 Configuring the California Sublime

150



5 The Sacrificial Son

200



6 Democratic Vistas

273



7 The Cosmological Sublime

321



Post Mortem

359

Abbreviations

371

Notes

373

Index

397

Preface

One day while browsing in the American Library in Athens, an obscure impulse moved my hand toward The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a book, like most of Jeffers’ work, then out of print. I opened the book, and fell right in. At the time I knew no one conversant with Jeffers, and so no one with whom to share my sense of him as a great poet and my puzzlement at his critical neglect. I found a kindred spirit at last in William Everson, to whom I reached out when I began to write about Jeffers. His generosity and support—far beyond the merits of my work—inducted me into the community of scholars, poets, and lay readers being organized around the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and its resourceful president, George L. White. It is my privilege and good fortune to have enjoyed that happy company, and that of the scholarly society which grew out of it, the Robinson Jeffers Association. Great writers exert a tidal pull on their students, and that shared experience has made many warm friendships for me. I am particularly indebted in the present work to Robert Brophy, Tim Hunt, Rob Kafka, and James Karman, but also to the many other colleagues who have shared their insights with me, and who will forgive me if I do not mention them by name in what, to do them proper justice, would be a list of unmanageable length. I again thank Dean Donna Murasko of the College of Arts and Sciences of Drexel University for the subvention that has helped make this book possible, and my editor, Norris Pope, for his support of a project quite different from my initial collaboration with the Stanford Press. I am grateful to the readers of the Press for their attentive and thoughtful appraisal of my manuscript. All remaining demerits are mine. My previous study of Jeffers, The Cliffs of Solitude, examined his major narratives from a Freudian standpoint. This seemed a natural perspective, since Jeffers was the first American writer to consciously utilize Freudian themes and stratagems in his work. I believe this interpretive model remains fruitful, and it informs the fifth chapter of the present book. Nonetheless, this book is, as its ix

Preface

title indicates, principally organized around the hermeneutic of the sublime. Through this, I have attempted to consider Jeffers’ work in the larger context of American literary and cultural history, and to situate him at what I believe to be one of its central crossroads. Jeffers occupied that crossroad with his contemporaries of the Modernist generation, but, although sharing many of the Modernists’ concerns and some of their stylistic innovations, he went his own way. His relation to the Modernists thus runs partly parallel to them, but is also in crucial respects adversarial. To draw this out fully is the work of another book. My intention here is to situate Jeffers in the tradition as he received it, transformed it, and, in my view, significantly enriched it. My chief debt, as in everything I have written and everything I have done, is to my life companion, Lili Bita. As Jeffers said of his own mate, Una, she has given me eyes, but heart and resolve too. To her and to my loving family, this book is gratefully dedicated.



Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime



Introduction: Framing the American Sublime

Robinson Jeffers, says Albert Gelpi, “is the poet of the sublime without peer in American letters.”1 Despite this assertion, however, there are entire books devoted to the American literary sublime that fail to cite Jeffers. This omission is all the more striking when one considers how deliberately he made natural grandeur his subject, and the thoroughness with which he explored it. The reason for this neglect is, in part, the tendency to marginalize Jeffers as a ‘lyric’ poet. A consensus has formed in some quarters that his long narrative poems, whatever their incidental felicities, are too overwrought to be fully successful works of art. The result is that the gist of Jeffers has been sought in his shorter poems, where his skill in evoking the beauty of natural process appears directly, unencumbered by dramatic apparatus. The consequence of this critical attitude has been not only to diminish Jeffers’ project, but to decontextualize the so-called lyric poems themselves, in which the pressure of tragedy is continuously felt. Far from seeking to eliminate the human in his work, Jeffers sought rather to give it fresh, and, as he took it, perdurable meaning: to create, that is, a new sphere for tragedy in modern letters. The failure to appreciate this impoverishes the full complexity of his view of nature in turn. It also makes it difficult to apprehend him as a poet of the sublime, since the essential aspect of the sublime is the encounter of human cognition and agency with the natural world. To instate Jeffers as a poet of the sublime is, therefore, to reaffirm his commitment to the human. To claim further, as Gelpi does, that he is America’s great poet of the sublime, is to place him among the central poets of our tradition. I hope this book will show why such a claim can be made. A word must be said about the other term of my study. The hermeneutic of the sublime has a long pedigree, beginning with Longinus and entering the Romantic tradition with Burke and Kant. Is there, though, a distinctively American subspecies? We do not think of Wordsworth and Turner as representing 

Introduction

an ‘English’ sublime, or of Goethe and Friedrich a ‘German’ one. Neither the nationality of the artist nor the particular topos described seems to require a nativist prefix. Why, then, in the American case? The answer to that can be cast in terms both of Americans’ perception of themselves and of others’ responses to them. America remains the unique modern instance of a country settled originally on the basis of a prescriptive ideology, Calvinism, and politically constituted on the basis of another, democracy. I say “modern” to except ancient Israel, although the original intentions of the Hebrews in settling the southern Mediterranean shore are undoubtedly mystified rather than clarified by the retrospective depiction of a Promised Land. What is certain, however, is that the first New England settlers regarded themselves as the direct successors of Israel, and the wilderness they claimed as their own Promised Land.2 Here they prepared, individually and collectively, for their encounter with God, the ultimate (if veiled) site of the sublime, and for the final revelation of his will in the world. Their purpose was consecrated, and so was the land that was to be cleared of encumbrances, both natural and savage, and made fit as the Lord’s tabernacle. As Americans ventured further into the wilderness, however, they found not only a natural abundance denied them on the scanty soil of New England, but an enlarged sense of their destiny and the stage on which it was to be performed. This coincided with the waning of first-generation Calvinism itself and the chiliastic narrative that had been based on it.3 Americans did not lose the sense of their distinction and of their connection to a divine, or at any rate to a higher purpose. They concentrated increasingly, however, on exploiting the material blessings of the land vouchsafed them, leaving the ultimate enactment of that purpose to the fullness of God’s own time. At the same time, European conceptions of the sublime began to valorize the American wilderness. Rather than a place to be cleared for the erection of a tabernacle, America itself was seen as a natural temple in which a pantheist deity might be revealed, not in some culminating moment of history but as a perpetually available immanence. Americans themselves, preoccupied with the practical problems of conquest and settlement, were slow to respond to this new vision of their land. A good example of the disparity between European admiration and American pragmatism is found in Tocqueville. His description of the Mississippi Valley is a splendid piece of Romantic scene-painting, informed, however, with a shrewd appraiser’s eye: 



Introduction The valley watered by the Mississippi seems to have been created for it alone. There, like a god, the river dispenses good and evil at will. Nature has seen to it that the fertility of its bottomland is inexhaustible. . . . Nowhere have the great convulsions of the globe left more obvious traces than in the Mississippi valley. The whole aspect of the region attests to the effects of water. . . . The tides of the primeval ocean piled up thick layers of vegetable matter in the valley’s bottom, and with the passage of time these deposits were leveled out. The river’s right bank is lined with vast plains as flat as if a farmer had smoothed them with a roller. Toward the mountains, however, the terrain becomes increasingly uneven and barren. The soil seems pierced in a thousand places by primitive rocks, which stand out like the bones of a skeleton from which time has stripped away muscle and flesh. . . . All in all, the Mississippi valley is the most magnificent place God ever prepared for men to dwell in, yet it is still but a vast wilderness.4

For Tocqueville, the valley and its river are one titanic presence, vastly extended in space and time, a scene of grandeur and half-concealed purpose, behind which lies the divine hand. The mode of description is scientific, the intent poetic, the very impersonality of the geologist’s rhetoric heightening the sense of an immanent sublime. At the same time, Tocqueville foresees the region’s domestication at the hands of man, a heroic (and divinely blessed) labor which tends, however, toward an inglorious result: cultivation. The irony in this description becomes explicit in a later passage in which Tocqueville depicts the hospitality he receives in a homesteader’s log cabin. The cabin is set in land partially cleared, in which “the trees have been cut but not uprooted; their stumps remain, cluttering the land they once shaded.” It is a scene reminiscent of the setting of Jeffers’ own “Apology for Bad Dreams”: “A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees” (CP : ). As Tocqueville’s taciturn host offers provision, the visitor comments, “our gratitude runs cold in spite of ourselves,” for it is clear that he performs his office as a duty of the frontier, and wholly without pleasure. His wife, too, seems drained of spirit, her own energies, like those of her husband, entirely consumed by the struggle with a wilderness that is ready to reclaim the land at the first sign of slackening. Tocqueville comments: “Their dwelling is like a small world unto itself. It is the ark of civilization, lost in a sea of foliage. A hundred paces beyond, the eternal forest spreads its shade, and solitude resumes.”5 As Tocqueville realizes, American pragmatism is rooted in the imperatives 

Introduction

of survival. It takes a certain breed of men—“restless, calculating, and adventurous,” as he describes them—to civilize a wilderness, and such men cannot afford excessive contemplation. Though they partake of the heroic, they are adversarial to the sublime, for it is the sublime that, ultimately, they are obliged to conquer and domesticate. Hard on the heels of the settlers came a generation of plein air painters, the first to escape the studio conventions of academic European art and to join their Romantic compeers in forest and glen. Unlike, say, the French Barbizon school, however, American artists enjoyed the vistas of a still almost virgin wilderness. Their work was the first articulation of an American sublime which took raw nature for its subject and not merely its site.6 At the same time, it was deeply conflicted. American artists were not mere observers of the sublime; they were also, wittingly or not, its surveyors, sizing it up for demolition and recording it for posterity. The paradox of their situation, as witnesses of a transcendental scene that the act of vision itself profaned into history, gave an uneasy pathos to their work. To be sure, as Tocqueville had pointed out, the Mississippi Valley was itself geologically dynamic, the product of natural forces that continued to shape it. No scene, no matter how dramatic, was more than a passing event; all grandeur was provisional. It was still possible to see the guiding hand of Providence in natural as well as human history, as Tocqueville himself did; but it was equally possible to see both as autonomous processes, if not as competitive ones. If the hand of God did not shape nature to the viewer’s pleasure, the hand of man well might. Frederic Edwin Church’s much-admired The Heart of the Andes () took this step. In search of an epitome of grandeur, Church created a virtual landscape, reshaping “actual” sites into a composite that contained at once soaring mountains, fertile plains, wide rivers, and plunging waterfalls. Although the genre of fantastic landscapes was well established in Europe, with Church we enter the modern picturesque, with the human imagination superseding the handiwork of God.7 That Church had rearranged the tropics rather than any American scene was yet another portent. The Heart of the Andes was an act of sovereign appropriation with imperial no less than aesthetic overtones. Manifest destiny had already had its prophet, however, in Thomas Cole, whose The Course of Empire (–) depicted the degradation of the natural sublime by human agency in five monumental canvases.8 Cole’s theme was not the sublime as such but the dangers of hubris in the early American republic. Using the conventions of Claudean landscape and Vico’s tropology of the epochs of civilization (gleaned 



Introduction

by way of J. M. W. Turner), he showed the transformation of primeval wilderness into Arcadian pastoral, its virtual disappearance in imperial, urbanized splendor, and its “repressed” return in the phase of empire’s collapse. In his first canvas, The Savage State, Cole offers a rugged landscape that appears more undisciplined than sublime, with tossing foliage, scudding waves, rearing thunderclouds, and primitive Indian settlements. In The Pastoral or Arcadian State, it has been transformed by cultivation and husbandry into a picture of serenity, the water becalmed and the sky cleared. All that remains of it in The Consummation of Empire, a scene represented by temples, fountains, concourses, and gilded statuary, is a glimpse of distant peaks covered with suburban dwellings, and a placid bay filled with pleasure boats. In Destruction, the bay is roiled, the peaks are bare, and the great city is falling to barbarian conquerors as the smoke of pillage rises into a menacing and almost engulfing sky. Nature is not, however, the victor but merely the scavenger in Desolation, the last of the series, in which a lone pillar juts into the sky and even the neighboring hills seem reduced to rubble. Wild vines crawl up the pillar’s sides, and a pelican nests at its top. But wilderness itself is irrecoverable, and the loss of a second Eden, like that of the first, cannot be reversed. Cole does not valorize wilderness as such in The Course of Empire. Nature is subordinated to history, and degraded in if not indeed by empire’s fall. Its situation is hence pathetic rather than sublime. Nonetheless, something more than human tragedy is enacted here, and the spoliation of natural grandeur adds to the sense of transgression. As a wild, second Eden, America offered the world itself a new redemptive possibility. For it simply to reenact the fate of former empires would be not only a deep disappointment but a kind of blasphemy. Cole’s vision, then, is still rooted in the Puritan conception of American exceptionalism, and the wilderness as a site marked out by Providence. The progress of America’s material civilization, involving as it did the clearing rather than the consecration of that site, led to an anxious preoccupation with what remained. The ever-retreating frontier appeared as a rapidly diminishing stage on which American destiny, whether couched primarily in religious or democratic terms, might still be realized. Following the Westward settlement with their easels, discovering still grander vistas, the painters reassured themselves and their public that sufficient time and space yet remained to fulfill that destiny, even as the very act of artistic representation recorded the reduction of both. The discovery of California’s gold at mid-century rapidly accelerated the 

Introduction

process of settlement. It also led to the unveiling of the site that would become, and still remains, America’s final place, the ultimate symbol of its natural grandeur. Yosemite Valley, a giant, glacier-carved gorge in the California Sierras, was a scene to rival Frederic Church’s synthetic landscapes: sheer cliffs, dramatic monoliths, cascading waterfalls, verdant glens.9 Albert Bierstadt, a German-born and -trained artist whose career bridged the traditions of the European and American sublime, made it his particular subject in a series of canvases that attracted attention on both continents. Bierstadt conceived Yosemite as a “Garden of Eden . . . the most magnificent place I ever saw.”10 It was an Eden, however, from which the human presence was to be banished, not after but before transgression: unlike his other landscapes, the Yosemite series contained no trace of human (or, for that matter, animal) presence. One might call this a pre-Darwinian sublime, the pristine world of creation rough-hewn from God’s hand before the taint of sentient life, which, as Darwin implied for many of Bierstadt’s generation, led inexorably to human transgression, and the degradation of the divine handiwork evident in mass wilderness clearance and commercial exploitation. This Creation of the Fourth Day, as it were, showed rather a world in which titanic forms—El Capitan, Sentinel Rock, and the Cathedral Rocks are clearly visible—coexist with a placid plant and arboreal life that softens their rugged outline and offers a partially domesticated if still imposing sublime. This is a world partly valorized by its closer temporal relation to God—closer, that is, to the first moment of creation itself—and partly by the absence, not to say the negation of man. The climactic work of the series, Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (), offers a dramatically lit prospect in which the descending sun, glimpsed around steep cliffs through a golden nimbus, seems to lead back in time as well as space to the divine source.11 Nature is thus apostrophized, in Bierstadt and in other pictorial, photographic, and literary representations of Yosemite, as a transcendent value, at once the site, source, and symbol of divine manifestation. At the same time, man, formerly the bearer of divine signification and value, is excluded from this vision. If Yosemite is, as Bierstadt saw it, a Garden of Eden, it is one that may be glimpsed only from the outside. Man, having been expelled from the original temple and forever seeking it anew, has found it at last on the final, continental shore, only to realize that he can never reenter it, but only gaze from afar. It is not that his presence would profane it, but that he is profanation itself; the sacred repels him. Yosemite is not man’s long-sought sanctuary from the postlapsarian world, but Nature’s sanctuary from man, the haven denied 



Introduction

him. That he has found and beheld it—the apparition of Eden, primeval and undefiled—is only the seal of his exile. Modern environmentalism, the movement to preserve what remained of the wilderness from human taint and corruption, emerged as a response to such sentiments. Partly the revulsion against the desecration of a “divinized” or at least an aesthetically valorized landscape, partly the attempt to maintain it in the more subtly appropriated form of a “heritage” for succeeding generations, and partly as a means of preserving it as a site of future redemption, environmentalism was fed by complexly interacting and sometimes contradictory values. Robinson Jeffers became its approved poet, an imprimatur placed on him by the Sierra Club’s immensely popular publication of Not Man Apart (), whose title was taken from a line in Jeffers’ “The Answer,” and which consisted of photographs of the California wilderness set against stanzas of his verse.12 With modern environmentalism, or at least the most extreme wing of it, the American sublime entered a cul-de-sac. If the sublime was construed as the encounter between man and the natural world that revealed the divine—and therefore the common participation in divinity that reconciled both—then to exclude or suppress the human was to annul it. In Bierstadt, the sublime remains accessible only as mediated, second-order experience: the spectator is permitted access to the scene of the sublime, but only through its artistic representation. One might argue that the absence of human figures in his Yosemite series invites the spectator to substitute himself as privileged witness. Nonetheless, the terms of his exclusion are clear. Just as the frame of the painting (and the glass covering, railing, or electronic sensor that might forbid access to it) proclaims that one may look but not touch, so its subject communicates a similar message. Denied entry into Eden, the spectator may behold it as a pilgrim, or in modern terms as a consumer whose appetite must be ever sharpened but never slaked. The National Park system, which permits physical access to the wilderness along specified trails or by “lookout point” vistas framed by railing, extends the prohibition and refines the exclusion. In Bierstadt, we are looking, perforce, at a single perspective, but one that represents at least the painter’s own direct experience, which we are invited to share through him and which he has represented for us. We have not beheld Yosemite bare, but he has, and what is offered is at least a record or memorial of the sublime. The modern park visitor, gazing at the prepared vista, sees a simulation carefully crafted from the real thing. He validates his experience by turning to the nearby diorama or postcard rack that faithfully reproduces what he has just seen: the replica of a replica.13 

Introduction

Representations such as Bierstadt’s pointed up the inherent and seemingly insuperable paradox of the modern sublime. If the essence of the sublime was the human encounter with prime nature, it was an encounter that presupposed the alteration of one term of the equation alone. On one side was overwhelming, annihilative experience; on the other, imperturbable magnificence. As a theory of aesthetic (or religious) perception, this did not require the advent of an Einstein or a Heisenberg to reveal its inadequacy. To the extent that the human agent alone experienced transformation, his agency—even figured as mere presence—was suppressed. As a passive receptor, he stood literally outside the scene of the sublime, and was therefore no more a participant in it than the spectator of Bierstadt’s paintings. (We will leave to one side the question of how works of art themselves are transformed, or rather informed, by the spectator’s gaze.) If the encounter of the sublime was not in some sense dynamic and transactional, the sublime itself could be experienced only as nostalgia, a longing for experience rather than the experience itself. The gates of Eden remained closed. The exclusion of the human agent from the scene of the sublime, however, or at any rate the insistence that his experience of it be mediated through barriers that, as in the case of the park, kept him from direct engagement with it, thinly concealed the anxiety that, in fact, the sublime could only be maintained as a fiction because the power of alteration flowed not from nature to man but the other way around. The clearing of the wilderness by settlement and the very necessity to “preserve” nature by limiting or excluding human access made it obvious that the effects of natural grandeur on man paled in comparison with those of man on nature. The natural sublime, as the ground of immanent divinity, sanctified man; by the same token, the wanton destruction of wilderness desecrated nature. Jeffers makes the point vividly through the mouth of the unnamed protagonist of his late poem “The Double Axe”: “The human race is bound to defile . . . / Whatever they can reach or name, they’d shit on the morning star / If they could reach” (CP : ). With these words, the sublime appears to reach a point of negation. The encounter with the sacred is rejected; the temple is polluted, not to say vandalized. Language profanes whatever cannot be otherwise touched; cognition itself is a species of violation, and consciousness, as Jeffers says in the mid-period narrative “Margrave,” is a “contagion” (CP : ). The adventure of the American sublime, however, was not limited by the encounter between individual subjectivity and natural grandeur. Such had been 



Introduction

its principal basis in Europe, where the landscape had long been domesticated and where even industrialization had merely replaced the pastoral. For Europe, the sublime meant a revaluation of the familiar, a new way of seeing what was already known. There was no question of discovering new Edens, but, as in Blake, of rediscovering the Eden already underfoot. The terms of the sublime were different in America. The wilderness had been, originally, the site of redemption, of no more intrinsic value than a stage is without the play to be performed on it. As that first drama receded with the ebbing of Calvinist faith, it was gradually replaced by the contested ethos of democracy, whose grand visionary was Thomas Jefferson. Man’s liberation was to be not from sin but from tyranny; his reward was not grace but freedom; his paradise was not heavenly but terrestrial. With Lincoln, especially the Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, America’s own secular redemption became a universal imperative, and the travail of its Union the template of human destiny. As the struggles of ancient Israel had been a pattern for the pilgrim fathers, so now the nation they had founded, having come to maturity and crisis, was to be a light for all mankind. The great poet of the democratic sublime was Whitman, for whom sublimity resided in himself and his fellows, in man as such. For Whitman, too, the Civil War was a defining experience, the fratricide that seemed to negate the natural comradeship of man and man, but which also called it forth at a deeper level as compassion and solidarity in the face of humanity’s tragic limit, death. Democracy, then, like its Calvinist antecedent, exposed death, and the attempt to transcend it, at its core. Whitmanian gregariousness was a compact against death, and individual liberty, always in tension with the larger community, found its immortality in the triumphant survival of the democratic collective. As heaven was the terminus of the Puritan sublime, and revelation that of the terrestrial one, so history was for the democratic sublime. These, too, were questions that engaged Jeffers. His own Jeffersonianism was of a limited, conservative kind, without the imperializing rhetoric that characterized the Declaration of Independence or the acquisitive policies of Jefferson’s presidency. He was deeply skeptical of all uses of power, and rejected any prospect of redemption through historical process. Indeed, though his poetic engaged the sublime at virtually every point, it was resolutely anti-apocalyptic. His view of all process, whether natural or historical, was cyclical, a vast, recurring chord without final resolution. Jeffers’ rejection of all tropes of finality was hard-won; the powerful un

Introduction

dertow of thanatos, the generalized impulse toward death and disintegration hypothesized by Freud,14 strongly characterized his early work, and remained a part of its deep structure. It is on this ground, indeed, that Jeffers most closely approaches Whitman, as his perhaps darker brother. I have dealt with the Freudian aspects of Jeffers’ work in a previous study,15 but they remain, in part, germane to this one. In construing an Oedipal sublime, Jeffers was not merely reacting to but enriching the tradition of the American sublime, since it was he who first introduced the Freudian hermeneutic into American letters. Jeffers’ Freudianism was mediated by an earlier influence, that of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. What Jeffers took from Emerson was less a doctrine than an attitude, that of the individual confronting the sublime with nothing but native courage and wit, and finding, or shaping, something of himself in it. Such an attitude finally partook too much of the self for Jeffers’ mature taste, and seemed to compromise the resolute monism of his religious and philosophical vision. Nonetheless, the Emersonian hero was important as a model for the transgressive protagonists of Jeffers’ narratives, in whom the quest for divine truth was confounded with the desire to incorporate it. Jeffers found in this the basis of tragic (and Nietzschean) hubris, but his ultimate exemplar was the figure of Jesus, in whom Oedipal transgression and religious striving were inextricably mixed, and to whom he turned repeatedly in his narratives and verse dramas. As Jeffers was the first poet to induct Freudian thought into American letters, so, too, was he the first to reckon with the implications of the most recent avatar of the American sublime, nuclear catastrophism. With the advent of the atomic age, the American sublime came in a sense full circle, linking hands with the Calvinist apocalypse in a vision of the end of history. Like Puritanism, it was implicitly redemptive for a chosen elite, who were now to be not the elect of an inscrutable God but the designated survivors of the nuclear State, which, in the fashion of New England’s deity, appointed life for the few and death for the many. This recrudescence of Calvinist primitivism in the guise of modern science appalled Jeffers, not least for its Promethean arrogance, and called from him a final assertion of divine sovereignty and human limitation. It is the contention of this book that Robinson Jeffers, more than any other figure in our literature, has comprehensively engaged and crucially defined the American sublime. There were, to be sure, interpreters and prophets of it before him, but it was he who gathered up its varied strands into a coherent whole. It might be said that he made his great synthesis only at the point at which 10



Introduction

the sublime had become hypertrophic—a concept to be invoked only with a certain ironic distance, if not, as in Stevens, to be largely inverted. Yet it seems to me that the notion of the sublime expresses a conundrum of modern experience that we have rather laid by than put behind us. In that sense, a poetics of the sublime still points the way ahead for us, and not merely a road already traveled. If the vitality of the sublime is not particularly apparent in American poetry at present—a poetry, for the most part, of small risks—it still manifests itself in other genres, notably painting. Indeed, if we consider it in its full context, it appears deeply interwoven with the fabric of American culture as such. This alone justifies our exploration of it in its most salient figure.

11

1

Heavenly Meditations

I American literature was forged on the anvil of Plymouth Rock. Those whose faith brought them to the wilderness believed themselves to be God’s chosen, the latter-day Israelites whose mission was to prepare a tabernacle against the coming of final judgment. That judgment hung over each of them, and only the unmerited grace of God averted its execution. Faith told the Puritan that his salvation was assured; doubt warned him that it could never be assumed. Doubt was the Devil’s temptation, but also God’s sure prescription against pride and arrogance. To live in the conviction of God’s mercy was to suffer torments unknown to the reprobate. It toughened souls by breaking them again and again. The pride of election gave way, with repeated humiliation, to the deep recognition of unworthiness. In that knowledge alone was the full blessing of grace revealed. So were God’s first children in the New World made. The repeated encounter with a divinity whose countenance was now revealed, now hidden, was the first birth of the American sublime. This first sublime was in many respects a pattern for the rest. It involved a single individual, a site of encounter, and a divine presence. The site was a cleared space. It might be the mind itself, prepared by invocation and prayer. The rhetoric of English Puritanism was charged with images of the Old Testament wilderness, but the godly seeker did not wander abroad in search of the divine; he retreated to his prayer-closet, where he might not only purge himself of extraneous thoughts and impressions, but be safe as well from the constable’s inquest or the derision of the profane. In the New World, however, the wilderness was not metaphor but reality, and clearing space a practical task. Each family grappled with a natural environment at once threatening and nurturing, like the demanding God whose gift it was and whose bounty and obligation it directly represented. Hostile, inclement New England, whose domestication began with the very name given it, was also the sacred preserve of 13

Heavenly Meditations

the godly. The impulse to appropriate it was checked from the very beginning by the divine immanence it manifested. New England was God’s harsh, second Eden, a garden to be entered by reverent toil. This was the foundation myth. America was both a divine gift and a prize to be won, at once given and withheld, a paradise of earthly plenty and a fearsome sanctuary to be profaned at mortal risk. These polarities relaxed in time, just as the Puritan notion of a consecrated community of the elect did in the half-way covenants of later colonial New England, and, finally, in the secular triumphalism of a conquering white race that spread itself from ocean to ocean, and in Jeffers’ words “raped / The continent and brushed its people to death” (“A Redeemer,” CP : ). This was the potent story of a fall from grace and the quest for new redemption, even if the terms in which it was once construed—covenant, election, salvation—were no longer credible, or at any rate no longer bore their original signification. To tell it required recovering some of the moral force and authority of the first Puritans, if not their dogma, their intolerance, and their pride. This meant, to a degree, reconstructing the core element of the Puritan sublime, the sense of the land as the site of divine encounter, but purged of credal presuppositions and responsive to the challenges posed by modern science. We shall see in subsequent chapters how Jeffers approached this task. In the present one, however, I wish to suggest how he borrowed and reshaped the characteristic literary form of Puritan expression, the meditation, as a vehicle for his verse. New England Puritanism had relatively little commerce with poetry and less with fiction, but it produced a rich literature of religious counsel and exhortation, and remained in intimate contact with the literature from abroad that had provided its prototype. The elect soul, shattered by the personal experience of sin and conversion required of each new member of the community, needed continual monitoring, guidance, and support, for the uninstructed conscience was a snare for the Devil. The meditation had an ancient pedigree. In its canonical form, it stretched from Origen and Augustine to Ignatius of Loyola and François de Sales. It was adapted to Protestant requirements in Puritan England and New England, and rebaptized, as it were, in Richard Baxter’s The Saints Everlasting Rest, first published in . As Louis L. Martz defines the distinction between the Catholic and Reformed traditions, the former emphasized the dialectic between God’s omnipotence and his charity: his awful power to crush, his constant will to save. God’s grace was always available; it had only to be sought. Systematic medita14



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tion, especially as defined in Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, was a powerful means to that end. For the Puritan, in contrast, salvation was available exclusively to the elect, while for others only the terror of God’s judgment remained. Accordingly, meditation was a comfort only to the elect, for whom it afforded a prevision of heaven; for the reprobate, it opened the gates of hell.1 To the elect, meditation was not merely a comfort but an assurance. Even the “saints,” the term applied among the godly to signify the elect, might know doubt and trepidation—indeed, were far more prone to it, as the most spiritually sensitive members of the community. The ability to meditate, which involved severe self-scrutiny (the examination of one’s particular sins and general unworthiness) tempered by Scriptural contemplation (the balm of God’s Word), was itself a strong sign of one’s election. As Baxter put it: “Sirs, if you never tried this Art, nor lived this life of heavenly contemplation, I never wonder that you walk uncomfortably, that you are all complaining, and live in sorrows, and know not what the Joy of the saints means.”2 Heavenly meditation—Baxter’s term of art—is not merely a source of comfort; it is also a duty, as with the exercise of any power of the soul. Indeed, it is the highest duty, as it involves the highest power, and brings to focus all the soul’s capacities: I call it the acting of all the powers of the soul to difference it from the common meditation of students, which is usually the mere employment of the brain. It is not a bare thinking that I mean, nor the mere use of invention or memory, but a business of a higher and more excellent nature. When truth is apprehended only as truth, this is but an unsavoury and loose apprehension; but when it is apprehended as good, as well as true, this is a fast and delightful apprehension.3

As the soul’s aim is to strive after God, so it must pursue him, zealously, in every manner by which he may be known. Just as God has enabled us to apprehend and enjoy the world through our carnal senses, so spiritual senses are provided that we may enjoy a foretaste of heaven. The saint may not forgo any part of the banquet that God spreads before him, for, as Baxter concludes, “If in this work of Meditation thou do exercise knowledge . . . and not exercise love and joy, thou dost nothing; thou playest the child and not the man; the sinner’s part and not the saint’s.”4 To refuse any part of God’s creation is to refuse it all. The connection between the legitimate enjoyment of the world through the physical senses and the anticipation of heaven’s delights was crucial to the Puritan sublime. The theme of spiritual ravishment had been central to the 15

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Christian mystical tradition from the beginning, as had the use of carnal metaphors to express it. Spiritual joy was ineffable; to make it palpable to others or even to oneself, it was necessary to invoke states of physical plenitude and rapture that were at best imperfect analogues of spiritual experience, and, in the hands of the vulgar, mere travesties of it. The resulting linguistic tension was inescapable. At one extreme it issued in a Manichaean rejection of the world; at the other, in ecstatic fusion with it. As Robert Daly has emphasized, Puritan praxis fell between these extremes of worldly revulsion and lyric exaltation. On the one hand, the world was the gift of the creator, however deformed by human sin. Its value in these terms was indefeasible. On the other hand, that value was not fulfilled in itself. The ultimate function of the world was to prompt the soul toward the contemplation of God.5 It is only recently that the Puritans’ positive valuation of the natural world has been given its due. Earlier scholarship, neglecting the background of Protestant iconoclasm from which the Puritan tradition emerged, took the paucity of visual representation in it as evidence of its rejection of the sensual. But the Reformed emphasis on the Word makes literature rather than the plastic arts the logical place to look for a proper understanding of Puritan attitudes toward the world. In sermon, treatise, and verse, the world was represented as a gift of God’s grace, albeit an abused one; as the site of the saint’s necessary travail; and as the prefigurement of his ultimate comfort. These topoi were common to Puritanism both in Old and New England, but confrontation with the American wilderness sharpened the conceptual issues raised by the natural landscape. As familiarly known and lovingly mapped as England was, so the uncharted American continent, the savage Eden to which the faithful had been driven by the hand of persecution, presented itself both as a fearsome desolation and a field of wonders. The terrors inspired by the New England wilderness are well documented—they would still echo in Robert Frost three centuries later—but its beauty and abundance found voice as well in Anne Bradstreet, and, even more strikingly, in the Massachusetts Bay poet William Wood, who offered an almost Jeffersian catalogue of: The princely Eagle and the soaring Hawke, Whom in their unknowne ways there’s none can chawke: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  The King of waters, the Sea-shouldering Whale, The snuffing Grampus, with the oyly Seal,

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The storm presaging Porpus, Herring-Hogge, Line shearing Sharke, the Catfish, and Sea Dogge.6

The New World was a harsh land, yes, and populated by predators; but “Princely” and royal ones, the signature of a sovereign God. Its beauty and bounty were, as the poet Richard Steere put it, “Gracious Ernests” of God’s care for his saints, and of “his future love.” The greater one’s responsiveness to the natural world, the clearer was one’s understanding of the divine nature and the more perfect one’s visualization of heaven. In Anne Bradstreet’s words: Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light, That hath this under world so richly dight; More heaven than earth was here, no winter and no night.7

Certainly, the contemptus mundi tradition was alive and well among the Puritans. The godly were told to abjure worldliness, however, not the world. As Steere puts it: When we’re Commanded to forsake the World, Tis understood its Vices and Abuses; For certainly its good is not intended.8

To spurn God’s gifts, in short, was as severe an offense as to embrace the Devil’s snares. To be sure, the world’s beauty was not to be compared to heaven’s, just as there was infinite disproportion between the saint’s felicity on earth and the joys of the hereafter. The absence of a proportion did not mean the absence of a relation, however. Baxter pointed out that Scripture itself depicted paradise “in words that are borrowed from the objects of sense . . . As that the Streets and Buildings are pure Gold, that the gates are pearl.” These images were figurative but not hollow, for the spiritual senses could only be awakened by stimulating the imaginative capacity, and that in turn by a fit appeal to physical sense. Carnal images did not describe, but they did signify. What, though, signified a “fit” appeal? The physical senses were a two-edged sword: while they might be pointed to a higher reality, they were far readier to sink toward a baser one. The paradigmatic appeal was through the Word itself; God was the master poet. But the Word required enlargement, outwardly in sermon and disputation, inwardly in prayer and meditation. Either way, it entailed new figuration. 17

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Puritanism was thus not only hospitable to the poetic imagination, but dependent on it. Spenser and Milton make the case readily enough. Whereas the great Puritan poets of England engendered fictive landscapes, however—Arcadia, Eden—New England Puritanism was tied to the American prospect in a unique and essential way. As Perry Miller describes it: The New England communities of the s . . . . entered into a holy society upon their own volition, inspired by their devotion to the word of God and their desire for pure ordinances; they joined in the migration deliberately in order to found sanctified commonwealths, and by that very act swore a covenant with God not merely as individuals but as a people. The first and unquestioned premise of the New England mind was the conviction that unlike other states these had not come into being through accident, by natural growth or geographical proximity, but were founded in the conscious determination and free will of the saints, who had migrated for the specific ends of holy living.9

The eschatological implications of this could hardly be overstated. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, quoting Cotton Mather, “What seemed merely another worldly enterprise, financed by British entrepreneurs, was in reality a mission for ‘the Generall Restoration of Mankind from the Curse of the Fall.’”10 By the terms of the Covenant, the Puritans became God’s people under the dispensation of the New Testament as the Israelites had been under the Mosaic code of old, and New England was—literally, as John Cotton explained—the new Canaan, a sanctified land for a sanctified people. Hitherto, the elect had been scattered among the unregenerate, polluted by contact with them and suffering with them the wrath of a just God. That was England. But now, by withdrawing from defilement and throwing themselves unreservedly on God’s mercy in a daunting wilderness, they had cleared both the psychic and physical space to fulfill his will. As Bercovitch concludes finely, “It was reserved for Americans to give the kingdom of God a local habitation and a name.”11 The name was New England. The core elements of the Puritan sublime—the praise of God in a redemptive wilderness, the duty of meditation, the metaphorical construction of divinity in terms of the world’s beauty—are almost a programmatic description of Robinson Jeffers’ verse. There remains an even more direct link, however: the man who may be regarded as the last in the apostolic succession of New England Puritans, Jeffers’ maternal ancestor Jonathan Edwards. It was Frederic Ives Carpenter who first suggested the connection between Jeffers and Edwards.12 Their affinities were temperamental as well as genealogi18



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cal. Edwards’ nature, like Jeffers’, was softened by matrimony; he described his wife Sarah as having a sociability and an instinctive rapport with the natural world that he lacked, and, “Uncomfortable with the idle chat of his parishioners,” as a biographer remarked, he “counted on Sarah to carry him through, to close the distance.”13 More substantively, Edwards sought to incorporate the Newtonian science of his day into his theology, as Jeffers would the Darwinism of the late nineteenth century and the new cosmology of the twentieth in his verse. Both men contemplated scientific careers in their youth, and Benjamin Silliman, the foremost scientist of early nineteenth-century America, remarked on discovering an early paper by Edwards on flying spiders that he might have been “another Newton” had he pursued his science.14 The compliment was excessive, but the point it offers is instructive: Edwards did not come to his science as a theologian seeking a rational justification for his faith, but as an enthusiast who never doubted the convergence of science and theology in the same unitary truth. As Miller remarks, he “regarded [science] not as an alien body requiring incorporation into Christianity, but as a language of God by which one could learn to refashion the language of theology.”15 For Edwards, God was manifest in the natural order, which reflected both his creative will and his determination to effectuate it through natural process, and which culminated in the free will—the moral agency—of regenerate man. Accordingly, there was a unique and inseparable connection between divinity and humanity, a refraction of one in the other. As another of Edwards’ commentators puts it, “Since the divine and human mind are related—that is, since the elect reflect both a natural image of their Creator and something of His excellency—whenever the saint turns his telescopic eye within, he gazes upon a moonlike self mirroring divine reality.”16 This view was qualified by two considerations. First, the privileged relation to divinity, although in theory a species attribute, was in fact available only to the elect, for it was precisely the spark of divinity within them that the reprobate rejected. Second, the disproportion between God and man was so great, the contrast between divine glory and human abjection so stark, that even the worthiest of the elect were an abomination. As Edwards told his congregation in his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (one which, according to witness, reduced it to terror): The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be

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Heavenly Meditations cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.17

In his attempt to make human vileness sufficiently vivid, Edwards even sacrifices his beloved spiders. It is not, however, that spiders are loathsome, but merely that humans regard them as such, that makes them suitable as a metaphor. In fact, man alone is vile, and creation is blameless and holy in respect of him: Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon. . . . God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end.18

If humans are granted a share in the divine mind and its inestimable gift of moral agency, they are correspondingly wicked and culpable when they reject these blessings to “serve sin and Satan.” Thus, humanity can appear both as uniquely chosen and uniquely iniquitous, fulfilling God’s edict or flouting it, completing his creation or defiling it. This radical dichotomy—the valorization of man as the capstone of God’s order, his rejection as lower than the least of brute creation—will not appear again in American letters until Robinson Jeffers. As for Edwards himself, he ultimately chose a voluntary exile after being cast out by his congregation, and he spent his last years preaching to the Housatonic Indians—a tribe less corrupt than the elect.19

II The figure who connects Edwards and his Puritan forbears to Jeffers is Emerson, the New England sage who was both poet and preacher. It was Emerson who rediscovered Edwards as a cultural icon and reinterpreted him as a precursor of Transcendentalism. As Perry Miller observes, both men in their separate epochs represented “the Puritan’s effort to confront, face to face, the image of a blinding divinity in the physical universe, and to look upon that universe without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass, and the confes20

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sional.”20 Emerson, of course, was no Calvinist; for him free will was not given man that he might conform himself to God’s law, but that he might search for him in the immensity of a world that bore everywhere the sign of his presence but nowhere the trace of his commands. Jeffers imbibed Emerson thoroughly in his youth, admired him into young adulthood, and showed his influence in his early verse.21 The influence remained, but settled. Behind it rose that of Emerson’s—and Jeffers’—Puritan forbears, mediated and contested by Jeffers’ own father. The anxious, attenuated Christianity of a late nineteenth-century biblical scholar like the Reverend William Hamilton Jeffers could no more satisfy Jeffers’ religious urgency than the hazy formulations of Transcendental Idealism; like Edwards, he looked back through the scrim of the material universe described by science to recover a creed outworn, Calvinism. This is not the place to consider in detail the evolution of Jeffers’ religious thought, for which an impressive study already exists.22 Suffice it to say that Jeffers appears to have had a conversion experience around the end of World War I—of what kind we can only speculate—that cast his mind into its mature mold. This by no means resolved his deeply problematic relationship with his father and the faith he represented; in the sonnet “To His Father,” the note of reconciliation is immediately distanced by the announcement of an independent (if tragic) destiny: Christ was your lord and captain all your life, He fails the world but you he did not fail, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I Father having followed other guides And oftener to my hurt no leader at all, Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides For trophies on a temple wall . . . (CP : )

Jeffers did not deal with the remnants of his filial piety, however, until he created his stupendous figure of sacrilege, the Reverend Arthur Barclay, the Oedipally rampant and God-engulfing hero of “The Women at Point Sur.” Barclay is the projection of everything Jeffers feared, loathed, and rejected in his father; but in the loathing that Barclay feels for himself as a hypocrite and a fraud is the seed of a new self-creation. That invented self was tragic and ruinous, but also liberating, for in casting off dogma and exposing himself to unmediated godhood Barclay was able, as Jeffers later put it in a poem that invoked him, to touch “truth” (“Theory of Truth,” CP : )—as the questing Reverend Jeffers, 21

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who spent his last years going distractedly from church to church and from congregation to congregation, apparently was not.23 In Barclay, Jeffers found a new persona for himself, one of which he was to make much subsequent use in his development of the meditation tradition. Though Barclay is, as Jeffers described him in his correspondence, a “fool” and a “lunatic,”24 he is also something else: a prophet. In creating him, Jeffers created a new role of his own, one in which he both fulfilled and trumped his father. At the same time, he resurrected a figure long absent from American letters, the religious seeker self-exiled in the wilderness. As Jonathan Edwards had turned from his own flock to preach among the heathen, so Barclay seeks new disciples in the isolation of the Big Sur coast. To be sure, his repudiation of the Gospel is the opposite of Edwards’ thunderous call for repentance, but his excoriation of his congregation speaks in the same accents: You are kindly and simple, you made war when they told you to, you have made peace when they told you to. You obey the laws, you are simple people, you love authority. I have authority Here, and no man will hinder me while I make my confession. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You’d swallow The yarns of idle fishermen, the wash of Syria? You are very simple people. It is time to scour off. (CP : –)

The “lies” that Jonathan Edwards wished to scour from his congregation were those of the half-way covenant, which suggested that the children of congregants might be admitted to worship without the direct experience of saving grace. The response to “The Women at Point Sur” was analogous for Jeffers; it was, as he remarked tersely, “the least understood and least liked” of his poems (SP xiii; CP : ), and its reception administered a check to his reputation from which it never fully recovered. This was painful but salutary; as Jeffers acknowledged in “The Bird with the Dark Plumes”: “Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize their blame?” (CP : ). In this and other poems of the late s, a distinct change of tone and diction comes into Jeffers’ verse. In the earlier lyrics he evokes natural process more concretely, and he appears less often to be addressing readers in the plural. Jeffers represents this change of voice as a surprise even to himself: “Am I another keeper of the people,” he asks in “Meditation on Saviors,” “that . . . / . . . the sicknesses I left behind me concern me?” (CP : ). Prophecy awakes in him, slowly and reluctantly, though he knows his message has been rejected in 22



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advance, and that it is wiser to be silent: “A sign is declared in heaven / Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people . . . / I heard yesterday / So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast, / It was hard to be wise” (“The Broken Balance,” CP : ). It is essential to the trope of prophecy in Jeffers that, Isaiah-like, the prophet be spurned or ignored; that great transformation is inexorable; and that efforts to reverse or avoid it are in vain: change can only be accepted and endured. Jeffers’ notion of culture-cycles, as has often been noted, is Spenglerian; but the idea of fixed and determinate world-ages is Augustinian, and was an essential element of Puritan divinity. Puritans especially, but seventeenth-century Englishmen and Americans generally, believed themselves to be living in the “latter age” of the world—a phrase appropriated by Jeffers—and in the imminence of final judgment. Accordingly, it was incumbent on the elect not only to avail themselves as individuals of the comforts of heavenly meditation, but to prepare collectively for the millennium. The Last Days were uncertain; they entailed a final confrontation with the Antichrist, and although they were a harbinger of ultimate joy they would also be a time of trial. Puritan tracts and sermons reflected this theme, and the great Puritan ministers—whom their congregations often received as the typological equivalents of Old Testament prophets—hammered it home. It is with these issues in mind that we may investigate the stance, structure, and content of some of Jeffers’ shorter poems of the s and s. I shall sample six—“Boats in a Fog,” “Hooded Night,” “A Little Scraping,” “Sign-Post,” “The Answer,” and “Going to Horse Flats”—as particularly representative. These poems display the classical structure of the Puritan meditation in compressed but epideictic form. Many others incorporate elements of the basic structure, emphasizing the vanity of civilization and its pleasures, the apocalyptic wrath to come, or the comforts of worldly retirement and contemplation. The most fully developed of Jeffers’ “meditations” display the tripartite form characteristic of the Puritan sermon (subject; scriptural application; moral). In “Boats in a Fog” (CP : ), Jeffers begins with a summary description—and rejection—of worldly diversions: Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers, The exuberant voices of music, Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness That makes beauty; the mind Knows, grown adult.

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Jeffers proceeds immediately to the central and most extended section of the poem, a description of the boats of the title as they wend their way through fog toward the harbor at Monterey. As with the first section, the action begins with a leap: “A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean, / A throbbing of engines moved in it.” But, as Jeffers shifts gears abruptly at the first semicolon of the first section, so he rapidly decelerates here, as the boats, enveloped in their lowering mantle, become “shadows” that move “Out of the mystery” and then back into it, slowed to a crawl as they hew carefully to the treacherous shoreline, arranging themselves naturally in a line behind a “leader,” and “Coasting . . . / Back to the buoys” of the harbor. When the active verb “throbbing” returns toward the end of the section—now as a noun—it has taken on the quality of its element (“The throb of their engines subdued by the fog”), absorbed by the sovereign hand of nature as are the boats themselves. The boats, that is to say, are laid under command; their purposes are no longer their own, and their progress is as ordered and instinctual as the flight of birds as they “creep” back to port under the poet’s gaze. At this point, the concluding section of the poem has been prepared: A flight of pelicans Is nothing lovelier to look at; The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue Against the essential reality Of creatures going about their business among the equally Earnest elements of nature.

The boats and the pelicans have become part of a single great order, and it is that order—not the workaday fishing vessels or the ungainly birds—that is beautiful. It is that ultimate order, too, that connects them with the larger cosmic pattern that includes “the flight of the planets,” and, unspoken but for the unattributed qualities of “nobility” and “earnestness,” the divine presence that embraces all. Thus, through the use of what the Puritan Richard Sibbes called “the holy imagination,” the meditative mind moves beyond sensory distraction through a rapt contemplation of the natural world to a realization of the divine. Very similar elements are juggled in a somewhat different order in “Hooded Night” (CP : ). The natural elements are introduced first, as the wind Moves in the dark ocean The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike, Not to be compared: itself and itself.

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The ocean appears as a direct manifestation of the divine, as Jeffers suggests both by suppressing the antecedent reference (is the ocean the subject, or its “sleeping power” aroused by the wind, or the entire scene, or the natural process it attests?) and by a metaphor made by the refusal of metaphor, the thing that is “Not to be compared; itself and itself.” The blowing wind “breathes” fog over “the huddled world,” extinguishing both ships’ lights and the stars in heaven, and leaving in the dimness of an approaching dawn only the bulking rocks of the headlands, whose primal shapes contrast with the hewn blocks of the pyramids as “the final unridiculous peace” they guard is contrasted with the flimsy Peace of Versailles. “Here is reality,” Jeffers says, in what is perhaps the most unforgiven line in modern poetry; “The other is a spectral episode: after the inquisitive animal’s / Amusements are quiet: the dark glory.” Jeffers ends the poem with a brief evocation of the “Sports and gallantries” with which he had begun “Boats in a Fog,” but which in “Hooded Night” include also the proudest moments of human self-commemoration (the pyramids) and self-congratulation (the victors’ peace of ). These are “spectral,” episodic, and they are immediately annulled in the clinching phrase “the dark glory.” Divinity is present at all moments and in all phenomena, and one needs only the attentiveness to sense it, the clarity to speak it: “Here is reality.” “A Little Scraping” (CP : ) is also in tripartite form, although the conclusion offers not, as in “Boats in a Fog,” the consolation of a divine gesture that embraces boats, birds, and planets in a common significance, but a brief jeremiad that forecasts apocalyptic ruin. It begins with the picture of an “anthill” human culture that has degenerated from amusements to mere “vices,” to which is opposed the anti-Puritan figure of the blind Milton “In his broken temple,” raging “against the drunkards.” But one need not, as Jeffers abruptly suggests, choose between stoic abstinence and vain struggle, for “the time is not a strong prison either”: A little scraping the walls of the dishonest contractor’s concrete Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom. Shake the dust from your hair. This mountain sea-coast is real, For it reaches far out into past and future; It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things.

The long withheld object of the first couplet springs the exultant line: “Shake the dust from your hair.” With that gesture, the perdurable landscape stands forth again, not emptied of human presence but bringing it into proper, subordinate relation: 25

Heavenly Meditations A few Lean cows drift high up the bronze hill; The heavy-necked plow-team furrows the foreland, the gulls tread the furrow; Time ebbs and flows but the rock remains. Topaz-eyed hawks have the white air; Or a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand, Goes through a cold rain over gray grass.

The first half of the passage depicts a pastoral landscape in which the human presence is inferred only; then, following the caesura of the third line, humans are introduced directly: the pair of riders whose purpose—call it implied narrative—is suspended on the cloudy ridge, and, separated from them by the easy sovereignty of the hawks, a woman with a knife in her hand, also bent on purpose, but enclosed as well by the landscape. Not heaven, here, perhaps, but an enactment of the sublime, a realization of the divine in the enterprise of “creatures going about their business among the equally / Earnest elements of nature.” Jeffers then proceeds immediately to the unexpected conclusion that links the poem to its opening lines: God is here, too, secretly smiling, the beautiful power That piles up cities for the poem of their fall And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes.

This is not a god of vengeance, nor one of salvation except on the most limited and harrowing terms; but it is one of tragedy, of the inscrutable purpose that includes all purposes, and to whose will one can only offer praise and submission. It is a god whom Edwards might well have recognized, if not accepted; and certainly a god unlike any that had appeared in American letters since Edwards’ time. Let us consider three more examples of “meditation” from the s, a decade that for Jeffers was increasingly clouded by the imminence of a new world war and which accordingly drew from him a more direct and hortatory statement. “Sign-Post” (CP : ) is a sermon compressed into a sonnet, but the “you” of its address is the poet himself as well as his audience, and hence it is a soliloquy no less than a pronouncement. It begins commandingly—or selfrebukingly: Civilized, crying how to be human again: this will tell you how. Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity, Let that doll lie.

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The poem’s problematic is stated in the form of a declaration: “Civilized, crying how to be human again.” As any reader of Jeffers soon learns, the term “civilized” was among the most negatively weighted in his vocabulary. It carried the burden that “sinful” had for Sibbes, Baxter, or Edwards: a preoccupation with worldly concerns and material comforts; a frivolous indulgence in pleasure and vice; a willful turning away from God. In “Sign-Post,” it seems to become the veritable antithesis of all value, for it is the condition one must escape to become “human” again. This is an apparent paradox, heightened by the use of “again,” with its suggestion that homo sapiens was properly human in its precivilized form and may be in some post- or transcivilized one, but cannot be so as civilized. One must, again, be attentive to the theological underpinnings of Jeffers’ language, for just as it is obvious that one must be human to be civilized at all, that civilization is in fact humanity’s ordained habitation (the cities piled up by “the beautiful power” of God for “the poem of their fall”), so it is obvious in the Puritan schema that sin is the distinctively human act, since all humans, elect or reprobate, commit it, and no other creature can. Jeffers’ use of “human” in contrast to “civilized” is, therefore, analogous to the Puritan notion of innocence and redemption, that is, of a prelapsarian (precivilized) or blessed (postcivilized) state. Even the regenerate cannot return to primal innocence, and final blessedness, of course, can only await the elect in heaven. But they can, as Sibbes and Baxter emphasize, enjoy the assurance of blessing on earth, and through meditation obtain a glimpse of Zion’s glory. Jeffers, in a post-Calvinist age, scoffs at the “harps and habitations” of a Christian hereafter (“Night,” CP : ), but he too offers redemption through meditation—the only redemption we can attain. If, in Baxter, meditation is an intimation of that which we can fully apprehend only in the perfected consciousness of heaven, in Jeffers, it is our singular mode of divine apprehension, the act of praise for which we were formed. In Baxter, meditation is a particular duty; in Jeffers, it is the supreme duty. Jeffers stretches paradox even further when he says that we can become “human” only by rejecting “humanity”: “Let that doll lie.” He means, as we can now see, humanity in its contemporary, corrupted state. Meditation is a means of distinguishing oneself from the reprobate mass; it is also a means of transcending the self: Consider if you like how the lilies grow, Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.

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Jeffers’ transformations of Scripture are distinctive; the injunction in Matthew to consider the lilies of the field is qualified by the laconic “if you like,” for all objects of contemplation are equally edifying; the Jacob’s Ladder is not a means for ascending to heaven but a meditative technique for escaping both the unredeemed, or, more modernly narcissistic self, and the collective which is its mass projection. With desire stilled by divinity and eyes cleansed by the natural world that is its manifestation, one can reap the fruits of meditation: Things are beautiful, your love will follow your eyes; Things are the God; you will love God, and not in vain; For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature.

These lines are perhaps as lapidary a religious testament as Jeffers ever offered. To see beauty is to love it; to love it is to share it; to share it is to become it, and become one with its source. There remains only the return journey: At length You will look back along the stars’ rays and see that even The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven. Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength And sickness; but now you are free, even to become human; But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

The journey along the stars’ rays is a journey back from the divine encounter, and the vision of a divinized cosmos is the cognizance of “heaven.” The process adumbrated in “A Little Scraping” is thereby completed, as Jeffers uses the same metaphor—broken chips—to restore what is now not mere “dishonest contractor’s concrete” but a “mosaic” which can take its place in a larger design. One is reborn, voluntarily, through the basic elements of matter and space (“rock” and “air”) that are the Cartesian extension of God, a process which brings one back to the starting-point of meditation (“Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity”). One is also not born of woman, the mark of our conception in sin. There is an Oedipal subtext in this, of course; but I think we need not burden the poem with further analysis at this point. For the purposes of our present discussion, it is as capital an example of divine meditation—and of meditation on the nature of such meditation—as modern poetry possesses. “The Answer” (CP : ) begins, like “Sign-Post,” in mid-thought: “Then what is the answer?” The question—one which the Puritan saints, too, had asked in their time of tribulation—was how to act in a world that, in the mids, was clearly racing toward destruction. Outwardly, Jeffers counseled hon28



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orable abstention, or, if choice was unavoidable, submission to the lesser evil; inwardly, however, it was more essential than ever to hold fast to the perception of divine reality: A severed hand Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and the stars and his history . . . for contemplation or in fact . . . Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

Again, Jeffers affirms not a simple stoicism that begins and ends with individual dignity—that, too, is a specimen of “man apart”—but acceptance of a transcendent order. Once more, too, he makes a critical distinction by means of a prepositional turn. The last line almost asks to be read, “and drown in despair when his days darken”; musically, it breaks the monotony of consecutive prepositional phrases beginning with or; rhetorically, it heightens the effect of “share men’s pitiful confusions.” But these phrases posit alternatives, not the consequences of a single choice. To be “duped,” as Jeffers says, “By dreams of universal justice or happiness”—to choose, that is to say, an ideology—is to share the confusions of the age. The political true believer simply plays the fool, or at most the tragic actor. It is the agonized neutral, however—the stoic—who will “drown in despair.” Salvation is possible only to him who affirms the “wholeness” and “beauty” of the divine order, above all when that order is most humanly obscured. This last point is dramatized in “Going to Horse Flats” (CP : –), whose narrator engages an elderly hermit in a conversation about politics. The hermit is Jeffers’ stoic, a man disabused of all creeds but tormented by the world’s horrors and almost comically anxious for its news. Flight has only concentrated his imagination and compounded his sense of helplessness; alone in a “nearly inhuman wilderness,” he finds no repose but broods the more intently on scenes of suffering thousands of miles away. The stoic’s meditation is thus the opposite of heavenly; it makes not for consolation but “despair.” He begs the poem’s narrator to read from a newspaper discarded by a stream, and when it has confirmed his worst suspicions of the world’s events yet again, he draws the inescapable conclusion: 29

Heavenly Meditations “That’s enough. They were proud and oppressed the poor and are punished for it; but those that punish them are full of envy and hatred And are punished for it; and again the others; and again the others. It is so forever, there is no way out. Only the crimes and cruelties grow worse perhaps.”

The narrator objects that this view is too “hopeless,” and offers “The Christian way” as a solution, forgiveness of one’s enemies and the return of good for evil. When the hermit rejects this as a long-failed experiment, the narrator suggests “extermination” as the logical alternative. If victor and vanquished cannot agree on peace, then the former might use its advantage to annihilate the latter, raze its records, and destroy its culture: “‘the feud will then be / Finished forever.’” The hermit does not deign to refute this position but merely scoffs, presumably at the idea that hatred can be expunged by atrocity. The narrator, after pausing to contrast the beauty of the scene around him with the hermit’s anguish, reflects: It is certain the world cannot be stopped nor saved. It has changes to accomplish and must creep through agonies toward new discovery. It must, and it ought: the awful necessity Is also the sacrificial duty. Man’s world is a tragic music and is not played for man’s happiness, Its discords are not resolved but by other discords.

The “world” Jeffers refers to here is the Augustinian City of Man, the field of strife and suffering that, in the dimension of time, is history. This world cannot be “stopped” because the forces that drive it—sin, in Augustine, or survival, in the Darwinian recension—are, in terms of this world, irrefragable. Nor can it be “saved” as such, not only because the remedies proposed—codes of ethics, systems of justice—are at best palliative, but, as the narrator suggests, because it is driven by an “awful necessity” beyond its power to control or comprehend, which imposes suffering as a “sacrificial duty,” and has, perhaps, formed it for this very purpose. Puritan soteriologists would have named this the will of God, which ordained suffering as the penalty for sin and offered salvation through unmerited, that is, humanly unattainable grace. Jeffers’ narrator speaks with no such firmness of assurance; humanity is offered only the dubious reward of “new discovery” in return for “agonies” of change. Nonetheless, there is a salvific alternative, for the individual if not for the collective: 30



Heavenly Meditations But for each man There is real solution, let him turn from himself and man to love God. He is out of the trap then. He will remain Part of the music, but will hear it as the player hears it. He will be superior to death and fortune, unmoved by success or failure. Pity can make him weep still, Or pain convulse him, but not to the center, and he can conquer them. . . .

The “solution” is a mitigation of suffering, not an achievement of bliss. This might seem no more than a prescription for stoicism, but for the adjuration to “love God.” The ancient Stoics, like modern existentialists, confronted the absurd. For them, the world was ruled by tychē, fortune or chance, which disposed it more or less arbitrarily. In a universe without moral foundation, virtue could be realized only in the individual. Its incentive was the attainment of ataraxia, the fortitude that steeled one to accept one’s fate. This in turn was achieved by a cultivated indifference to personal circumstance. The good Stoic discharged his duties, be he a slave like Epictetus or an emperor like Marcus Aurelius, without questioning them. There is much of the stoic in Jeffers, of course, but of a Christian kind; he does not prescribe indifference to the cosmos but rather its embrace as the manifestation of divine order. Man’s participation in this order is a passion; his role is “tragic” and his agon a “sacrificial duty.” From a merely human point of view, this is intolerable, a suffering without redemption. The hermit exhibits this extremity, drawn out on a rack between his despairing flight from humanity and his desperate hunger for fresh news of its disasters. The narrator’s response is that man must attune the “music” of his destiny to that of natural process and divine purpose, whose mediating term is beauty; only thus is he reconciled to his fate. This, in turn, echoes the argument of “Natural Music,” an earlier poem in which Jeffers invokes the “music” of oceans and rivers that would embrace “the storm of the sick nations [and] the rage of the hungersmitten cities” if “we were strong enough to listen without / Divisions of desire and terror” (CP : ). The narrator, significantly, keeps his peace, for, he reflects, “How could I impart this knowledge / To that old man?” No one wishes to hear it, for “all men instinctively rebel against it.” Nevertheless, he concludes: They will come to it at last. Then man will have come of age; he will still suffer and die, but like a God, not a tortured animal.

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This, too, is remarkably Augustinian. The world—Augustine’s City of Man—is a field of suffering, and in unredeemed time it can never be other than that. The Christian Stoic endures it only through his participation in the City of God, where faith gives explanation, hope gives fortitude, and the Imitatio Christi gives example. The pagan knows only despair. Jeffers’ pagan is the old man, who has tried Christianity and found it wanting, but has no other “solution.” His despair is lucid, but his condition is still that of a “tortured animal,” harried by ceaseless anxiety and unable to take comfort in natural beauty. To penetrate this beauty to the divinity it both manifests and conceals is, as the narrator suggests, to find repose; it is not, however, to find relief, for Jeffers’ deity permits himself none either. The modern Imitatio Christi, which, as Jeffers says, makes a man “like a God,” is to know oneself part of the larger suffering that is being itself. Redemption is nothing other than this, and eternity simply the momentary participation of consciousness in the divine agon. “Going to Horse Flats” takes not only the classic form of a meditation, but that of the dialogue, another preferred seventeenth-century form. The dialogue seems largely suppressed, however, because neither speaker truly engages the other: the old man makes scant reply to the narrator, who, in turn, keeps his inmost thoughts to himself. The exchange seems unsatisfactory on another level, too, because Jeffers’ sympathies appear clearly to lie with the narrator, if, indeed, we are not simply to regard him as a surrogate for the poet himself. From the standpoint of the meditation the dramatic shortcoming is less significant, since the reader is the object of address and the didactic point is what counts. But the poem is better construed as an interior monologue, in which the divided halves of the poet’s own consciousness are represented by the personae, and the assertion of the final lines is meant to persuade the speaker no less than the reader. The power of such poems as “Sign-Post,” “The Answer,” and “Going to Horse Flats” lies, then, not in their didactic certitude but in the tension of their self-divisions. Like the Puritan meditations, those of Jeffers banish sin—in his case, the sins of personal self-absorption and collective narcissism—and affirm trust (if not repose) in a God-ordered cosmos; like them, they put temptation to flight only to find it soon returned. If Jeffers feels compelled to repeat his theme, it is partly because he is trying to persuade himself.

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III As World War II approached, Jeffers found it increasingly difficult to follow his own counsel. In “Contemplation of the Sword” (CP : –), an interpolated prayer breaks down in complaint: Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart.

Jeffers did not often recover “a whole heart” during the war years; there were fewer meditations and more screeds. In “The Bloody Sire” (CP : ), he wondered whether “Old violence is not too old to beget new values,” and “Invasion” (–) affirmed that “The beauty stands” despite war’s horror, and incorporates it. But the concluding lines of other wartime poems yield to bitterness and despair: “a hare-brained episode in the life of the planet” (“Fourth Act,” ), “Our women [will] uncover themselves . . . for bits of chocolate” (“We Are Those People,” ); “High on the dawn the angular shadow of a sick ass being clubbed to death” (“Dawn,” ). The poems gradually turn away from public speech, reflecting on the folly of prophecy and counseling the poet to silence in the face of events too awful for tragedy and too terrible to speak of: Watch and be quiet then; there is greater grandeur here than there was before, As God is greater than man: God is doing it. Sadly, impersonally, irreversibly, The tall world turns toward death, like a flower to the sun. It is very beautiful. Observe it. Pity and terror Are not appropriate for events on this scale watched from this level; admiration is all. (“Greater Grandeur,” CP : )

This, too, is meditation, but no longer addressed to the imaginary congregation of a readership; it is soliloquy, in which the poet counsels, and argues with, himself alone. Jeffers did however make a grand, culminating effort at public address in “The Inhumanist” (CP : –), a composite work that, itself part of a larger one, “The Double Axe,” contains elements of narrative and meditation, of retrospection and prophecy, simultaneously more fantastic and more nakedly prescriptive than anything he had ever written: in form a Nietzschean dithyramb, in purpose and effect, a final sermon. Twenty years 33

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earlier, he had assumed the anti-persona of Arthur Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur” to warn of a time of coming violence and of false prophets. Yet Barclay had spoken some of Jeffers’ truth, too, and in “The Double Axe,” the poet, now himself on the verge of old age, created a protagonist who was as close to an alter ego as he ever permitted himself. The “Inhumanist”—refusing social identity, he owns to no name—is as a purged and chastened Barclay might have been had he survived to learn wisdom and restraint, and the final lines of “The Women at Point Sur” are almost a segue into the apocalyptic landscape of “The Inhumanist”: When the sun stood westward he turned Away from the light . . . After three days, Having not tasted water, he was dying and he said: “I want creation. The wind over the desert Has turned and I will build again all that’s gone down. I am inexhaustible.” (“The Women at Point Sur,” CP : ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About midnight he slept, and arose refreshed In the red dawn. (“The Inhumanist,” CP : )

The “red dawn” of “The Inhumanist” is no ordinary sunrise, but the aftermath of the nuclear conflagration with which the poem concludes. Writing at the onset of the atomic age, Jeffers was the first American poet to explore what Rob Wilson calls the nuclear sublime, though Wilson gives him no credit for it.25 Unlike his successors in the genre, however, Jeffers’ approach remains within the tradition of Puritan apocalyptic. For that tradition, the apocalypse was a foreordained event, the appointed terminus of history. No one could know certainly its day or its duration, though its coming would be announced by signs, and perhaps by a final age of terrors and wonders, a purgation before judgment. This purgation was not purely spiritual; it involved a series of actual wars with the forces of the Antichrist, typically identified with the papacy and the House of Habsburg. These events, however ineluctable, required active response from the faithful. Jeffers did not of course imagine a final end to creation, or even in the near term to history; nor did he conceive a judgment other than that visited by humans on themselves.26 He did, however, intuit a divine purpose and a divine consciousness active in the universe, even bringing it down to the level of speech in such poems as “Apology for Bad Dreams” and “At the Birth of an 34



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Age,” as well as in “The Inhumanist” (, ). The long train of wars that Jeffers envisioned as having begun in his own time would continue,27 apocalypse upon apocalypse, each a brief flaring on the surface of the planet like the novas that blazed momentarily in the heavens, all a part of the same inscrutable order. The error of his Puritan forbears, Jeffers thought, was to imagine that creation was coterminous with humankind, both beginning and ending with it: “It is not true that the word was in the beginning. Only in the long afternoon comes a little babble: and silence forever” (). Apocalyptic rhetoric had long been a staple of Jeffers’ vocabulary. Barclay had spoken of the need to “scour” encrusted doctrine, and Jeffers had used the figure again in “November Surf ”: “The earth, in her prophetic childlike sleep, / Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast / Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines: / The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous, / The rivers mouth to source pure . . .” (CP : ). Apocalypse, then, was purification, renewal. Nothing was permanent but the God beyond phenomena, and even the uttermost annihilation was only the prelude to new birth. “You Night will resume / The stars in your time,” Jeffers had written in “Night” (: ), and, borrowing a figure from Eastern theosophy, he depicts the ultimate moment of withdrawal and regeneration in “Shiva”: “Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, / Empty darkness under the death-tent wings, / She will build a nest of the swan’s bones and hatch a new brood, / Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed” (: ). This vision was tested by the world war it had portended, and whose horrors obsessed Jeffers far beyond . In “The Inhumanist,” he again invoked the death of the sun and the galaxy: “Vast is the night” (: ). In a later section of the poem he faced the even more radical vision of universal entropy, only to resuscitate the cycle with an affirmation that seems to waver between faith and will: He felt in his mind the vast boiling globes Of the innumerable stars redden to a deadly starset; their ancient power and glory were darkened, The serpent flesh of the night that flows in and between them was not more cold. Nothing was perfectly cold, Nothing was hot; no flow nor motion; lukewarm equality, The final desert. The old man shuddered and hid his face and said,

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Heavenly Meditations “Well: God has died.” He shook like an epileptic and saw the darkness glow again. Flash after flash, And terrible midnight beyond midnight, endless succession, the shining towers of the universe Were and were not; they leaped back and forth like goats Between existence and annihilation. ()

This passage is critical in Jeffers, for it marks his most definitive rejection of the image of cosmic heat-death predicated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an image that haunted the minds of his generation. Such a “final desert” would truly represent the death of God, not the Nietzschean rejection of the tribal deity ridiculed elsewhere in “The Inhumanist” as a mere projection of “human fears, needs, dreams, justice and love-lust” (), but the extinction of the universal creator. This death is intolerable, however, and Jeffers, having echoed and amplified Nietzsche’s famous dictum (“Well: God has died”), immediately recants this despairing vision by invoking the image of eternal recurrence, of inextinguishable hope. Yet atomic weaponry—the new physics—had, for Jeffers, disturbed the cosmic equation in a way that even the threat of entropy could not; it introduced a derangement and disorder that, even if only “a hare-brained episode” in the life of the planet,28 threatened the greater universal harmony. If he could still will himself to find a kind of “ghastly” beauty in the image of Allied and Axis armies preparing for battle at Normandy, likening them in “Invasion” to the “enormous opposed presences” of mountain and ocean, with Hiroshima, “the awful power that feeds the life of the stars” itself had been “tricked down / Into the common stews and shambles” (“Moments of Glory,” : ). Even if the mushroom cloud were only a “squib” beside the galaxies, it signified a Promethean transgression that had dire implications, for it was no hero who had stolen fire from the heavens but a race of pygmies projecting the shadow of their own evil. As Jeffers put it in another poem tributary to “The Inhumanist”: Life’s norm is lost: no doubt it is put away with Plato’s Weights and measures in the deep mind of God, To find reincarnation, after due time and their own deformities Have killed the monsters: but for the moment The monsters possess the world. Look: forty thousand men’s labor and a navy of ships, to spring a squib Over Bikini lagoon. (“What Of It?” CP : )

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The “monsters” are not the sailors themselves, dwarfed by the scene they create, nor the scientists and politicians behind them, but something sprung from their collective efforts, a civilization run amok. Jeffers had foreseen these “monsters” in an earlier poem, “Diagram” (“you children / Not far away down the hawk’s-nightmare future: you will see monsters,” CP : ), and, although he saw too their eventual demise (and even, in “What Is Worthless?” [: ], some redemptive possibility in the nuclear genie), his fears very much outran his hopes. In another postwar poem, “The Inquisitors” (–), he pondered whether a nuclear holocaust might not extinguish all planetary life, and in “The Inhumanist,” God himself, entangled in his creation, is heard to cry, “I am caught. I am in the net” (). These shorter poems set the context for the apocalyptic meditation of “The Inhumanist,” and for the singular character of its protagonist. The Inhumanist lives as a “caretaker” on the former farm of Bull Gore, which had been destroyed in a premonitory holocaust whose story forms the first part of “The Double Axe.”29 His sole companion is a dog, and his sole possession is the double-bladed axe that gives the poem its title. The axe is both symbol and Doppelgänger, at various times in the poem “screaming,” “barking,” “neighing,” “buzzing,” “yelling,” and “giggling”; leaping of its own accord; and even killing two intruders in the night while its owner sleeps. As the Inhumanist explains in a prose passage, “In Crete, [the axe] was a god, and they named the labyrinth for it. . . . It was a symbol of generation. . . . But this one can clip heads too” (). Its two halves, that is, represent the alternating poles of creation and destruction, and in wielding it (though the axe at times seems to wield him, too), the Inhumanist takes on godlike attributes of his own.30 Like Arthur Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur” (and their distant precursor Jonathan Edwards too), the Inhumanist is self-exiled, having “paid his birth-dues” and being quits with the people in a phrase Jeffers recalled in his preface to The Double Axe volume.31 As always in Jeffers, this is a resolution not kept, for it would mean the end of his poetry. The Inhumanist chiefly soliloquizes—the first eleven sections of the poem are a long, broken monologue—or addresses his dog or his axe, both of which “speak.” His congregation is enlarged by the appearance of revenants, trespassers, fugitives, and finally refugees, whom Jeffers describes collectively as “transgressors.” Each is dealt with in turn, and although several express the wish to become disciples, none are invited to remain. The first “disciple” presents himself humbly, as a seeker of

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wisdom. The second, importunate, alternately demands salvation and attempts suicide. When the Inhumanist finally dispatches him with his axe, the dead face that confronts him is his own. The would-be disciple is the Janus-face of his will to power, the otherness he cannot escape but must slay again and again. The Inhumanist may, by stern refusals, reject the role of savior that is repeatedly thrust on him and that, as his disciple-double shows, remains his deepest temptation. He cannot so easily put aside that of prophet. What he sees is not the long downward spiral of an exhausted culture cycle that Jeffers had described in “The Broken Balance” and elsewhere, but the imminence of nuclear holocaust. “Do you see those horns / Coming over the hill?” he tells an interlocutor early in the poem. “That’s the third world-war” (). The image is that of the apocalypse in Revelations ., and the prophecy hangs over the poem until it is fulfilled in its last pages. Witnesses come to tell of “The fire, the blast and the rays. The whiffs of poisoned smoke that were cities . . . // the fire death . . . . end of the world.” Jeffers describes the day as “a burning brazen wheel,” and the Inhumanist, finally lying down to sleep, awakes as we have seen to the “red dawn” of a post-apocalyptic future (–). The important point is that there is a future, and that the prophet keeps faith with it. As Jeffers rejects the entropic death of the cosmos in favor of a vision of eternal recurrence, he rejects too an end to history, for human destiny has not yet run its course. Even atomic war, he concludes, will leave the race but “slightly scorched. It will slough its skin and crawl forth / Like a serpent in the spring” (). The metaphor suggests both renewal and the persistence of sin. Humanity is unredeemed, and has yet to be finally tried: God is not done with it yet. The poem’s fulcrum, as Jeffers himself noted,32 is Section XLV, in which the Inhumanist, riding alone in the natural church of the mountains, hears the “cries” of “future children” in “the enormous unpeopled nave of the gorge,” and in this thronged solitude delivers the sermon that, as he believes, the “transgressors” of the present cannot hear: . . . Moderate kindness Is oil on a crying wheel: use it. Mutual help Is necessary: use it when necessary. And as to love: make love when need drives. And as to love: love God. He is rock, earth and water, and the beasts and the stars; and the night that contains them. ()

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It was symptomatic of Jeffers’ own position that, like Edwards among the Indians, he no longer framed his discourse to his civilized peers but to a hypostatized Other, imaginary in Jeffers’ case, savage in Edwards’. Of course, for the poet this was a literary conceit, whereas for the preacher it was literal experience. Nonetheless, although Jeffers was still speaking to his tribe—the mere fact of publishing a book attested that—he had resigned himself to the fact that his message would fall on deaf ears. In another short poem from The Double Axe, “Cassandra,” Jeffers predicted both the failure of the book and the rejection of his vision; the prophet, he wrote, was “to men / And gods disgusting” (: ). Even a sympathetic critic such as Selden Rodman accused him of sitting “in that properly inhuman stone tower of his waiting exultantly for the Bomb,” and more than forty years later Rob Wilson described him as “all too gleeful” at the prospect of atomic annihilation.34 Wilson’s exclusion of Jeffers from his treatment of poetic responses to the nuclear age reflected the persistent misreading of The Double Axe, for the admissible tropes in his discussion are shock, numbness, despair, and resistance, and from this perspective Jeffers’ attempt to set the war and the bomb within the framework of apocalyptic discourse could only appear, as Rodman put it, “totally irresponsible, politically, poetically, [and] humanly.”34 To approach “The Inhumanist” in its own terms, we must consider the figure of the prophet as well as his message. The Inhumanist is commonly supposed to have been a spokesman for Jeffers, if not a self-portrait in extremis. There is truth in this, of course—was Zarathustra not Nietzsche?—but the Inhumanist is a thaumaturgic figure, too, and even, at some points, tinctured with divinity. His axe, not unlike Siegfried’s sword, is a magical implement (“In Crete it was a god”). On one level, it symbolizes technology run amok, for Jeffers regards modern technē less as an aspect of human mastering than as a Promethean enterprise, epitomized in the sacred, dangerous power of the atom that has now been “tricked down” into the squalor of human affairs. The Inhumanist himself, the wisest of the “transgressors” who populate the poem, cannot control the axe. Weary at last of the “violences” it has brought into the world, he flings it into the sea, but it instantly comes to life again, resurfaces, and returns to its “owner”: [It] flew a long flashing arc, dived gannetlike And breached the wave . . . But presently the sea boiled,

39

Heavenly Meditations The water blackened and a broad corpse came up, it was one of those eight-armed monsters, beaked and carnivorous . . . its bulk was all hacked and mangled, and a fury of sharks Fed on its wounds. But the axe floated clear among the shark-snouts, And swam like a small gray dog in the whirling surf under the gull-sky, and came to the cliff and climbed it, and came To the old man’s hand. ()

The axe returns “tamely” to the Inhumanist after its act of carnage, like a faithful dog; but masterfully, too: it owns its owner, since he cannot dispose of it and it will not be separated from him. These thaumaturgic and Promethean elements (the magician whose powers eclipse him; the hero whose transgression binds him) are reenacted at a third and higher level, however. Section XXIX of the poem presents a vivid and disturbing image. The Inhumanist’s daughter, who has taken refuge with him, wakes in the middle of the night to an “angry noise”: She found her old father Working the treadle grindstone behind the house, grinding an axe, leaning the steel on the stone So that it screamed, and a wild spray of sparks Jetted on the black air. ()

The girl interrupting him, the old man admits that hatred for human evil, and for the divided humanity in himself, has moved him to fury. Jeffers then drives the image to the meaning implicit in its first iteration: He stooped over the stone, the steel screamed like a horse, and the spark-spray Spouted from the high hill over land and sea. It was like the glittering night last October When the earth swam through a comet’s tail, and fiery serpents Filled half of heaven. (–)

The spray of sparks that “jets” and “spouts” in the heavens clearly suggests a kind of celestial genesis. The axe blade that screams like a horse on the hill under a shower of light recalls, in turn, the epiphanic scene in Jeffers’ earlier poem “Roan Stallion” (CP : –), in which divinity manifests itself to the protagonist in the power of an unbridled stallion. The “serpents” figure the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction symbolized by the opposed blades of the double axe itself. In this densely worked image, then, the Inhumanist is a 40



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divinized figure wielding cosmic powers, while at the same time he remains a very human one venting anger and frustration at his tribe. When he wakes in the morning, he tells his daughter that she may merely have seen his “ghost,” for he has “slept like a rock.” This colloquialism is immediately turned, for Jeffers next describes “that opaque gray monster the ocean, incessantly / Gnawing his rocks.” The gnawing of the rocks, like the grinding of the axe, is symbolic of natural process; but if the Inhumanist himself is now by metaphorical association the subject of that process, it must be borne in mind that Jeffers’ panentheistic deity is one who participates in every created form: nothing exists that is not God. The scene ends with a gesture both of cosmic and political renunciation, as the Inhumanist declares: “I will grind no more axes.” It is precisely such a renunciation, however, that will prove finally impossible on either level. God cannot cease to act without renouncing creation itself, and the Inhumanist cannot cease to suffer the ignominy of his human, incarnate condition. If there is an element of the Christ in the Inhumanist’s suffering witness and a touch of Moses in the prophet who hears God’s “great virile cry” across the heavens and whose prayer is answered in God’s own voice, the apotheosis of the poem occurs when the Inhumanist “becomes” God by piercing the fabric of creation and perceiving the divine essence that flows through all things and is therefore the core of his own being as well: Suddenly he knelt, and tears ran down the gullied leather Of his old cheeks. “Dear love. You are so beautiful Even this side of the stars and below the moon. How can you be . . . all this . . . and me also? Be human also? The yellow puma, the flighty mourning-dove and flecked hawk, yes and the rattlesnake Are in the nature of things; they are noble and beautiful As the rocks and the grass:—not this grim ape Although it loves you.—Yet two or three times in my life my walls have fallen— beyond love—no room for love— I have been you.” His dog Snapper Pitied him and came and licked his loose hand. He pushed her off: “I have been you, and you stink a little.” (DA ; cf. CP : )

The Inhumanist does not experience but remembers the moment of apotheosis that is “beyond love” because the perception of identity with the Beloved is complete. This is the foretaste of “heaven’s delights” that is the object 41

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of heavenly meditation, although Jeffers’ sense of actual union with the divine body of the cosmos is, in Calvinist terms, a scandal. Human separateness—the descent into the world of phenomena—returns with the approach of the dog whose “pity” is the imputed wonderment of nature at a creature that inhabits its skin so “loosely” that it has need to seek beyond its limits. The Inhumanist responds by reaffirming the experience of union with all the elements of creation (“I have been you”) and by acknowledging the radical separateness, marked by aversion, that is the condition of ordinary creaturely existence (“and you stink a little”). Jeffers thereby encapsulates the poles of his own thought: on the one hand, the romance of separateness that he had celebrated in “Boats in a Fog” and many similar poems, and, on the other, the perception of the divine unity of all phenomena and the longing for ecstatic consummation in it. The mediating term between them, as Jeffers again emphasizes in this passage, is love, an element proper to humanity alone, and, like everything human, deeply equivocal. As an aspiration toward the divine, love is for Jeffers a means of self-transcendence and even an aspect of divine actualization; as pity or narcissistic self-regard, however, whether individual or collective, it is a calamity for the race. Toward the divine, therefore, love is unconditional, as the final access to reality we call value; toward humanity, it is tempered and wary: as Jeffers had counseled in an early poem, “Shine Perishing Republic,” “be in nothing so moderate as in love of man” (CP : ).35 If a direct aspiration toward communion with the divine was the highest expression of love, it was also the most difficult, fleeting, and potentially illusory. Love could not be a final end or value, for absolute love, creation without destruction, was as impossible to divinity as human love without hate. In the heavens this expressed itself in the consuming fury of stars drawn too close by gravity, figured by Jeffers as quartering eagles: The old man heard An angry screaming in heaven and squinted upward, where two black stars Hunted each other in the high blue; they struck and passed, Wheeled and attacked; they had great hate of each other; they locked and fell downward and came apart, And spiralled upward, hacking with beaks and hooks and the heavy wings: they were two eagles: He watched them drift overhead, fighting, to the east . . . ()

In the end, the Inhumanist’s vision of God—and, it is perhaps fair to say, Jeffers’ ultimate vision, too—is that of a glorified predator whose prey can only 42

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be himself: “What does God want? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “I see he despises happiness; and as for goodness, he says, What is it? And of evil, What is it? And of love and hate, They are equal; they are two spurs, For the horse has two flanks.—What does God want? I see here what he wants: he wants what man’s Feeling for beauty wants—if it were as fierce as hunger or hate and deep as the grave.” ()

Man’s ethical predicates cannot measure God, and human passion is but a pallid reflection of the divine agon. Aesthetic emotion offers a plummet, but only an emotion seized of an inexpressible, and, in human terms, a horrific passion—“fierce as hunger or hate”—could penetrate the divine reality. Jeffers approached some notion of what this implied in a late, untitled quatrain: Eagle and hawk with their great claws and hooked heads Tear life to pieces; vulture and raven wait for death to soften it. The poet cannot feed on this time of the world Until he has torn it to pieces, and himself also. (“Tear Life to Pieces,” BE 59; CP : )

If the poet could, like the self-hunting God, rend himself and feast on his own entrails, then he could “feed on this time of the world,” the epoch of decline in which God showed not his creative prodigality (that had only the appearance of benignity) but his annihilative force (that had only the appearance of confusion). Jeffers continued to insist to the end of his life that God could not be comprehended by human categories, and above all that God was not— certainly as humans understood it—love: He is beautiful beyond belief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante’s Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments: this is the God who does not care and will never cease.36

The God who is “beyond belief ” transcends human comprehension, and therefore atheism, too, is a perennial response to him. Because divinity is in this sense so alien, Jeffers suggests that it is best figured as one of the great predators, whose quality, as he wrote in another late poem, was “not mercy, not mind, not 43

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goodness, but the beauty of God” (“Birds and Fishes,” CP : ). Melba Berry Bennett, who edited Jeffers’ last, posthumous book of poems, The Beginning and the End, chose this poem, and these words, to conclude the volume, and hence her presentation of Jeffers’ career. We cannot know whether Jeffers would have done so himself, but the choice seems fitting: a final, heavenly meditation in which the face of God peers starkly through the struggle for existence. In presenting a fierce, unyielding God of natural process, Jeffers sought to do in his day what Lucretius, Dante, and Milton had done in theirs—to depict a transcendent reality in terms of the best science and epistemology available to him. But in his insistence on both the unapproachable majesty and the radical immanence of this God, he was perhaps more faithful to the Calvinism of his ancestors than they themselves had been. Calvinist orthodoxy had always stumbled on the rock of divine love, for God’s eternal decree excluded the reprobate, and his mercy extended only to the few. By rejecting the categories of justice and mercy and embracing the full implications of scientific materialism, Jeffers sought to pare away the anthropomorphism that, no less than the long-shed doctrines of election and reprobation, had obscured the intuition of divine reality and the task of divine encounter in modern culture. The Puritans had stressed the necessity of this encounter by each of the faithful, alone; beyond any other duty, it was the very object of heavenly meditation as such. This meditation had ceased with the collapse of salvific belief, and humanity, deluded in Jeffers’ view by dreams of secular redemption, had turned inward on itself. Only the restoration of the individual encounter with the divine—which was to say, the restoration of the individual himself—could reverse this disastrous process, at least for those capable of achieving it. In a bitter turn of phrase, Jeffers called this prescription Inhumanism; but it was in essence a return to the unmediated Calvinist relation of person and deity, seen through the prism of twentieth-century cosmology rather than that of seventeenth-century theology. Without the anchor of divinity, Jeffers believed, there was nothing to temper the world-devouring narcissism of the great Romantics, or to halt the slide of what Emerson called “the calamity of the masses” when that narcissism collapsed upon itself. If radical individualism was the burden of the American ego—and Jeffers, undeceived as Tocqueville had been by its surface amiability, never doubted that this was so—it could be borne, in his view, only by the opposition (not merely the spectacle) of an infinitely greater power. Americans needed God more than anyone, but a God whose colossal disproportion and salutary indifference could humble, and, in 44



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Robert Frost’s term, “appall” them. That such a God could not be loved (and in that sense be acknowledged) by anyone other than Robinson Jeffers did not concern him any more than it would have concerned Jonathan Edwards. A God contained by human vision, defined by human interest, was not worth conception for either man. Alfred Kazin describes the genesis of American literature thus: In the beginning at New England our writers were Calvinists absolutely sure of God and all His purposes. He created man to glorify him forever. But never sure of his obedience, distrustful of his innate disposition to sin, God kept man forever under His eye. Each claimed to know the other because there was a covenant between them, a contract. Each was eternally watchful of the other, each apparently needed the other. . . . No wonder that the Puritans in the wilderness, lacking everything but God, were confident to the last that they knew God’s mind.37

Robinson Jeffers, under the eye of his dead fathers and the cope of heaven, sought to recreate this primal scene on the last wild shore of America. For him, however, neither God’s mind nor man’s purpose was given. The only certainty was that each, somehow, was involved in the other.

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2

Transcendental Etudes

I The native tradition in philosophy begins with Emerson, whom Jeffers pointed to as one of his formative influences and whom he continued to ponder to the end of his career. Emerson was a crucial point of reception for post-Kantian idealism in America, and his response to the challenge it posed for the vestigial Calvinist orthodoxy and moral meliorism that dominated early nineteenth-century American thought was to shift the basis for philosophy in Europe as well as the United States. Kant had shown the mind imprisoned in its own perceptions, with reality an unguessable surmise. The post-Kantian sublime emerged as the borderland where the artist and the mystic might test the boundaries of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. For Emerson, however, the notion of straddling frontiers was temperamentally alien. He took himself as both the starting-point and the final destination of his philosophy. Doubt, for him—what he called the “noble doubt,” common to all sensitive minds, as to whether the material universe had objective existence—was not a condition to be transcended, but the ground of all knowledge. What Emerson insisted on, then, was the necessary interpenetration of self and world, soul and God. Reality was inseparable from experience, which in turn consisted of an ever more finely-graded series of perceptions, which, since they unfold not logically but intuitively, as the unpredictable stages of a history of moral growth, reflexively illumine and redefine one another. What might seem contradiction in Emerson was thus to be understood as truth-in-progress reflected from a variety of angles, and what sometimes appeared as smugness was a faith in the essentially moral character of knowledge. The error of traditional metaphysics, as Emerson saw it, was to posit reality as an out-there or an in-here. Kant had tried to have it both ways by conceiving the worlds of essence and experience as separate realms. For Emerson, however, reality was precisely 46



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that which could be affirmed, and affirmation was simultaneously a cognitive, a constitutive, and a moral act. What anchored Emerson’s thought—and, to his recurrent irritation, also fettered it—was the natural world. For Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Kantian idealism enabled the mind to dismiss mere “impressions of external nature” and embrace Spirit directly. To Emerson, the rejection of material phenomena left one prone to “subtility and moonshine,” or, worse, solipsism. One had to pass through sensory experience to find the moral substratum of the cosmos, and, since morality was fulfilled only in action, one had to return to it. If it was not exactly the case that there were sermons in stones, it was nonetheless true that sermons were inefficacious without them. The question Emerson could not settle was whether Nature enclosed or disclosed moral reality. On the one hand, the child fed on the world as his natural sustenance; on the other, the adult who did so was merely cloddish. Natura naturata was something for mature consciousness to penetrate and transcend, even as it remained materially dependent on it. To organize the wash of phenomenal experience was a necessary task, but only a preliminary one. The goal of the mind was, first, self-recognition as a moral agent, and, secondly, the discovery of that self as reflected in the moral doctrine of Nature. Formerly, this doctrine had been presented as the commandments of a paternal deity. To a maturing race, however, the equation of human with divine personality was scandalous. God was a necessary conception of the mind, the authorizing force of both phenomenality and morality. To define this God in and through the world in which he manifested himself was to attain the real and the moral insofar as human cognition could grasp them, and (since cognition was not an end in itself, but a means to action), human agency could engage them. This quest, to which each enlightened person was dedicated, enacted human freedom. Dogmatic assertions about the nature or intentions of the deity could only impede if not preclude it. Emerson’s violent rupture with the church of his youth, his renunciation of preaching, and the final divorce of his Divinity School address, was the testament of a personal liberation, and the remainder of his career was devoted not only to the exploration of that Godin-the-world whose recognition he saw as the ultimate human task, but to a mode of self-presentation that patterned this task for others. It was no accident that Emerson was the first thinker since Socrates whose person was inseparable from his philosophy, so that to comment about either was to involve both. In 47

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depersonalizing God, he personalized—and personified—the quest-hero who sought him. In this fashion, Emerson engaged the sublime.1 The hero who sought the sublime might be seen either as an ego attempting to incorporate the world into himself, or as a sacrificial victim offering himself for consumption by it. Wordsworth exposed himself to the blasts of the Alps; Turner clung to his palette in a storm. Emerson showed that one could court the extremes of experience on the streets of Concord. This was so because the external world could do no more, ultimately, than reveal its identity with the soul’s moral perception of itself. As Emerson wrote in “The Over-Soul”: We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life . . . . these revelations . . . are perceptions of the absolute law. (EL )

The “absolute law” Emerson referred to was the divine origin of the moral sense, and the cosmos as its material unfolding. The sense of the individual self as a rivulet before “the sea of life” did not require an actual ocean; both were only metaphors for the experience of one’s relation to a mighty whole. Similarly, the disproportion between self and cosmos that appeared intrinsic to the perception of the sublime was a question of perspective. Insofar as the world was a construct from phenomenal experience, the mind might imagine itself as equal to or even greater than it. Emerson expressed the point strikingly in the famous account of his dream: I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world. (JE : )

In Emerson’s revision of Genesis, the ego floats free in the amniotic bath of the cosmos. ‘This world’—not merely the Copernican earth, but the sum of material existence as such—appears merely as an offering to godlike man, and knowledge of it not as a temptation but a duty. The world is ‘good’ enough to eat; that is, it is both physical and moral nourishment. Man seems entirely sovereign here, except for the injunction that he must eat: this alone suggests the presence of an authorizing force beyond him, and a moral order implicit in the cosmos. 48

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Unlike the material world of Laplace, Emerson’s cosmos does have need of the God-hypothesis. Without it, he is left only “to wander without end” in the labyrinth of his own conceptions. No kind of order can come from this, since all his imaginings are in this case equally sovereign, and none therefore can be finally determinative. God, then, immanent in matter, present in spirit, is the frame and final content of the cosmos. Respectful of his highest creation, he does not approach it too closely lest he stunt the moral freedom with which he has endowed it. Man, for his part, seeks and enjoys God in the world, but never disturbs him in his solitude. Infinite though their disproportion be, the crux of their relation is courtesy. Jeffers’ most obvious appropriation (and reworking) of Emerson is in his early sonnet sequence, “The Truce and the Peace” (CP : –). The occasion of the sequence was the armistice that ended World War I, an event that had deeply shaken his faith in civilization and forced him to confront violence as a universal fact of experience. The sequence, with its rhymed quatrains, is not yet the Jeffers who found his distinctive voice in blank verse, but it contains so many of his subsequent themes and images that it might almost be considered the matrix of his mature art. The octet of the first sonnet frames the whole: Peace now for every fury has had her day, Their natural order is moribund, they cease, They carry the inward seeds of quick decay, Build breakwaters for storm but build on peace. The mountains’ peace answers the peace of the stars, Our petulances are cracked against their term. God built our peace and plastered it with wars, These frescoes fade, flake off, peace remains firm.

“Peace” is the final order of things; the violence of natural process (including human history) is contained within it, passing disturbances that quickly crack, flake off, decay. “Peace now,” Jeffers repeats through the first three sonnets, meaning the ‘now’ of war’s aftermath but also the perpetual present of its underlying reality. The relationship of this atemporal, perdurable reality to the world of phenomena is suggested in the image of creation as a peace “plastered” with wars as a blank wall with frescoes. The ‘furies’ must have their day, for otherwise the wall remains blank; the blankness must remain as what Jeffers would call in “Night” “the matrix of all shining and the quieter of shining” (CP : ). The arbiter between the pregnant calm of peace and the violence of phenomena is God’s will, which regulates the process as a whole while partici49

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pating in it, since the world is not other than God himself. God literally suffers the world, but is at the same time the only vantage from which it may be beheld. This is suggested in the second sonnet in an awkwardly developed figure: “though purgatory fires were hot / They always had a heart something like ice / That coldly peered and wondered, suffering not.” The apprentice poet stumbles here, mixing his metaphors but in the process revealing the gestation of his thought. ‘Purgatory’ is a figure for the extasis in which God suffers the world, while yet remaining its detached and unmoved core, “a heart something like ice.” This ‘heart’ peers and wonders, a perceiving intelligence that, a few lines further down, addresses the divine totality of which it, too, is revealed as a fragment: “Strong God your charms / Are glorious, I remember solitude.” In Sonnet III, this voice takes human form, and speaks in the persona of the poet himself: In the inner world I have touched the instant peace. Man’s soul a flawless crystal coldly clear, A cold white mansion that he yields in lease To tenant dreams and tyrants from the brain . . .

The integrity of the soul, like that of Godhood-in-the-world, is inviolable, “a crystal coldly clear,” and disciplined consciousness can touch the “peace” that is always instant, always available. Yet, also like that Godhood, the soul suffers the violences that “tenant” it, though not without the consent of the will. The soul is thus a microcosm of the world in which God resides and upon which he acts. This interpenetration is emphasized in Sonnet VI, in which God “sleeps in the mountain that is the heart of man’s heart.” In Sonnet VIII, these images undergo further development, as if reaching for a final formulation: That ice within the soul, the admonisher Of madness when we’re wildest, the unwinking eye That measures all things with indifferent stare, Choosing far stars to check near objects by, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Surely for a strange use He sphered that eye of flawless diamond. It does not serve him but with line and rod Measures him, how indeed should God serve God?

The soul’s “icy” core, like God’s, remains detached from the phenomenal world in which it participates, its own sole function being to measure and ‘ad50

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monish.’ God is its author but at the same time it is his reversed simulacrum, measuring him as he takes constant measure of the world. Sonnet IX begins as a direct continuation of its predecessor: It does not worship him, it will not serve. And death and life within that Eye combine Within that only untorturable nerve Of those that make a man . . .

The “Eye,” now capitalized, is both a physical and a metaphysical entity, a witnessing consciousness that is at the same time the source of its own authority. It acknowledges God, but only to “measure” him; it refuses to worship or serve. Like God, it incorporates both life and death within itself, not as the common temporal experience of dying in the very act of living, but as perennial opposites. These opposites are in turn united with the self-authorized Eye through the “untorturable” optic nerve, which, since it does not carry the pain which is the condition of all sentient experience, is subject to neither. This, of course, evokes the traditonal association of the eye with the soul and the soul with immortality, but with a difference: for, whereas the soul’s immortality is conferred from without, the Eye’s imperishability is its own nature. Jeffers’ own source for what emerges as the master image of his cycle is, of course, the famous Emersonian conceit of the transparent eyeball in “Nature”: In the woods too, a man casts off his years. . . . Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. (EL )

Emerson’s eyeball reflects a tranced condition in which the self is both suppressed (“I am nothing”) and affirmed (“I see all”). Not the self but its grosser, material portion disappears (“all mean egotism vanishes”), and the remnant— the focused yet seemingly effortless attention of the will—is suffused with a sense of the world as a totality, a vantage that belongs to God. Such an experience in fact divinizes the self, although, in thus evoking the sublime, it remains conscious of separation and even of radical diminution with respect to the 51

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whole (“I am part or particle”). In the moment, the self is God or Godlike; but the moment will not last, and the self must recover its material aspect. Jeffers’ appropriation of Emerson’s image may not be fully conscious, for his version of it develops slowly over the course of an eleven-sonnet sequence. The similarities are obvious enough, but the differences are equally striking. Emerson situates his eyeball in a natural although abstracted setting (“on bare ground”), which in turn is entered, or attained, by a passage through the woods. This is more conventionally sublime; the numinous cannot be approached by mere introspection—the visionary’s potentially self-delusive rapture—but only through Nature, the “blithe air” that leads to “infinite space.” Nature is, moreover, continually present, the ground of the self ’s experience. The “currents” of Universal Being that course through the eyeball suggest not a transcendence of natural process but a totalized participation in it. Jeffers begins his journey from no such placid stand, but rather from “purgatory fires” within which “something like ice,” already ‘peering’ and ‘wondering,’ insists upon an inviolable essence (Sonnet II). This then becomes the “flawless crystal” of man’s soul in Sonnet III, perfect within and invulnerable from without even as it admits the promptings of sense. The latter themselves are self-generated (“dreams”), for the soul’s autonomy is otherwise compromised; not for Jeffers’ Eye the reception of “currents” from the ether or the passive submission of transparency. When in Sonnet VIII the Eye is described as staring and unwinking, it is not, like Emerson’s, exposed to the cosmos, but rather a focused gaze that “measures” it indifferently—a posture simultaneously defensive (cognizance without affect, reconnoitering) and offensive (as an act of appropriation). This suggests not a sovereign trust in the universe but radical anxiety in the face of it, a point confirmed by the image in Sonnet V of the defenseless stare of the dead: “eye-pits no light / Enters.” Not to be consumed by death is to exert the vigilant, unwinking sight that holds off the enemy by ‘measuring’ him. Yet the effect is the same: the Eye cannot close. The last two sonnets of the sequence attempt a reconciliation between self and cosmos that will embrace both personal trauma and the vast tragedy of the war, whose full dimension stands out only in the moment of its cessation. Sonnet X, the last to employ the trope of the eye, ends with an affirmation that reinstates its underlying anxiety: I found this wisdom on the wonderful road, The essential Me cannot be given away, The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay.

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The encounter with the sublime (“the wonderful road”) does not destroy the self, which risks (and courts) annihilation in being exposed to it. This is both a source of relief and disappointment, for in discovering itself inviolate the self must also acknowledge that the world, too, is inassimilable to the ego. This “truce” has Oedipal roots, as I have suggested in an earlier reading of the poem (CS –). The Eye is “single” (integral but isolate), and it stands, at the end of the long contest of the poem, as triumphant but nearly shattered (“God cased in blood-shot clay”). Emerson’s eyeball has its own anxieties, but nothing like the mortal struggle suggested by Jeffers’ image. The final description of the Eye does not, indeed, so much resolve as restate the poem’s original problematic. Jeffers affirms its inviolability (“God cased”) but concedes its vulnerability (“blood-shot clay”). Moreover, the affirmation remains an equivocal one. One wants to read “God cased” as an adjectival phrase (“God-cased”) rather than as a subject with its verb, and it seems to me that this linguistic tension is purposive. If we take the latter reading—one reinforced by the fact that the succeeding phrase does make use of the adjectival copula—then the statement as a whole suggests external agency (a God who has ‘cased,’ i.e., sealed and protected the Eye). The adjectival reading, however, suggests that the divine element is incorporated as an aspect of self-fashioning; that the heroic ego still recognizes no author beyond itself. The imperfections of its “blood-shot clay” then appear as the badge of its struggle, rather than the deliberate mark of an ontological inferiority. “Blood-shot” itself can, of course, be read as ‘suffused with,’ i.e., vital, rather than as porous and vulnerable (leaking vital fluid, mortal). When one recalls that the Eye is originally figured as a “flawless crystal,” the indeterminacy, or perhaps irresoluteness of Jeffers’ own attitude is apparent. The poet can neither fully accept nor fully reject the idea of an external deity, and, consequently, of ego-limitation. It is significant that the diversions and distractions he encounters along the road to “Peace” are represented as dreams, or, at best, illusions. This in turn is part of what Bill Hotchkiss has identified as Jeffers’ “Sivaistic vision,”2 and Jeffers does, indeed, offer a strikingly Buddhist image of the deity in the culminating image of Sonnet XI: “The eternal living and untroubled God / Lying asleep upon a lily bed.” In any case, it is clear that, for all the dramatic scenery of the sequence, there are only two protagonists: for Jeffers, only God can be Other. This seems very far from Emerson’s placid, not to say complacent notion of the human relation to the divine; yet, without Emerson’s construction, the form of Jeffers’ religious quest seems scarcely conceivable. In a sense, Jeffers’ 53

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lifework was to give adequate description and substantive content to the idea of God, a task for which only the cosmos itself would prove adequate. That is to say, the ego-anxiety of a poem such as “The Truce and the Peace” was mirrored in an equal and corresponding anxiety about the existence and nature of God, and the scope of his power. This ontological anxiety, for an American of Jeffers’ time and place, stemmed directly from Emerson. God as the authorizing agent of creation had been traditionally perceived in the West under the aspect of moral personality. God (or, in pagan thought, the gods) related to humans as Person to persons; morality was the content of divine nature, communicated to humans in terms of prescriptive injunctions. To pagans, these injunctions primarily concerned the proper offices of divine service and worship; the will and purposes of the gods were inscrutable and peremptory, and the task of humans was to discern those directly applicable to themselves through divination and supplication. The Hebrews made the decisive leap in Western thought not only by concentrating divine agency under a single Person, but by adapting the idea of a legal code to a code of Commandments regulating intrapersonal human relations as well as divine offices. Plato took the further step of identifying the divine Personhood with the Good, thus enabling his Christian redactors to define moral personality as the constant will of God to human beneficence, expressed ultimately in terms of salvation. This process was not smooth; elements of the dark, inscrutable, and even arbitrary deity clung to the Christian conception. These were resolved (but also complicated) by the notion of the Christological personality, which served both as a direct, humanized expression of the divine and as a buffer between humans and the more inscrutable aspects of the Godhood. What Emerson attempted, as the heir both of Enlightenment skepticism and the Puritan tradition, was to rescue a conception of God for his contemporaries that avoided the extremes of both. The New England churches had gradually abandoned the Covenant theology and predestinarian doctrine of their Colonial ancestors, but what remained in the wake of dogma was the image of a paternal, judgmental, and still perhaps wrathful deity. The clergy looked back on this deity with a certain nostalgia, as the anchor of a moral order otherwise ill-secured. For Emerson, however, he was a bogeyman to be dispelled, an insult to mature intelligence that kept his fellow countrymen from assuming the intellectual birthright they had won with national independence. On the other hand, he was equally anxious to avoid the pitfalls of skepticism, which tied morality only to human reason. It was true that the Enlightenment 54



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conception of reason was connected to the placid order of a cosmos that notionally reflected it, but in the absence of an agent that authorized both—for which the God of Deism, itself a rationalist construct, was a pale and denatured substitute—it was not clear how they were related except by analogy. Medieval and Renaissance correspondence theory had linked mind, matter, and cosmos in a complex hierarchy of ontological resonance and value, all validated by an overarching divine order. The reified rationalism of the eighteenth century was scarcely a replacement for this confident unity. If human reason were severed from divine purpose, and individual destiny from salvific intent, what guidance was there for human action in Newton’s laws? Robespierre had worshipped a God of Reason while bathing his hands in blood. If Enlightenment rationality did not provide a satisfactory account of human conduct, it was no more successful in explaining the natural order. By Emerson’s time, long-term geological processes were already understood to proceed from abrupt and catastrophic ruptures, and Darwin’s ‘conversion’ to evolutionary theory was almost exactly coincidental with the Divinity School address. Nature was Other, obeying laws of its own, and proceeding in cycles that vastly exceeded man’s brief tenancy on earth. Emerson’s project, then, was to reconnect humanity with a purified concept of the divine through the mediation of the natural order. He grounded his project in the human because, of the three terms of discourse—the three elements of being—the human was the least problematic. Man, spiritually considered, was a creature of moral aspiration. He sought right order in his conduct, and order in the world. The question to be addressed was whether there was anything in the world that answered to this aspiration. Nature, considered in its physical aspect (including the merely physical aspect of man), did not furnish a reply. It could not be dismissed for this reason, because even in its brute facticity it was the only external evidence immediately available. If the world had a moral foundation, then nature would in some fashion reflect it. Emerson’s attitude toward nature is patronizing, like that of a parent dealing with a wayward child. He indulges its moods, enjoys its delights, but never doubts his final authority. It has something to tell him, perhaps, but it can only confirm what he intuitively knows. On the other hand, morality was the necessary stipulation of God. If human freedom did not reflect divine order, then the concept of God was, as Laplace had suggested, an unnecessary hypothesis, not to say a meaningless one. If the world lacked moral framework, then it could be dealt with in corporeal 55

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terms. It was there; it was a sustaining environment; but it had no claims to wonder or reverence, and its origins, though a matter of speculative curiosity, were otherwise indifferent. Candor required it to be confessed that little could be known about God other than that he was the ground of morality. Attributing personality (or gender) to him was a piece of impudence, like painting a face on the moon. No doubt Emerson’s insistence on this point reflected a reaction against the Puritan image of God as a stern and terrible judge, and perhaps against paternal authority in general. It did not help that this image had softened; a tyrant grown weak was all the more to be rebelled against. Human freedom began in the rejection of divine personality, that is, in the understanding that man had to frame his own laws. If those laws reflected a higher, confirming morality, then man had found his proper way. But the age of commandment was over. However the case might be, then, man was on his own, and as all questions issued from him, so all returned to him. This, finally, was the meaning of the figure of the transparent eyeball. Man was “part or parcel of God,” that is, he both reflected the divine order and carried it within him. Above all, he was conscious of that fact. If nature, too, were valorized by its participation in the moral order, that participation was inferior precisely because it lacked awareness of the fact. Nature’s ultimate value was to give man an image of himself; thus, as Emerson wrote, “In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (EL ; emphasis added). The assumption of a divinely authorized morality was, of course, a matter of faith, but it was a faith that Emerson affirmed serenely, as not subject to doubt. Whereas others of his time sought confirmation of the divine in nature, Emerson found it in himself. To be sure, nature’s beauty, bounty, and “commodity,” to use a favorite Emersonian term that linked the sublime expanse to the Yankee warehouse, did indeed reflect the divine order. As a subordinate manifestation, however, it gave less immediate evidence than man could get by interrogating himself. This did not mean that nature could be simply dismissed, or reduced to purely instrumental terms. Man erred by seeking the divine solely within himself, for he was then apt to confuse the part with the whole, and lose himself, as Emerson put it, in the “labyrinths” of the self. Nature was a necessary corrective to excessive self-absorption, and an essential mediating term between God and man. Reality had a threefold aspect, divine, natural, and human; these aspects interpenetrated one another, and none could be negated. 56



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Puritanism, in rejecting the cult of Mary and the saints, had restored the primacy of God the Father. The doctrine of predestination reduced meanwhile the intercessory role of Christ, who, while remaining critically important as the head of the Church and the symbol of Christian consolation, inevitably lost some of his more humane elements and associations with the devaluation of Mary. With the waning of predestinarian belief, Edwards’ God of wrath lost face as well, and a religion that had depended upon a deeply personalistic view of the relation between the deity and his Elect found itself able to sustain neither image nor doctrine. In this sense, Emerson’s overt rejection of divine personality was merely the culminating step in this process, the final iconoclastic gesture against a God already in ruins. Jeffers’ own path away from traditional religion seems to have been a more difficult and conflicted one. The withdrawal of divine personality implied by the sublime and the absence of it posited by Emerson appeared to Jeffers as an appalling void. It was complicated by the death in  of his father, against whose severity and doctrine alike the young Jeffers had rebelled. This dual sense of loss (and also of guilty liberation) was reflected in the poetry he wrote during and immediately after the Great War, and is best summed up in the sonnet that immediately precedes “The Truce and the Peace” in Jeffers’ own Selected Poetry, “To His Father,” a poem which it will now be useful to quote in full: Christ was your lord and captain all your life, He fails the world but you he did not fail, He led you through all forms of grief and strife Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake That coils in one’s own brain against your calm, That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake With coronal age and death like quieting balm. I Father having followed other guides And oftener to my hurt no leader at all, Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides For trophies on a savage temple wall Hardly anticipate that reverend stage Of life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age. (CP : )

The designation of Christ as the Reverend Jeffers’ “lord and captain” is an interesting choice; it is the Son who leads the (literal) Father, and leads him “Intact” to honored age though he otherwise “fails the world.” Beneath the rheto57

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ric of filial piety, Jeffers thus suggests that the father has been misled, or that he has followed complacently through the “grief and strife” experienced more deeply by others, presumably including his son. This is made overt in the sextet, when Jeffers—claiming his own voice and patrimony with the appropriative “I Father”—both declares independence and describes his own anguished quest. The earthly son has followed “other guides” or “no leaders at all,” thus discarding and finally rejecting any authority not derived from the self: an Emersonian gesture, if hardly the Emersonian tone. The striking if somewhat melodramatic figure of years “nailed up like panther hides / . . . on a savage temple wall” suggests a deliberate regression to more primitive but also more authentic modes of personal and religious experience, modes obscured by a denatured Christianity. It also conjures up an image of the poet as both hunter and hunted, since the “years” nailed up (a crucifixion image, of course) are the poet’s own, and the process has been to his “hurt.” It also anticipates the use Jeffers makes of a similar figure in the narrative “Cawdor” (CP –), Jeffers’ retelling of the Hippolytus legend. The Hippolytus figure, Hood Cawdor, is stalked by the young stepmother who, desperate for his love, dresses herself in the skin of a mountain lion Hood has shot and draws his fire on herself. In this case, the chain of events that ensues leads to Hood’s own death at his father’s hands, a consequence that suggests the penalty for transgression against paternal authority. “To His Father” implies that Jeffers’ own rejection of such authority may have similar consequences, for he cautions himself that he can “Hardly anticipate . . . the reverend stage / . . . of extreme age.” Rebellion and submission are mixed here, too, for as the poet seems to accept that the rewards of age are hardly to be expected for a transgressor, he simultaneously disparages them in a barely concealed pun. The ‘reverend’ stage is precisely what he does not wish to reach, a complacent Christianity settling into its dotage. Jeffers’ rejection of traditional religion, while far more radical than Emerson’s, was thus more traumatic as well. Certainly the path to the Divinity School address was a long and difficult one, and Emerson was well aware that he was exiling himself from polite society and the respectable professions in delivering it. That he bore this with aplomb should not obscure the courage such a step took. Jeffers hardly faced comparable ostracism, although he was eventually scandalous enough to be banned in Boston when a staged version of his “Dear Judas” offended the authorities.3 What distinguished the two men in their rejection of conventional religion was that Emerson, having dethroned the personal deity, slipped easily into his place. The supersession of divine per58



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sonality freed the human one to roam, to speculate, and to reclaim the world as Eden. God remained as the guarantor of a moral order that permeated all of creation, which man freely accepted (and as freely adapted to his own needs and occasions). He was one with the cosmos, and with man himself. This also meant that man, insofar as he realized his moral nature, was one with God as well. The Emersonian Son had seamlessly incorporated the Father. As “To His Father” suggests, Jeffers would not be so easily able to put the issue of a paternal deity aside, nor, as we shall see, to accept so unproblematically the conjunction of moral beneficence, natural process, and human consciousness in a post-Darwinian and Freudian world. For him, the approach to deity through the sublime would not be a confident convergence between elements that already interpenetrated each other, but an act of exposure that risked, if not courted, the annihilation of the ego. If, for Emerson, the morally conscious self was itself the experience of divinity, for Jeffers, God was appallingly Other, the flame from which the self had issued and in which it was destined to be consumed. There is abundant evidence in the verse that Jeffers’ conception of the deity was bound up with unresolved Oedipal conflicts, though of course it could not be reduced to them. A comparison of Jeffers’ experience of paternal authority with that of Emerson reveals striking similarities, but significant differences as well. Jeffers recalled an exacting taskmaster who began to “slap” Latin and Greek into him at an early age, and one of whose few games with his eldest son was to have him run a distance from him and then, upon command, return, like a dog fetching a stick. The relationship would become far more complex (and conflicted) as Jeffers matured, but the mark of early discipline remained, and the trope of “distance” would be critical in his work. (It was also perhaps not coincidental that Jeffers’ younger brother, Hamilton, would become an astronomer.)4 Like Jeffers’ father, Emerson’s was a clergyman, and, like Jeffers, Emerson remembered him with reluctance and a good deal of reserve: But I have no recollections of him that can serve me. I was eight years old when he died, & only remember a somewhat social gentleman, but severe to us children, who twice or thrice put me in mortal terror by forcing me into the salt water off some wharf or bathing house, and I still recall the fright with which, after some of this salt experience, I heard his voice one day (as Adam that of the Lord God in the garden), summoning us to a new bath, and I vainly endeavouring to hide myself. I have never heard any sentence or sentiment of his repeated by Mother or Aunt

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William Emerson pushed his six-year-old son into the sea in an effort to treat a skin affliction; unlike William Hamilton Jeffers, he made no effort to retrieve him, but left him to flail for his life. Emerson thus had Nature thrust on him quite literally at an early age, and that he would seek to domesticate it is perhaps no surprise. His revenge on his father was to convict him of mediocrity, although he condescendingly allowed him some role on the intellectual ladder that led to Emerson himself. As the fourth of eight children in a busy household, moreover, he had some cover from his siblings. Robinson was the first, and, for seven years, the only child of the Reverend Jeffers. Most importantly, the elder Jeffers shadowed all of his son’s youth, living into Robinson’s twenty-eighth year. Dismissal was not to be easy. The two long poems that preceded “To His Father,” the verse drama “The Alpine Christ” and the narrative “The Coast-Range Christ,” display the difficulties Jeffers encountered in seeking his personal and poetic independence. In both poems, the protagonist is a young man whose filial piety is expressed, ‘Christ-like,’ in the quest for an absent God. “The Alpine Christ” is the earlier of these two works. Jeffers never sought to publish it, perhaps never completed it, and, in response to an inquiry from his bibliographer S. S. Alberts, declared it lost.6 Yet it was (or would have been) the longest poem of his career. When William Everson found it in the s among the papers of the Jeffers Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, he estimated the surviving torso to be about two-thirds of the whole. Even this fragment, when published in The Alpine Christ and Other Poems (the only edition in which it is presently available), exceeded, by page if not word count, Jeffers’ longest published poem, “The Women at Point Sur.” Simply by virtue of the effort he expended on it, and the obvious ambition if not success of the poem itself, it compels attention from anyone interested in the genesis of Jeffers’ mature art, or concerned with his struggle for personal emancipation. The hero of “The Alpine Christ” is called simply The Young Man. We meet him, wandering the Swiss Alps in despair over the death of his father, while the Great War rages around him. The Young Man’s personal grief both reflects and is 60



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reflected by the titanic agony of the war itself, and both are seen in terms of the overthrow of the cosmic order as figured in the supersession of God the Father. Borrowing, as Everson has shown, the Miltonic devices of Thomas Hardy’s “Dynasts,”7 Jeffers employs heavenly voices who bear tidings of the Father’s death and the chaotic reversal this brings to earth, where a son’s premature death (that of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria) embroils the powers of Europe. The Young Man attempts a general symbolic atonement by offering, Christlike, to sacrifice himself. The gesture fails, of course, because it requires us to identify this “Alpine Christ” with the actual one, and his earthly father with the paternal deity. Instead, Jeffers abandons The Young Man, incarnating the Son in a shepherd figure, Manuel Ruegg. Descending from heaven, Christ / Ruegg seeks to restore peace and to right the cosmic disorder by a reenactment of the Passion. But his mission, too, is unachievable, because he can neither revive nor replace the Father. God, as Nietzsche had pronounced him, is truly dead. “The Alpine Christ” was an attempt to grapple with the tragedy of the Great War even as it unfolded—an attempt unique in scope and ambition, if not in poetic achievement—but it was, also, a personal atonement for Jeffers himself. The Reverend Jeffers had died in the first year of the Great War, , a fact that linked the poet’s own coming of age with the crisis of European culture. Jeffers himself had studied in Switzerland, and, like many aspiring American poets of his era—Frost, Pound, Eliot—had planned a lengthy sojourn, if not actual resettlement, in Europe. The outbreak of the war forced him to give up this idea, and led him instead to the small artist colony of Carmel on the central California coast, where he found what he would call his destined place, and built a permanent home. Jeffers also lost a first child in : his daughter Maeve, who lived a single day. Although her death preceded his father’s, there is an ominous note at the beginning of “The Alpine Christ,” where a (moribund) God the Father instructs the Angel of Death to “go hastily and touch / The Archduke Ferdinand of Austria; / For he shall not inherit” (AC ). Jeffers, too, had failed to provide heritance, and the matter was much on his mind in “The Year of Mourning” (CP : –), the long elegy he composed prior to “The Alpine Christ.” The poem is dedicated both to parent and child, and Jeffers laments that he has lost both “root” and “firstling fruit,” as if he himself, the unworthy stalk, had been unable to convey genuine generative power: “We stand no more” (). The poet hastily corrects the thought: “I stand, though shattered”; but the suggestion of a castrating blow remains. 61

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Although “The Year of Mourning” ostensibly refers to the loss of both parent and child in its title and dedication, there is only one further reference to Maeve. Instead, the remainder of a twelve-part, sixteen-page poem is an Oedipal propitiation devoted entirely to the Reverend Jeffers. The connection to “The Alpine Christ” is most visibly apparent at the beginning of Section VII: White alpine summits crowned with snow and peace, Islanded high above the deadly flood Of dark and sundering blood, With you we dwelt in the fair old days when still Peace lived on earth; and his most reverend head Lived; and with fruitfulness of high increase . . . ()

The central imagery of “The Alpine Christ” is already adumbrated here: the equivocal notion of a sublime ‘summit’ that is also associated with the father’s “reverend head,” simultaneously an object of quest and refuge, protection, and threat; the secure but isolated peak, set above the “deadly flood” of war but also surrounded by it; the “sundering” blood that leads not to the “fruitfulness of high increase”—the confident virility of the sire, the assured continuance of the generations—but to strife, doubt, and the sense of radical inadequacy that expresses itself in excessive veneration and mourning. The poem even contains the figure of a “young man,” precursor of the poet’s divided persona in “The Alpine Christ.” Jeffers grieves in “The Year of Mourning” and observes himself in the act, a self-partition that is also a self-protective sacrifice. The absent father proves even more threatening than the one present in life, and the son, first offering to recreate the father in himself (“I will upon the world’s dead vacant frame / Retrace his sacred footsteps reverently, / And dream his life back to the power it was” []), then to withdraw from being entirely (“Let me at length go home, O westering stream, / And entering at the issued gate, no more / Be anything, as I was naught before” []), and finally, facing the last extremity of Oedipal punishment and abasement, to renounce the usurped paternity that had brought forth only death and not life. It is Jeffers, then, who must perish that both his father and daughter may live; that is to say, he must resign paternity to where it rightly belongs. What he has sought on the heights is forgiveness for his presumption in being; what he must do is to leap—or, rather, accept being flung—into the Tartarean pit of war: O rather with those millions, O with them Much rather would I bleed and perish, hurled

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Into the monstrous gape And ravening maw of war, so thou mightst live! And she have lived; and thou, O Father, shape The splendor of her opening youth, and give Wise counsel and sweet love, as unto me So unto her, to a much worthier end! ()

Jeffers’ final act of contrition in “The Year of Mourning” is to absolve the father for the unworthiness of the son, who received “Wise counsel and sweet love” but nonetheless proves, all too literally, a broken reed. With the father made sire to his own granddaughter by the son’s negation (or, in the strategy suggested earlier, by his covert withdrawal into the mother), the rent in the generations is repaired, and the son effaced together with his generative failure. These all too revealing lines suggest not only Jeffers’ latent Oedipal terrors, but the difficulty he would face in dealing with the question of a deity. In a sense, the Reverend Jeffers stood in place of one: where Wordsworth might seek intimations of divinity on the sublime heights of the Alps, Jeffers, on the same ground, was overwhelmed by the absent father instead. In “The Year of Mourning,” the world is so far defined and validated by that father that his absence suggests only an ontological void, “Awful, discrowned of stars, naked of light” (). That the father himself had been a servant of God did not suggest to the son that he follow in his footsteps. Like Emerson, Jeffers repudiated his father’s faith, and there is even a touch of contempt in the otherwise unbroken panegyric of “The Year of Mourning” when he touches on this subject: . . . . . . . . . . he indeed not wholly pierced The curtain slack and ceremonial Of misbelieving priestcraft: nay, he twirled Himself the loaf, and made it flesh and God With charms and faith: so mixed with worst is best. ()

That his father (though like many of his generation an anguished religious seeker) had officiated at the Mass, was a source of deep embarrassment to the freethinking son, the only blemish on the “beautiful steep highways” of the elder Jeffers’ mind. At this point, despite his deep responsiveness to nature, the fundamentally religious cast of Jeffers’ own mind was still unapparent to him. Jeffers personalized and even dramatized the idea of God in “The Alpine Christ” precisely because he regarded him as a cultural artifact, an iconic prop 63

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for the action of his story. This “God,” far from omnipotent, is a querulous and aging despot whose indecisiveness suggests the famous Eliotic hesitancy of the Four Quartets: “A frightful interval is slit between / Decision and the act” (AC ). When he wreaks war on the nations in the manner of an Old Testament Jehovah, the result is not to chasten mankind but to unleash an uncontrolled carnage that presages his own demise. Much of the latter part of the poem is missing, but the plot outline is clear. God sends the Son, in the person of ‘Manuel,’ to restore peace on earth. This suggests both an Oedipal and an ontological contradiction, since the Son is charged to accomplish what the Father cannot. It soon becomes apparent that Manuel can offer suffering mankind nothing more than what the Father imminently faces, the “peace” of death. The Young Man accepts it joyously, but, as another “Voice” in the whirlwind exclaims, “O God, to live / Is the whole flame and wind of my desire!” () The modern Christ explains that life is suffering, and that the repose all men long for is to be had only with the Father. Some complain that this new gospel is not the “easy doctrine” () they had been raised in, that men might enjoy present life and life hereafter. Manuel replies that the war itself, far from being set on by spiritual hosts, reflects the universal desire for death (i.e., union with the Father). To the voice that cries out that it wishes to live, he answers simply, “Repent that loose desire”; and, to the objections of another: “Peace is enough; / Peace after suffered toils is more than joy” (). It is evident that Manuel and The Young Man are two figurations of the same persona. The Young Man seeks his father; Manuel comes from him. They are one in their mutual desire to please and honor him, to carry out his bidding, and in their wish to be reunited with, indeed, in him. When The Young Man joyously accepts death, it is as an end to his separation from the paternal identity. He can accept his existence only as an extension of the Father’s; it has no value in itself, and no description except as negation. ‘Manuel,’ too, accepts his errand with reluctance, and as his essence remains undivided from God, so, in part, does his consciousness: thus, while he repeatedly calls himself a surrogate or “ambassador,” at a climactic moment he speaks in the Father’s voice as “I God” (, ). All of Manuel’s strength comes from identity with the Father; separation from him is inconceivable, as it is for The Young Man unendurable. We gradually understand that the tidings Manuel brings are not merely for the end of the Great War but the world itself: that “The Alpine Christ” is an Apocalypse. Manuel himself is deceived, however, for the message he has been given is incomplete. As the nations appear ready to follow him at last, an angel 64

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confides to him that God has perceived, in his waning powers, the end of his own life. Manuel cries that this is “impossible” (), for the Father’s death must either annul his own identity or leave him in the position of The Young Man, incapable of any emotion but suffering, any act but mourning, any condition but emptiness, any habitation but the void. God at first wonders (having lost omniscience as well as omnipotence) whether he is not about to be overthrown by “lawless spirits,” but he soon divines that his slayer is Fate, the one principle to which he as all creation is subject. God has been omniscient, except for the one truth Fate had veiled from him (and with it, its own existence): namely, his own mortality. It is this truth that reveals Fate itself, inscrutable by definition and known only through its act. Once revealed, Fate assumes the character of a foreknowledge, the secret wisdom of the Socratic riddle that all knowledge is memory. As Jeffers’ God says: We are only abandoned By that old power, the immortal, the universal, Of whom we are part;—and are plucked out of it, And scalpelled to the root. We have been a God. ()

The castration imagery reveals the Father to whom the Father himself is subject, but to whom no appeal may be made and from whom no mercy may be expected. Deprived of his potency, “God” retains only the consciousness of his own supersession (“We have been a God”). Fate does not merely annihilate; it first humiliates. Fate is, of course, an old Romantic trope, and, as such, an enfigurement of the sublime. Shelley’s Prometheus faced it in the form of Demogorgon, and Nietzsche’s Superman in that of eternal recurrence. “Fate” in this sense is the residue of divine absence, the intuition of a perpetually veiled will—benign, indifferent, or inimical to human wishes according to taste—beyond the Kantian poiesis. It is the brooding presence behind Hardy’s tales and historical epics. We have canvassed the literary influences behind “The Alpine Christ” (above, n. ). But it may also be suggested that Jeffers found in Emerson’s “Fate,” the first essay in his Conduct of Life, another critical source for his ruminations. One wonders, indeed, whether the first lines of the untitled poem that prefaces the essay may not have been the key to the project for Jeffers’ much larger projected work, “Witnesses,” of which “The Alpine Christ” itself was to have been only a part: Delicate omens traced in air To the lone bard true witness bare

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In Emerson’s own corpus, “Fate” was a corrective to the more robust optimism of his earlier works. Conduct of Life appeared in , at the crossroads of the Civil War that would be for Emerson what the Great War was for Jeffers, and one hears an echo of the political crisis in the fatigued remark that “We are incompetent to solve the times.” The book also followed closely on the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and, perhaps responding to it, strikes a particularly sober and pensive note: [T]he forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea,—are hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity. (EL –)

There is a good deal of strain in this passage. The ways of Providence are, as the traditional figure has it, mysterious, but they are also the surety of God’s beneficence. The “ferocity” hidden in nature, the “huge, mixed” instrumentalities by which it proceeds, and the “wild, rough, incalculable” road it follows, makes the “terrific benefactor” who stands at the end a dubious quantity. Are we, from the human point of view, to take the noun or the adjective of Emerson’s description as the critical signifier? Is it God in his often quite terrifying aspect whom we face, and, if so, to whom and on which terms is he a benefactor? The domesticated, early nineteenth-century world of “Nature” falls away here, and we seem to be back in the bleak wilderness of the Puritan William Wood’s “sea-shouldering Whale,” “snuffing Grampus,” and “Line shearing Sharke” (see above, p. ). In this Darwinesque mood, facing “the terror of life,” Emerson even finds a stoic dignity in the Calvinism he had so vehemently rejected (EL ). God’s ends, which Adam and Eve so wilfully defied in the Garden, are not man’s own. From this troubled beginning, Emerson slowly works himself back to a confident relation to the world again. If Fate is, from one point of view, necessity, circumstance, limitation (Emerson tries out each term without settling on any), it has its own “stupendous antagonism” in power, which turns out to be not divine intention but the oppositional force of mind, in a word human freedom. Nature is partly adamant—a material substratum—but also partly plastic and amenable to human ends; most simply, it is “what you may do” (). If matter can overwhelm us with its brute force, it cannot crush mind, for mind 66



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no less than matter constitutes the world, and at its proudest stretch it may be said that “Intellect annuls Fate” (). Indeed, it is the destiny of man to discover, both in the individual and in the race, how little Fate circumscribes the active will. Emerson’s image for this process shows how much of the repressed figure of the father stands behind this conception: We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate, as children stand against the wall in their father’s house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger. ‘Tis only a question of time. ()

From this pleasant expectation, Emerson teases out a theodicy without God—or, rather, one with a human deity. Evil, he finds, is simply “good in the making,” circumstance we do not yet know how to turn to advantage. Fate is destined “melioration,” and “No statement of the Universe can have any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort” (). Whereas Emerson at first characterizes nature as profligate—“An expense of means to ends,” he says, “is fate”—he now declares that “Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends” (–). This leads to the sweeping assertion of a design that governs all phenomena: “The ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself, the correlation by which planets subside and crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work into finer particulars, and from finer to finest” (ibid.). This sounds very much like divine intention, and Emerson does invoke a kind of deity, a “Blessed Unity,” in his peroration (). But nothing finally escapes the human perspective. Emerson prescinds from his notion of an antagonism between man and fate, for the division between “person and event” is illusory: “Person makes event, and event person” (). When Emerson does at last invoke God, it is to find him within himself. The key to existence, he declares, is the “double consciousness” we have of ourselves as materially limited but spiritually unbounded. Though the individual endures pain and mortality, he must reject his lesser for his higher self: “Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures benefit by his pain” (; emphasis added). This last phrase strikingly anticipates Jeffers’ theodicy, but we must remember that Emerson’s God, though externally present as a moral agency that pervades the cosmos, is realized as such only in the context of human consciousness. It may thus be said that Emerson denies divine personality only to locate 67

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divinity within the human person. It follows, then, that Fate is that which man ultimately has within his grasp, and not vice versa. For the Jeffers of “The Alpine Christ,” Fate, too, appears at first in the guise of necessity, the blind force that annuls personality in its bleak, purposeless triumph. It is this force which manifests itself, in nature as process, in human affairs as death, and which sweeps even God from his throne. As Manuel expresses it, it is: The huge bulk of necessity, the force Impersonal, including all persons, And coursing with the stars, and treading the earth: Fate, the unwearied, the universal, whose power Was to my Father’s, even to God’s, as God’s In his vast prime and noonday to the least And feeblest of mankind.—There is neither good Nor evil in Fate’s inhuman omnipotence, Nor love nor will:—here all things evil and good Included, undersap each other, and blank Their opposites, and being themselves devoured Can bear no witness beyond the to-and-fro That never finds an end; the lift and fall, And purposeless eternity of power. (AC )

Fate is here identified almost wholly with a natural process defined as mere persistence, “power.” Nothing lurks behind it; it has nothing to accomplish; therefore it appears, to human purposes, as vacuity. Manuel’s vision strains paradox to the point of the absurd, because that which is absolute potency is also perfect nullity. The Young Man’s father dies on earth, and God the Father in heaven, one for no more reason than the other: all flesh is grass, and so, too, is spirit. Meaning requires intention and will; but it also requires life. “Consider then,” says Manuel, “how all things valuable, / All will, all beauty, all power, breed from the marriage / Of spirit and body” ()—a very Emersonian sentiment. Spirit alone is bootless, “a weak and wandering flame,” but flesh alone is “mere / Wild carrion” too. Their proper union produces “love,” the “need that beggars Fate,” and redeems the world. Manuel’s own love has hitherto been directed toward the Father, and he conceives his errand to humanity in the same terms. The Father’s death staggers him, but he soon recovers. Love remains, despite the loss of its object; the gospel is intact, and even purified, since it must now be construed not as filial 68

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piety but universal brotherhood. No less than the death of God is required for this final revelation: “To living men / I shall unroll . . . the infinite script / Of the supreme apocalypse, of love / That saints and saves the earth” (). As for God’s power—for Manuel, though now knowing himself mortal too, still participates in the divine nature—succession is immediate and unconditional: “I am his son, and now to me / Transverts obedience” (). Whereas The Young Man of “The Year of Mourning” and “The Alpine Christ” has no function but to mourn, the Son lacks time for even the barest obsequies: O straitened love That found no time to waste itself toward heaven, Being caught and tangled in this teeming earth! So needed here: there it were nothing worth, Its object wanting. Yet I had thought to make Libation of lone tears for his dear sake Between evening and dawn; henceforth there is No dot of time in two eternities For filial grief of mine: importunate And awful human needs so rule my fate. ()

With these lines, the poem as we have it ends. Manuel, in embracing ‘his’ fate, makes it an aspect of his will. This is an Emersonian move, negating fate’s compulsion by assimilating it to one’s own project. Thought must react upon circumstance; in Emerson’s terms, “person” becomes “event” and (therefore) vice versa. We can understand in this sense why there is no room for divine personality in Emerson’s schema; it is man’s instead that must penetrate all of natural process and fill the cosmos. Jeffers goes the literal step further of actually killing off God; the Son who is left is truly, then, the Son of Man, not merely an inheritor or successor but a being self-instituted. The mature Emerson evidently regarded himself in this light, as someone fully emancipated from the mere accidents of his birth and tradition. For the still-young Jeffers, this process was not yet complete, as another early poem, “The Coast-Range Christ,” would indicate; in some respects, at least, it would remain a life-long task. The transition from the figure of The Young Man to that of Manuel, however, represented a major step forward. The key to this was the device of Fate, which, by projecting responsibility for the Father’s death on a completely hidden, unsuspected, overmastering, and “impersonal” force, made possible a guiltless succession. Unlike the Oedipally burdened Young Man, Manuel finds himself blamelessly surprised by the Father’s death. The mortality imposed on the Father is equally 69

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a surprise to him (“we believed / Ourself immortal,” AC –), and, being presumably imposed on the Son as well, constitutes both the act and the punishment of supersession. The Son inherits, but dies as well, thus folding patricide and suicide into a single event. “The Alpine Christ” is remarkable as a poem, but equally so as a psychological document. In dealing with his own repressed emotion and seeking his liberation as an artist, Jeffers ransacked the stage properties of nineteenth-century literature and philosophy, creating a Christological sublime in which his own conflicts could be resolved on a cosmic canvas. One must stand a bit in awe at the depth of struggle this represents, if not entirely at the literary result. Yet “The Alpine Christ” was in many ways to be the seedbed of Jeffers’ mature art, and a poem he quarried both thematically and for individual verse lines (often reshaped, but bearing unmistakable provenance) in later works. The influence of Emerson on the early Jeffers can be further detected in the latter’s figuration of the moral and aesthetic dimension of the cosmos. Emerson, as will be recalled, regarded Nature as a moral as well as a material emanation of the deity. If the material world often seemed obdurate to man’s purposes (or, put another way, a challenge to them), it was also a book that bespoke divine value. Man, in this sense, sought what was already given, for the moral order suffused the natural one, making divine intention and human aspiration merely a matter of congruence. Man’s task was to realize the moral order through consciousness, will, and act, thereby endowing the world with personality. Thus, the equation of “person” and “event” in “Fate” was a completion of each through the other. In Emerson’s paraphrase of Hegel, the moral was the real. In “Ode on Human Destinies,” the last-placed poem of Jeffers’ first commercially published volume, Californians, he seems to agree with Emerson: Fate, that alone is God, can change no more Than the strong traveller may control, His necessary courses toward the timeless goal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . what he wills Is part and substance of the immense design: He is beautiful and great, Being work and will, being child and slave, of constant Fate. (CP : ; )

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matizes as “God” is only a temporary and limited manifestation of it, as is, on a more humanly accessible plane, that of Christ-Manuel. If Fate seems “purposeless” and “inhuman” in “The Alpine Christ”—process without value—it is quite the opposite in the “Ode,” a means of expressing the fixed and constant purpose of divinity. Godhood itself may not swerve from it, since, being moral in its essence, it is absolute and unchangeable. To imagine otherwise would be to impute imperfection to the divine will. The hesitant, faltering God of “The Alpine Christ,” who imagines himself the master of process, is merely an aspect of it, to be discarded when he has served the purpose that lies behind him. The Godhood itself is unknowable, and so presents itself as inexplicable Fate. But the perception that its purposes are ultimately moral gives comfort to the human “traveller,” and by aligning his own nature with that of the unknown God, it raises and ennobles him, making him a unique presence in creation, “beautiful and great.” Nature slumbers through all the violence of process; man alone is awake in her. This is precisely the solution Emerson works out in “Fate”: the moral man, however subject to time and mortality, spiritually bestrides the cosmos. Such a formula, however, could not be satisfying to Jeffers, for it seemed, if not to exclude the tragic, then to render it insignificant. In “The Alpine Christ,” he had projected his own unassuaged guilt and suffering onto the canvas of a world war, and required no less than a divine epiphany to resolve it. Suffering was not, he would discover, an incidental by-product of natural process, but the manifestation of its very essence, and if human suffering were to be redeemed, it could only be in relation to a suffering so vast and final that it beggared all comparison and forbade all approach. There was no comfort in this knowledge. The wise man shrank his sails in the face of it, but the tragic hero was drawn to it, and, by Promethean or Christlike exposure, was consumed in it. The question was what might lead the hero to such an adventure. For Emerson, as we have seen, man’s distinctive value consisted in the moral nature he shared with the cosmos and his recognition of it amid the welter of natural process. In a single leap of intuition, man could bridge the gap to the divine, or, rather, realize the divine in himself. The limitations of individual mortality did not inhibit that wonderful Enlightenment creation, Man, whose duty and whose destiny it was to manifest divinity in nature. Suffering—the lot of mere individuals—could have little place in this scheme, nor could there be any final distance or disproportion between the human and the divine, since it was the task of the former to personify the latter. Jeffers accepted moral aspiration as the distinctive attribute of man, the 71

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specific element that he contributed to the canvas of nature. In the critical early poem “Moral Beauty” (CP : –), he aligned this aspiration not with divinity per se but with other, representative manifestations of natural process—flowers, a heron (one of his heraldic birds), the earth, and the sun. These all possessed their own defining qualities: the flower, simple beauty—that is, direct aesthetic appeal—; the heron, “wind-voiced liberty”; the earth, maternal bounty; the sun, the self-consuming “passion” of its “creative fires.” All, too, were elements in a larger, all-encompassing design: And you obedient walk great paths, and all things draw Up to one endless end, and all endures Or all returns, the law and the law-observing Eternally unswerving.

Man, too, obeys this “law,” which seems purposive but whose “end” is mere endurance or repetition. Man’s moral character seems, in contrast, a frailty, since it requires an element of choice (and therefore possible error) otherwise lacking in nature: These feel their ways and walk in them and fail not; But us that walk in a false dawn deluded Some phantom of decision and free choice A little while deceives.

Jeffers suggests here that the moral impulse may itself be a delusion, a deficiency of will. Man is a thing of irresolution and doubt, having lost the surefootedness of instinct. He seeks to change that which cannot be changed, and achieves, from the point of view of “the courses constituted,” only folly. Yet, however he misconstrues the actual world, he is resolute in this at least; indeed, “indomitable”: The old human and indomitable will, That testifies of wrong and right but still Falls mute toward false and true.

The cosmos has no apparent need of “wrong and right,” and no seeming place for it. Yet man persists in its quest, seeks to organize his existence around it, and perishes for the sake of it. Since nothing is functionless, it, too, must serve, if only for the purpose of “praise”: This small thing, this mere pallor, has its place Like the others, making praise

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Of beauty: O beauty of the spirit of man, Dear beauty of his desire toward righteousness, Fair flower that at the planting of his spirit began . . .

The beauty which the flower exhibits has its counterpart in the moral impulse, and both testify to the beauty of the cosmic whole. The value that Emerson assigns to morality, Jeffers thus sees in “beauty” as a universal attribute. No single entity can do more than display a particular aspect of it; all, together, constitute it; and each, through simple manifestation in sheer being, “praises” it. Jeffers developed this theme a decade later in “Boats in a Fog,” a poem we have already explored. As we saw in that discussion, he is roundly dismissive of the conscious, civilized effort to produce beauty, whether through art or artifice (“Sports and gallantries”). Beauty is rather made manifest as a quality of natural necessity that he calls “bitter earnestness.” When man participates in this necessity, he shares in the result. Jeffers finds such moments in the ordinary rounds of labor that make up the economy of the Big Sur coast. In the case he considers in “Boats in a Fog,” it is a small fleet of fishing boats cautiously hewing to the coastline between rocks and shoals, whose progress through the elements is no less admirable (“nobler” is the strong word Jeffers chooses) than a flight of pelicans or even the passage of planets, because equally purposive. Jeffers’ images here in fact exhibit very different kinds of motion, although he assimilates them to the generic motion of “flight.” The boats in fact merely creep, while in characterizing the regular orbiting of planets as flight, Jeffers introduces—as he often does—a form of pathetic fallacy in the description of astronomical phenomena, thus emphasizing his sense of natural process as exhibiting purpose and not mere regularity. Similarly, he personifies humanity in the figure of the boats; they are “patient and cautious,” in the fog, ‘creeping,’ unsure of direction and feeling for safety. At the same time, they share association as natural kinds, emerging out of a primordial “mystery” they remain at one with. Their indecision, though uncharacteristic of other kinds, is a part of the natural order, and therefore an aspect of its beauty, here given sovereign definition as “the essential reality / Of creatures going about their business among the equally / Earnest elements of nature.” Man’s participation in beauty is thus not in his exception to natural process, but in his conformity to it. It is his manner of conforming that distinguishes him, neither ‘antic’ nor automatic but grave and searching; in a word, moral. Man can find his harbor only by successive, deliberate acts of choice, not because his natural instincts are blunted but because his goals are not limited by 73

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them. The overarching goal is harmony with natural process; but what birds achieve by flight, man achieves by choice. To return to “Moral Beauty”: Because it is our beauty we shall defend Our beauty; this is what the stars have not; This doubtful splendor cast on a desolate spot, This wildflower that God’s watch-falcons forget, It is ours, it is born of us, it is ours to attend; The universal God is in our debt And lacks if we lose it, the little birth Of light we are lonely lamps. Huge, wild, without end Wheel the ageless heavens; we also have our worth.

Jeffers did not discard his early conception as he matured, but restated it. As he wrote in response to a query from Sister Mary James Power in : I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to exist elsewhere in the universe. (SL –)

In Jeffers’ latter formulation, moral beauty is not the whole of humanity’s errand but only an aspect of it; yet he continues to insist that it is unique. The change in his view is the lesser importance he gives to this quality. In “Boats in a Fog” it is the resemblance of the personified vessels to the activity of other phenomena that is finally impressive, not the manner of their difference. But the difference remains: it is the substance of the drama Jeffers will achieve in the mature narratives. Moral beauty is, as we have seen, only one aspect of a more generalized quality that Jeffers perceives in the universe, and which in turn he regards as the visible manifestation of the divine value that inheres in it. The flower exhibits beauty in an obvious way—it is immediately pleasing to the eye—; the heron’s flight is more complexly beautiful, being bound up not only with a visual experience but with the valorization of freedom; moral beauty, the beau geste of the human species, is almost entirely intellective. Yet our understanding of beauty, and our capacity to perceive it in such abstract forms as sentiment and behavior, remains rooted in sensory experience, which is the primary instrument for communicating value. In Emerson, a valorized universe is above all a moralized one, whereas what Jeffers calls moral beauty is, for him, specific only to humans, and not to be predicated of the world at large. In a sense, “beauty” (in 74

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all its forms) serves for him as morality does for Emerson, as the placeholder of value. This is not to say that Emerson is insensitive to natural beauty; for him, too, it is a signifier. In “Fate,” he remarks on “the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow and the curve of the horizon and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the organism of the eye” (EL ). This passage goes almost directly into an early Jeffers sonnet, “The Excesses of God”: Is it not by his high superfluousness we know Our God? For to equal a need Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom Nor the birds without music: There is the great humaneness at the heart of things, The extravagant kindness, the fountain Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise If power and desire were perch-mates. (CP : )

Characteristically, Jeffers extends the conception of beauty to include not merely the pictorial or the sensually pleasing, but natural necessity as well. Yet Emerson offers him the key in speaking of “the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.” The beautiful is not ornament but essence; it both expresses and attests universal value, as translated by the “organism” of the eye. This is good Kantian practice, as is Jeffers’ own late formulation of beauty as “the human mind’s translation of the transhuman / Intrinsic glory” (“De Rerum Virtute,” CP : ; and see below, Chapter 7). Authors are influenced by great precursors not only in what they find congenial in them, but in what is antagonistic as well; indeed, without asserting a ground of difference, they are likely, as Harold Bloom suggested, to remain derivative. Where Jeffers parted company with Emerson was in the latter’s distinction between matter and spirit. In this he was assisted by the challenge of Darwin’s thought and the late-nineteenth century revival of materialism, which will be the subject of the next chapter. He would also, as we shall see, have found 75

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a contrarian nearer to hand in Henry David Thoreau, the alter ego of New England Transcendentalism. Emerson’s response to nature was an ambivalent, not to say a conflicted one. This was unsurprising enough in view of his childhood trauma, but it derived as well from post-Kantian philosophy. In “Nature,” having previously divided the world into ‘nature’ and ‘soul,’ he spoke, as we have noted, of the “noble doubt” that possessed all finer minds as to “whether nature outwardly exists” (EL ). It was a doubt to be overcome, he thought, but never to be entirely relinquished. Matter had existence; it could never have dominion. Spirit was primary, and, as he wrote in his Journal, “every natural fact is trivial until it becomes symbolical or moral” (JE : ). Elsewhere, he expanded on the theme: To the rude it seems as if matter had absolute existence, existed from an intrinsic necessity. The first effect of thought is to make us sensible that spirit exists from an intrinsic necessity, that matter has a merely phenomenal or accidental being, being created from spirit, or being the manifestation of spirit. (JE : )

This suggests a gloss on the comment in “Fate” that the universe lay under a “necessity of beauty.” Beauty was matter animated by spirit, an effect to which matter submitted as clay to the potter’s hand. The moral, aesthetic, and “symbolical” subordination of matter to spirit, its status as mere phenomenal manifestation, made it ontologically dubious as such. Emerson pursued this theme in the ‘noble doubt’ passage: “The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end,—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man?” (EL ) We are back with this in Plato’s cave, except for the hint that the inhabitants of the cave may have it right after all—or, rather, that the cave itself, like the transparent eyeball, is only the thinnest of membranes separating appearance from reality. In her harsher moods, Nature is a bogeyman; in her milder ones, a child’s delight. Emerson records his intense pleasure in crossing Boston Common under the stars, and allows that he “expand[s] and live[s] in the warm day like corn and melon.” This is the tribute that spirit offers to matter; but it is a tribute downward, a condescension. One accepts it without endowing it with independent value, for, in itself, it has none. A passage in the Journals suggests both the abiding influence of Emerson 76



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on Jeffers, and also their point of separation. Emerson contemplates a natural scene: The river flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite, collective beauty which refuses to be analyzed. Nothing is beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole. (JE : –)

In some respects, this passage might almost be taken for the Jeffersian imperative. The whole burden of Jeffers’ mature poetry is that the universe is beautiful as such and as a whole, being a vector of divine value, and that all seeming ugliness—even its most problematic case, human ugliness—is, from the perspective of the whole, reconciled in the beauty of a final design. There are innumerable passages that attest this; the best-known, perhaps, being “The Answer” (CP : ; quoted above, p. 29). Emerson does not, in fact, insist on such constant affirmation; there is much in gross nature, he suggests, that the spiritual man must reject or at any rate transcend. It is easy enough to see beauty in a flowing river, and in an abundant mood to project particular beauty onto a universal plane. But Emerson does not admire the natural calamities he depicts in the early sections of “Fate,” and he does not, as we have seen, admire brute matter (or brute humans) as such. He would certainly not attempt to admire the severed hand Jeffers invokes in “The Answer.” Despite his rejection of Christian trappings, he cannot rid himself of the sense of the world as fallen, a contested ground in which spirit, simultaneously penetrating matter and imprisoned in it, struggles continuously to emerge. “The river flowed brimful,” he says, “and I philosophised upon this”—there is not the slightest description of an actual river, and had Emerson simply imagined rather than observed one, the contemplative result could well have been the same. For Jeffers, the phenomenal world was the ground of his art, and its depiction and praise the principal task of the poet. Every aspect of that world was equally imbued with value, and every element in it a direct manifestation of divinity. To describe the flight of a heron (or, for that matter, the feeding habits of a killer whale) was, therefore, to praise the deity and to perform an office of worship. This was in the highest sense a moral responsibility as well. It meant precise, almost clinical observation without any taint of repugnance or sentimentality—that is, without censure. It was, in short, a sustained application of the scientific attitude, with the added prescription that the observation be not value-neutral but value-positive. The poem “Oh Lovely Rock” offers a purposefully heightened sample. The poet is camping beneath a sheer rock wall in a 77

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gorge, and stokes his fire: The revived flame Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall 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. (CP : –)

Jeffers’ approach to the rock is tentative and indirect, as if discovery must unfold slowly and piecemeal in the light of the night fire, whose “breath” reminds us of the rock’s origin in flame. It is almost as though Jeffers is reluctant to share the moment in which ordinary vision (the “Nothing strange”) becomes the second sight of revelation (“I cannot / Tell you how strange”). Thus is a common mineral compound, worked through aeons of process, defamiliarized as sublime encounter, as if the poet “were / Seeing rock for the first time.” The flame offers access to temporal reversal, as though leading the “eyes and mind” back to the source of the rock, “real and bodily / And living.” For the moment, this synoptic view suggests the “passion” and “nobility” of natural process, embodied in a single object of contemplation. The poet’s vision, that is, transcends its immediate object, but without losing sight of it; the rock is still present in all its particularity even as its essence and its destiny are revealed. Nature, for Emerson, is the “NOT-ME” the self seeks to appropriate, and whose irreducible otherness is tamed by reducing it to a moral exemplum; in contrast, Jeffers seeks the intensest possible experience of otherness, of alienation, as if only by self-abnegation can one gain in-sight and knowledge. If, then, Jeffers affirms with Emerson a value that permeates the universe, he parts company with him in refusing to devalorize any element or aspect of it. Emerson, that is to say, is a classic dualist, defining the world in terms of the opposition between higher and lower, good and evil, the moral and the material. For him, the task of man is aspiration toward the former categories, and 78



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transcendence of the latter ones. Jeffers, a strict monist in the mold of Lucretius and Spinoza, rejects all such distinctions. For him, the task of man is not to choose the world, but to accept it.

II If Jeffers gradually weaned himself from Emerson’s influence, so too did Emerson’s first protégé, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was philosophically eclectic; “a mystic,” as he declared, “a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot” (JT ..). If Emerson took the colossal “NOT-ME” of Nature as a challenge, Thoreau saw in it a comfort: I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. . . . If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself. I should lose all hope . . . . Nature is a prairie for outlaws. (W : –)

Thoreau conjures up three different images of Nature here. It is partly a retreat from man, that is, a place secluded from him, where human rules do not prevail. At the same time, it is an imaginative space for “outlaws” who do not wish to obey those rules either, at least as constant moral obligation. This space cannot, by definition, be colonized; it is a place for sojourn, or at most temporary encampment. Finally, it is an intractable arena, inhospitable to human purposes. Yet it is not simply apart from man, characterless in itself, but a place in which “a different kind of right prevails.” There is, Thoreau suggests, a moral order in Nature, a “fate going on / Outside our fates” as Jeffers puts it in “Oh Lovely Rock,” inassimilable and incomprehensible to man, but “right” in the sense of appropriate to its own condition. Whereas, then, Emerson responds to the apparent puniness of man against the cosmos by suggesting that his stature as a moral being makes him coeval and coequal with it (if not, indeed, its master), Thoreau wishes to reduce him, at least rhetorically: “In order to avoid delusions, I would fain let man go by and behold a universe in which man is but as a grain of sand . . . I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect here is infinite. It is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me. When I reflect, I find that there is other than me” (W : –). Thoreau plays tellingly on the meaning of ‘reflect’; rather than being the 79

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object of reflection, man himself serves as a reflective agency, giving the universe back to itself through cogitation, the operation of consciousness. This faculty has little value as such (just as a mirror’s value is only in its capacity to reflect that which is other than itself), and should not “absorb much of the attention.” Indeed, since man is “but the place where I stand” and from which the universe is best observed, it would make as little sense to concentrate on him as it would to stare at the ground from a vista point. From the standpoint of the sublime, whose terms he attempts to reinstate after Emerson’s depreciation of the physical world, Thoreau all but effaces the human subject in favor of the natural prospect in this passage. In more ecstatic moments, he would testify to a sense of heightened participation in creation that, ‘delusively’ or not, at least temporarily effaced the distinction between observer and observed. He certainly cherished these moments, and we may perhaps catch a reflection of Thoreauvian mysticism in Onorio Vasquez, the visionary shepherd who threads in and out of Jeffers’ mid-period narratives, and who regards the phantom images he periodically sees in the skies as the “jewels” of his life. But Thoreau rarely strayed from the discipline of consciousness, which, sharpened by practical toil, he regarded as both the condition and duty of man. Jeffers, too, regarded consciousness as the distinctively human attribute: But man is conscious, He brings the world to focus in a feeling brain, In a net of nerves catches the splendor of things, Breaks the sonambulism of nature . . . his distinction perhaps, Hardly his advantage. (CP : )

No more for Jeffers than for Thoreau was consciousness an end in itself, but a mode of reflection for the encompassing glory about it, and, perhaps, a unique means of actualizing it. In Thoreau, this means was a diligent attentiveness that might yield (but not long dwell in or succumb to) ecstatic states of perception; for Jeffers, it was expressed through tragedy. Although Jeffers valorized tragedy—and humanity through it—his view of it, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, was decidedly unsentimental. For him, as for the Greeks, it expressed not the pathos of the human condition but its excess. It was, in short, a disease of consciousness. If disciplined, scientific consciousness of the sort Thoreau too prized was a difficult and admirable quality; but it was constantly vulnerable to the extremes of introspection on the 80



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one hand, and afflatus on the other. The former led to narcissistic self-preoccupation and incest, literal or figurative; the latter to ego aggrandizement, an engulfment of the world by the self. In both cases, consciousness then served not, in Thoreau’s image, to reflect the world, or, in Jeffers’ not dissimilar one, to focus it, but rather to distort it, as an excessively curved mirror might. This produced generally uninteresting results—the funhouse mirror, the madman taking himself for Napoleon—but also, to the controlled eye of the artist, tragic vision. The prototypic tragedy, Oedipus Rex, involved both elements of inversion and afflatus; Oedipus, who unwittingingly (but gratifyingly) sleeps with his mother, also exhibits the vaunting self-projection the Greeks called hubris. Jeffers deliberately used both elements in constructing his first genuinely tragic protagonist, Tamar, who, in the poem that bears her name, seeks to annul her incestuous ancestry (and, with it, the temporal belatedness that balks her assertion of will) by purgative acts of union with her father and brother that will enable her, as she says, to undo past time and make her the authorizing agent of herself (CP : ). This is madness, assuredly; but it is also, in Jeffers’ intense poetic realization of it, tragic aspiration. Here, again, Jeffers shares company with the Greeks, for whom moral flaw was the precondition of tragic vision, a symbolic blindness expressed, as in the Oedipus cycle, by the literal blindness that overtakes the hero in the end and at last enables him to “see.” Such vision, though itself flawed, could rise to a grandeur that in a sense validated itself; thus, Jeffers could describe the enraptured Tamar as making, if only momentarily, “a third part / With the ocean and keen stars in the consistence / And dignity of the world” (). Similarly, the tragedy that consumes Reave and Helen Thurso at the end of “Thurso’s Landing” (CP : –) ennobles not only its protagonists but humanity as such, enabling it to “shine” against “the dark magnificence of things” (). Tragedy is thus, for Jeffers, a form of sublime encounter, but one in which the approach to the sublime is not deliberate but unwitting, and the results fatal to the protagonist. It is achieved, in fact, by wilfully mistaking self for cosmos, whether by introspection or afflatus, or (since each defect implies the other) by a combination of both. Hence Jeffers’ wry comment that consciousness is “man’s distinction perhaps,” but “Hardly his advantage.” If, moreover, tragedy can be ennobling and even momentarily empowering, it is inevitably absurd and disgusting as well, an enfigurement of reality that is also a profound disfigurement. Thoreau, neither tragic poet nor Emersonian sage, could ignore this ques81

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tion; his consciousness concerned only himself, and such others as might wish to share its fruits. Emerson, however, could not evade the issue without peril. It was he who suggested that human thought could embody divine morality itself, and therefore not only properly described but intellectually contained the cosmos. The responsibility that went with such power seemed to require a divinity to house it; it nothing less could authorize the universe. The problem it posed, accordingly, was that of afflatus, for who could ensure that what one took for moral enlightenment was not mere ego assertion instead? Emerson was sensitive to the issue, and in “The Over-Soul” he warned of “here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought” (EL ). This might almost be a description of Jeffers’ Barclay, who was certainly intended to portray the type. Emerson responded that man might know “that the Highest dwells with him . . . if the sentiment of duty is there”; that is, if what is inspired in him is not the sense of power but the call to service (). It is this “important proviso,” as Joel Porte notes, “that saves Emerson from moral chaos.”8 Perhaps it did, for Emerson’s intellectual daring always took refuge in the piety of a lukewarm temperament; but it was, inevitably, a less certain prescription for others. The moral stance of the Emersonian hero, variously embodied as the “Poet,” the “Scholar,” or sometimes simply as the “Great Man,” was particularly manifest in relation to the two constant cycles of his condition, retirement and labor. The mass of men lived solely in and for their immediate circumstances, engrossed in material pursuits. The first act of the higher, Emersonian man was, consequently, withdrawal and abstinence. It helped if one were, like Emerson himself, personally fastidious, with an inborn inclination to solitude: the Scholar, he said, “must embrace solitude as a bride” (EL ). Solitude per se is of course the setting of sublime encounter, the precondition of divine ravishment. Yet, in Emerson’s forceful image, it is the Scholar who embraces the sublime environment in an act of sexual conquest. The Scholar is, moreover, enjoined to do this; that is, to master nature, and in so doing to discover its moral identity with him. At the same time, however, the suggestion of mere autoeroticism in Emerson’s image conveys a warning. The Scholar finds himself in solitude, but he must not lose himself there. Just as one must never so far transcend the material world as to lose actual contact with it, so one must never so far yield to solitude as to withdraw from the world of others. “Let the youth study the uses of solitude and of society,” Emerson stipulates. “Let him use both, not study ei82



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ther” (EL ). Here, again, Emerson’s fondness for paradox suggests a dialectical relationship. The Emersonian hero must be in but not of society; the “Great Man,” as he notes, is most alone when most in company. Sublimity, as we have seen, was self-reflexive for Emerson; the hero retired into solitude to discover the world in himself as well as himself in the world. This, in turn, was the spur to his vital activity. Solitude, as such, had no value; it was merely the space in which the hero collected himself, and, qua poet or scholar, performed his labors. Work produced in solitude was one thing; work produced for solitude, or as its precious expression (art for art’s sake) was another. Such things, Emerson warned, were “struck with death from the first” (EL ). Solitude was thus redeemed by labor, by outreach toward others. “I will suggest,” Emerson said, “that no separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself ” (EL ). Emerson apparently meant, or came to mean, not merely literary labor but the more mundane or even manual sort. He would soon reconsider this position. “If I may judge from my own experience,” he confided to his journal, “I should unsay all my fine things, I fear, concerning the manual labor of literary men. They ought to be released from every species of private or public responsibility. To them the grasshopper is a burden” (JE : ). To be “released” from responsibility was not, however, the same as abstaining from it. Emerson virtually launched the career of the public intellectual, spending nearly forty years on the lecture circuit. He did this in part for financial reasons—he had not been left a wealthy man, and he had a household to support—but the taxing role of an itinerant lecturer was one he chose in preference to the more settled academic life that could have been available to him. It often wearied him, but he gave it up only when his health began to fail. The man who complained that even a grasshopper was a burden in fact voluntarily shouldered something closer to an elephant for most of his adult life. Public lecturing inevitably involved Emerson in matters of controversy. Certainly, he regarded the lectern as a species of pulpit where oracular pronouncements could keep him above the fray of actual engagement; in this sense, it offered him a prophetic middle ground between direct political participation and academic retirement. It also, however, subjected him to pressure to define his terms, something he was never very comfortable doing. This was particularly the case with the most polarizing issue of his day, abolition. Emerson was 83

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personally opposed to slavery, as was most of Concord, but the vehemence of the abolitionists, including his friend Thoreau, was distasteful. It was not until  that he took a firm public stand, and even then only through an address commemorating the British emancipation of the West Indies. Thereafter he became progressively more engaged, finally concluding the issue to be of such weight that it was worth, if need be, the sacrifice of the Union.9 What offended Emerson in slavery was, ultimately, its perversion of labor. It was not the labor of the slave he had in mind, however, but that of freemen themselves. “Use, labor of each for all, is the health and virtue of all beings,” he declared at the beginning of his address on “American Civilization” (). Slavery debauched labor by creating, on the one hand, compulsory toil, and, on the other, the class of idlers who reaped its profit. This implied that labor as such was “disgraceful,” unworthy of human dignity, and that civilization consisted in the emancipation of an elite from its constraints. As we have seen, Emerson, for all the ambivalence of his attitude toward labor, recognized that the “truth” and “power” of the understanding were inseparable from its free exercise. Just as the seer who ignored his material bond with nature would wander lost in his own imaginings, so too would the imagination itself atrophy in the absence of a structured relationship with the world. That relationship, be it mental, moral, or manual, was labor. The kind of labor that was abhorrent, then, was unfree labor. Slavery was its epitome, but there were elements of duress in other forms, too. This was presumably what Emerson referred to when he spoke of the wish to be free of all “responsibility”—that is, of all externally imposed effort, conduct, or commitment. Such a desire was utopian in the sense that only the strictest hermit was free of all societal pressure, and that such an individual was faced by the most unremitting demands of material necessity. The hermit’s life had, nonetheless, an appeal for certain spirits. Thoreau, in creating America’s first literary hermitage at Walden, averred his willingness to get his daily sustenance, but not (as he had done, and as he would do again) to labor at the behest of others: “If I should sell my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for” (W : ). The “peculiar calling” was his literary craft, and the stream of reflections that fed it. These, in turn, were linked to his observation and close handling of the material world, which shaded naturally in Walden into the work of sustenance proper. In Emerson, contact with nature meant rustic excursion. In Thoreau, who sought to reinstate at Walden the medieval nexus between 84



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piety and manual labor, it entailed a concrete and productive relationship. This relationship was not an end in itself, but a means of establishing a permanent, ecstatic rapport with nature. It was, nonetheless, the essential middle term, the mediating condition, of this final intimacy. Jeffers took elements of style and substance from both Emerson and Thoreau in his own construction of solitude and labor. His temperament inclined him to solitude, and the home he built, Tor House, though an urban address, became the most famous site of literary seclusion in America after Walden itself. Hermits, too, populated his imagination. The most extreme of them, the unnamed protagonist of “An Artist” (CP : –), is a sculptor, who, having “astonished Rome and Paris in his meteor youth,” has disappeared into a desert canyon where, alone with his Promethean vision, he carves half-emergent Titans from the rock, “that strove / In dream between stone and life, intense to cast their chaos . . . or to enter and return” to their source. What they have found is not fire, but natural wonder, the ecstasy that only human eyes can construe but only stone ones can contain. As the sculptor explains to the traveler who has accidentally found him: What I see is the enormous beauty of things, but what I attempt Is nothing to that. I am helpless toward that. It is only to form in stone the mould of some ideal humanity that might be worthy to be Under the lightning.

The moment of Dionysian vision is blinding, intolerable; the “ideal” humanity the sculptor wishes to create is the very opposite of self-contained classicism, the “Rome” of his youth. Masterpiece yields to monstrosity, “the eyes calm through the brute veils of fracture” but the bodies “heavy with pain,” a contradiction that reflects the condition of ecstatic experience. The hermitsculptor has passed beyond the possibility of art and can fashion, as he himself describes them, only “sketches” and “spalls”; the traveler can remember only “fragments.” From our perspective, the hermit of “An Artist” has created a solitude in which his every thought and resource has turned to a labor that, literally, transforms physical environment into psychic equivalency. The stone of the canyon itself seems to protest at this through the “enormous breasts” and “defaced heads” into which it is worked, and whose agony reflects not only the sculptor’s 85

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intended expression but the irreducible paradox of Jeffers’ aesthetic, that the material of art is always superior to its product, and always in the process of reclaiming it. The sculptor himself acknowledges this, noting only that his works “will last my lifetime”: a sufficiency, since he has no desire that they be seen by anyone but himself. His visitor expresses the ambiguous hope that they will survive him, suggesting they may have value for others but agreeing to keep their secret. Yet there is a hint of fatal decadence, not only for the sculptor’s art but for the environment it inevitably distorts. Man spoils what he touches, and ecstatic consciousness is, perhaps, most destructive of all. The traveler finds the sky above him “almost . . . abominably beautiful,” as if it too had received some taint from the sculptor’s vision. “An Artist” is, certainly, a self-portrait, although one completed only by the traveler-narrator himself. The sculptor’s rejection of recognition and fame, his stated hope to “crawl out on a ledge of the rock and die like a wolf ” when he has grown too old to work, and the traveler’s injunction to others to “let him alone” while he lives, all find echo elsewhere in Jeffers.10 At the same time, however, the poem is clearly a cautionary tale. The sculptor, in seeking to create forms to bear the weight of the world’s beauty, has not only produced half-hatched abortions, but has psychically deformed himself; the traveler describes him as a “troll among Titans.” His very aspiration to express the sublime Otherness of creation has ensnared him in an incestuous self-relation, of which the Titans are both the symbol and the product. As each figure is abandoned, the sculptor can only dig deeper into his closed canyon, deeper into himself. “An Artist” may also be read as a critique of the Transcendentalist tradition. The figure Emerson variously calls the ‘Scholar,’ the ‘Poet,’ the ‘Seer,’ or the ‘Great Man,’ Thoreau “the one, only man” (JT : ), and Wallace Stevens the ‘Major Man,’ reflected for Jeffers the temptation of Romantic afflatus and the crisis of vocation it implied. The true seeker must, as Thoreau asserted, be free of all employment except the promptings of nature and of his own soul. These categories were readily conflated, and, since both Emerson and Thoreau aimed at the fullest identification, not to say fusion of self and world, there was little incentive to distinguish them. The sympathetic soul vibrated to nature’s harmonies, and vice versa. Did it matter whose was the chord, and whose the echo? Emerson was more alert to the dangers in this attitude than his younger colleague. By grounding both man and nature in the common foundation of morality, he hoped to avoid the subjective Idealism he deplored in Alcott. By in86



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sisting as well on the necessity of labor, he acknowledged that the ‘Scholar’ (or poet, or seer) had an essential connection to his fellow men; indeed, if morality was man’s ontological essence, then labor might be said to be his social one, the bond that validated the human community. Jeffers’ sculptor would seem at first to have heeded Emerson’s prescriptions to a fault. Far from avoiding labor, his life is unremitting toil; far from yielding to narcissism, he passionately affirms the world as value. What he lacks, however, is vocation, in its original signification of vocare—to call out, to summon. He has, to be sure, a skill, and he applies it faithfully. But he shares it with no one, refusing even to show the traveler more than he has seen by accident. Nor has he any interest in posterity; it will be enough, as he says, if his “sketches” last him out. In creating his ideal humanity, he has rejected actual humans. He would thus seem to have met Emerson’s criterion as a maker of work for solitude; that is, of work “struck with death.” It will be remembered that Emerson himself rejected an original vocation, that of divinity, after which he experimentally adopted the personae of ‘scholar,’ ‘poet,’ and ‘seer,’ never definitively avowing any one. Where, as in “The American Scholar,” he apparently sets out to define one, he remains elusive, for no such scholar as he describes—“Man Thinking”—ever was or will be. It is a measure of this elusiveness that his public finally settled on him not a title but a sobriquet, “the Sage of Concord,” that was punningly exact if nothing else. To this day, academic taxonomists still debate whether to admit him among the philosophers, when in fact his role was to deconstruct all roles. That, to be sure, was a vocation in itself, perhaps the highest and most difficult of all; but it was also indicative of the crisis of values occasioned by the supersession of New England orthodoxy. The very notion of vocation had been shaped by sacerdotal authority, and priestly efficacy by ritual decorum and theological truth. Luther had partly secularized the concept, a task Max Weber later undertook to complete. Emerson’s originality was to decouple the idea of vocation from a specific occupation as such, and to return it to its root component of expressive communication. Whatever else vocation might be, it was first and foremost an act of speech.11 If for Emerson vocation was a succession of roles united only by speech acts, Thoreau was perfectly comfortable with the persona he invented for himself at Walden. That persona was of a man happily communing with nature and exploring its possible relations to himself. Nothing in it required a third party. Thoreau made it clear that knowledge, or at any rate the knowledge that 87

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interested him, was acquired in solitude rather than by dialogue. Others existed chiefly as icons of convention, as a prompting for reflection, or in contrast to his own state of being. Thoreau had no aversion to their company, but he had little to profit from it, and was always glad to return to his own. As for vocation, he professed himself thoroughly satisfied by an occupation unique to himself. Of course, Thoreau the man had a vocation not comprehended in this selfpresentation, namely the creation of Thoreau the persona. He wished this persona to be known, and to that end he became, or sought to become, what his friend Emerson was: a professional writer; that is, a man consisting, occupationally, entirely of speech acts. He published, it is true, relatively little, and his principal literary effort was expended in a voluminous diary. But he certainly wished to succeed as a man of letters, and no American writer strikes a more beguilingly conversational tone. No matter how intimate his subject or elliptical his thought, one is at once his confidant. If Thoreau the author belies Thoreau the literary subject, however, the import of his work is nonetheless that real knowledge remains personal and incommunicable. The proposition that each individual must get it for himself is the sum of what he has to say. Thoreau describes the process of his own enlightenment with generous encouragement, but he cannot convey its actual content. The very volubility of his speech does not bridge the chasm between the self and others, but rather widens it. Emerson was only touching the surface of his disquiet about Thoreau when he lamented that his friend had turned out not the great American “Engineer” (a builder of bridges), but the captain of a huckleberry party. There was, of course, a political Thoreau, the passionate abolitionist and the author of Civil Disobedience. Even his public activity, however, had the character of a private witness, and his famous rejoinder to Emerson when asked why he had courted imprisonment, “Why did you not?”, might serve as the emblem of his own self-segregation. There was something of the prophet in his stance, of one come not to reason but to declare. In contrast, Emerson’s pronouncements were vatic or oracular rather than prophetic; that is, issuing from an authoritative voice but resistant to stable meaning. The question of prophecy may be regarded as a subset of the larger issue of vocation. If in Emerson the problematic of vocation exhibits the tension between engagement and retreat, that of prophecy sharpens it. The prophet is one compelled to speak—his function does not exist otherwise—but, because his discourse is threatening and disruptive, he is generally ignored if not con88



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temned. The more urgent his claim to be heard, the less likely others are to heed him. This dilemma is neatly encapsulated in the myth of Cassandra. Cassandra courts death by the very urgency of her speech, but, since she is condemned to be disbelieved, she is treated as a mere public nuisance. In this sense, Apollo’s curse involves both Cassandra and the community she addresses; as she is compelled to speak the truth, so her auditors are prevented from acknowledging it. The wisdom of the myth is thus to show that prophecy is formed not with intent or utterance, but only at the point at which the speech act meets its reception. Strictly speaking, Cassandra utters truth rather than prophecy, since there is no possibility of her being believed. Prophecy is, above all, a public act. For Jeffers, the sense of vocation and prophecy developed together, and were inextricably entwined. His ambition formed slowly, and crystallized only under the impact of the two decisive events of his life: his marriage to Una Call Kuster in , and his discovery of the Big Sur coastal region around Carmel the following year. Once he had committed himself to poetry, he permitted no other interest: vocation, one might say, preempted career. In a brief prose comment, “All the Corn in One Barn” (), he explained his abstinence from critical or expository writing as a necessary husbanding of focus and energy, for poetry, as it could express the whole of his intention, required the whole of his powers.12 There was more to the story, however. Jeffers’ project was nothing less than to renovate the poetic idiom of his time, which, under the influence of the Symbolists and the Imagists, had become in his view so attenuated that it was no longer capable of performing its critical and distinctive function, the expression of natural reality. Instead, it had ceded its vital powers to prose, to the enlargement but also the distortion of the latter. Jeffers had Mallarmé and the early Pound in mind, but he might as easily have looked toward Thoreau, whose prose descriptions of nature, particularly in the journals, often strained sense and syntax to the breaking point. Thus, while seeking, as he put it, to “reclaim some of the power and reality that [poetry] was so hastily surrendering to prose” (CP : ), it was perhaps equally crucial to free prose from the burden of poetic expression it had assumed by default. Prose could, to be sure, expound any subject, including those particular to poetry; but it could not express the latter nearly as well. As Jeffers explained: [P]oetry and prose are different things; their provinces overlap, but must not be confused. Prose, of course, is free of all fields; it seemed to me, reading poetry and trying to write it, that poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent things and the permanent aspects of life. That was perhaps the greatest distinction

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Transcendental Etudes between them, as regards subject and material. Prose can discuss matters of the moment; poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by. This excludes much of the circumstance of modern life, especially in the cities. Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, and political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral have only news value. (Ibid.)

To choose poetry was not to exclude all modern life; it was, however, to subordinate it to the primary and elemental forms of natural process that ultimately encompassed it. Similarly, prose was appropriate to the description of natural phenomena for instrumental, and, to an extent, expressive purposes, but yielded to verse at a certain level. In choosing poetry at the moment when it seemed itself to have lost vocation, Jeffers could not, in his own view, make less than a full and unconditional commitment of his powers. That he had difficulty in forging what seemed to him a valid style was, under the circumstances, hardly surprising; what he sought was not merely a voice for his own poetry, but for poetry as such in the modern world. This was the very opposite of founding a school, for if Jeffers thought the fetish for originality that seemed to mark his time was a symptom of decadence, he had still less use for those who merely mimicked “dead men” (ibid., ). Rather, he sought a deliberately inimitable expression: the speech of prophecy. Prophetic speech, for Jeffers, was not predictive, at least in any specific sense; nor was the prophet himself, as such, exceptional. However important the poet’s function, it conferred no special privileges, especially in a democratic society (see below, p. 03). Above all, the poet was subordinate and inferior to the world he tried vainly to capture, a point most memorably made in “Love the Wild Swan”: I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against the white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things. (CP : )

Such remarks were balanced by more assertive ones; the poet’s task, Jeffers said elsewhere, was to “not to play games with words, / . . . [but] to awake dangerous images / And call the hawks” (“Triad,” CP : ). These various 90



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dicta had a common thread. Poetry could be the most vital or the most trivial of pursuits, depending on whether the poet’s impulse was prompted by the “splendor of things” or by the desire to create a purely self-referential world unconnected to it. The poet was always inadequate to his task, since the part could never contain the whole, just as the prophet’s speech could never reflect the fullness of the divine Logos. But one could fail honorably; the poetic effort could be hopelessly futile and misguided, but also a genuine re-creation: The pallid Pursuit of the world’s beauty on paper, Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime. If, burnished new from God’s eyes, an angel . . . (“Second-Best,” CP : )

The poet’s validation came from a success it was not his to judge. The task was all; as Jeffers said in concluding “Second-Best,” “Write and be quiet.” In the vatic sense, then, the poet, like Moses, faced away toward the sublime encounter, and his utterance, in its purest terms, was praise. Similarly, his prophetic speech as such was testimony rather than adjuration. Jeffers figured this in “Meditation on Saviors” (CP : –), whose speaker wrestles with the burden of prophecy and the temptation of power concealed in it. The necessity to share revelation—the moral obligation of the enlightened man set out by Emerson—was checked by a fastidious repugnance; the people, as Jeffers’ speaker says, “are not delightful to touch,” nor are they apt to be moved: Here is an anxious people, rank with suppressed blood-thirstiness. Among the mild and unwarlike Gautama needed but live greatly and be heard, Confucius needed but live greatly and be heard. This people has not outgrown blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on the high cross to catch at their memories; The price is known.

Jeffers unflatteringly contrasts Occidental civilization with the cultures of the East, unsurprisingly in the wake of a world war whose carnage defied rational explanation and which, in “The Alpine Christ,” he had linked to divine apocalypse itself. Jeffers’ own view of the war had deepened with his developing conviction that individual and collective narcissism—the consequence of a lapsed sense of the cosmos as divinely constituted and valorized—had blinded 91

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the West, and had been perhaps implicit in its character from the beginning. This was the final meaning of the cross, a testament to the blood-sacrifice exacted of and by the West’s would-be “saviors.” Christ’s love for humanity had been proclaimed as the motive for the sacrifice of Jesus, but the speaker of the “Meditation,” contemplating the “price” of embodying a new salvific ideal, rejects compassion as an animating principle: “for love of the people I would not do it.” The genuine temptation is power, even if posthumous: For power After the nerves are put away underground, to lighten the abstract unborn children toward peace . . . A man might have paid anguish indeed. Except he had found the standing searock that even this last Temptation breaks on; quieter than death but lovelier; peace that quiets even the desire of praising it.

The prophet is wholly fulfilled in mystical contemplation, the rapture of a peace beyond process that makes even the office of praise superfluous. Jeffers had described this vision earlier in “Night,” whose subject is apostrophized as the “Peace-bringer, the matrix of all shining and the quieter of shining” (CP : ; cf. above, p. 9). Yet this final repose—the halt between the cycles of material creation and destruction defined by Hindu mysticism and echoed in the theories of modern science—was a temptation too. Emerson had described it as the ‘moral’ essence exhibited by the cosmos, the final vision of the enlightened intellect, and Thoreau had sought its analogue in the depths of Walden. Like Emerson, however, Jeffers recognized it as a point of reference rather than of rest; man’s duties lay elsewhere, and the quietism of the Hindu sage seemed finally to both another form of narcissism. Human destiny was Janus-faced, and in the actual world of process in which men lived it was perilous to turn in any direction for too long, whether toward the heights of the sublime or the crowded solitude of the city. Moses had gone up the mountain, but he had also returned to the tribe. Thus, the speaker of “Meditation on Saviors” acknowledges the dangers of isolation and affirms his public nexus at the very outset of the poem: I pledged myself awhile 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.

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Transcendental Etudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This people as much as the sea-granite is part of the God from whom I desire not to be fugitive.

Not merely solitude but suicide—the ultimate form of separation—is part of the temptation the poet must resist. It is significant, however, here as in “The Answer,” that humanity is embraced not for its own sake (“they are not delightful to touch”), but as part of the divine whole. Once again, Jeffers is closer to Thoreau than to Emerson in rejecting qualitative distinctions of being; the world, both insist, must be affirmed as such, without any division into higher and lower, ‘moral’ and material. Thoreau is in fact quite scathing in his rejection of the imputed morality of Emerson’s Idealism: “The best thought is not only without sombreness—but even without morality. . . . The moral aspect of nature is a disease caught of man—a jaundice imported into her—To the innocent there are no cherubims or angels” (JT : ).13 The acceptance of the cosmos as a whole does not preclude judgment of its human part. This, indeed, is the very function of prophecy. To judge nonhuman nature would be absurd. Natural process is what it is; a stone must fall as a bird must fly; stars are born and die in fire; all things are ordered and ordained. Before this, the poet or philosopher can only stand in awe, contemplation, and praise. The human world alone knows morally significant choice and hence the possibility of “moral beauty” or its opposite; knows, that is, good and evil. In the absence of a personal God or of specific revelation, however, how is the prophet authorized, and by what duty is he prompted or compelled to speak? Cassandra’s compulsion to prophesy is absolute, as her revelation, within its limits, is complete. The poet-prophet is self-appointed, and claims no foreknowledge of events. He can bring the tribe only his vision of the “perpetual music” of the cosmic order, the wholeness and value it embodies, and the “peace” its contemplation brings. Beyond this, he is without special warrant or privilege. Even were he to behold synoptically the course of all history and the fate of all individuals, he would be unable to alter any element of it: The mountain ahead of the world is not forming but fixed. But the [prophet’s] words would be fixed also, Part of that mountain, under equal compulsion; under the same present compulsion in the iron consistency.

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If the prophet can have no effect on events, why prophesy (or, more precisely, testify)? Jeffers suggests that he too is under necessity, although one internally perceived rather than externally imposed. As humanity cannot subsist without the world that contains it, so no individual can exist apart from the race, or among the mere phantoms of his imagination. If the type of the savior exposes the delusion of one extreme, that of the hermit exposes the other. The prophet speaks, finally, because his speech is too urgent to be suppressed, regardless of its effect or even in the foreknowledge that it will be ignored. It, too, is part of the “music,” the universal concordia discors.14 The tension between the prophet’s necessary utterance and his sense of its futility runs throughout the “Meditation on Saviors” and its companion poems, “The Broken Balance” and “Birth-Dues.” In the former, the speaker finds it “hard to be wise,” and addresses himself not to a contemporary audience but to the children of the future; in the latter, a long prophetic expostulation—one of the most lapidary statements of Jeffers’ major themes in the whole of his corpus—ends on a sour, almost contemptuous note of withdrawal: “But I having told you / . . . / Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the people” (CP : ; ). Of course, Jeffers could no more renounce his prophetic vocation than he could poetry itself, and in such poems as “Prescription of Painful Ends,” “The Blood-Guilt,” and “Cassandra” (CP : , , ), he returned again and again to the prophet’s dilemma. The latter poem, invoking the figure of the Greek seeress who had assumed so large a role in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Jeffers’ adaptation of the Oresteia, made for a final summation: The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers Hooked in the stones of the wall, The storm-wrack hair and the screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra, Whether the people believe Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer Meet a tiger on the road. . . . . . . . . . . . .  . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poor bitch, be wise. No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men And gods disgusting. —You and I, Cassandra.

Jeffers continued to pay his “birth-dues,” and so to honor the obligation to impart discovery that Emerson declared to be the portion of the self-enlightened man. The Emersonian ‘prophet’ was an ambiguous figure, at once the pioneer who sought “an original relation to the universe” and the witness 94



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of a preestablished moral order between man and the cosmos. Thoreau’s quest was more open-ended, but less tolerant of paradox; what he affirmed finally through the self ’s encounter with the natural world was a passionate and instinctive monism. Jeffers was closer to this version of the sublime, and certainly there is no more fiercely monistic vision in American literature than his. Yet the Emersonian dimension of his thought should not be scanted. While he was one with Thoreau in rejecting the idea that the world exhibited a moral basis, the notions of beauty and value he developed played an at least analogous role in his perception of the cosmos, and the theism it expressed, while like Emerson’s a notionally impersonal one, reached back still further to the grand precursor figure of Edwards. Why Jeffers took this seemingly retrograde path can only be understood in the wake of the intellectual challenge that followed the Transcendentalist generation.

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I New England Transcendentalism had had its day by the late s, and the loss in swift succession of two of its luminaries, Theodore Parker and Henry David Thoreau, signaled its effective close. Its real death knell, however, was the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in , followed in  by The Descent of Man. Transcendentalism had been the attempt, in the Emersonian catchphrase, to create an “original relation to the universe” for modern man—a relation, that is, beyond dogma and even beyond theism, but one that still answered to a confident sense of human uniqueness. Such a sense required one of two conditions: either that Nature as such was a template for human ambition and desire, a passive ground on which, for all its Romantic titanism, man might impress his own fancy and his own will; or that it answered in its own fashion to man’s moral perception and aspiration. The first condition reflected received notions of the sublime, in which Nature’s energies quickened man’s own powers; the second, to which Emerson remained faithful despite the proto-Darwinian doubt he had expressed in “Fate,” affirmed a belief in the essential affinity between the structure of Nature and the moral intuition of man. In both cases, Nature offered no insuperable impediment to the projects of human will, no difference or opposition that could ultimately frustrate it. The shock of Darwin’s thought was, first, in depicting a world of process without man, and then in integrating him with it not as an act of special creation but as a casual by-product. Newton, of course, had described the world in purely mechanical terms, but its operation precluded neither a divine creator nor human lordship. Gradually, however, scientists widened the frame of the universe both in its scope and antiquity. By the time of Emerson’s Divinity College Address, the age of the earth itself was reckoned at half a billion years. The discrepancy between this calculation and biblical chronology, however liberally interpreted, meant that the traditional account of an invariant creation as the 96



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product of a single act of divine will—fiat lux—was no longer scientifically credible. Either God had permitted a barren earth to remain without habitation for vast ages, or life had emerged in utterly remote epochs before any human record. This, too, made no sense in providentialist terms. The only alternative was to conceive life as a continuous, developmental process. It was difficult to construe humanity as coterminous with such an activity. If, then, man were to be considered as the crown of creation, it was necessary to posit him as proceeding from lower to higher levels of biological complexity (and ontological significance). It was necessary, in short, to devise a theory of evolution. This theory had itself been developing for more than a century before Darwin gave it capitulary form. The challenge posed by Darwin was threefold: by positing life as a struggle for survival and nature as its field of contest, he seemed to strip all moral calculus from the universe; by inscribing man as a biological agent fully within this process, he left human morality ungrounded and problematic; by thus adjourning all questions of value unrelated to material necessity, he left no scope for a divinity conceived in terms of spiritual purpose and providential ends. Emerson, as we have seen, was willing and even eager to jettison the idea of a personalist deity, but only if he could refashion nature to reflect his quasi-divinized concept of the “scholar.” By radically alienating nature from human aspiration, Darwin shut that avenue firmly down. What medieval mystics and moderns such as Pascal and Kierkegaard had construed as the terror of man’s estrangement from God had now become the scandal of an immersion in nature from which all decent instinct recoiled. The vulgarity of so-called Social Darwinism, with its cheerful embrace of an ethos of competition and domination, only made the debacle more apparent. Even Darwin’s most tireless champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, was compelled to admit that man’s most esteemed moral instincts—kindness, forbearance, and care for the weak and infirm—were not only without echo in the universe, but biologically dysfunctional, and tended to degrade the species physiologically. Darwin himself famously asserted that his scientific conclusions had made him feel a like a “murderer”—the assassin of Christianity and of the comfort and hope it provided, even within his own family.1 Darwin abandoned his faith, as Copernicus and Newton had not. The generation that succeeded him, the one to which Nietzsche announced that God was dead, was as deeply divided as any since the Reformation. This was particularly true in the Protestant intellectual circles to which Robinson Jeffers’ father belonged. William Hamilton 97

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Jeffers was a minister in the United Presbyterian Church, an Old Testament scholar of distinction, and, for much of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, associate editor of the Presbyterian and Reformed Review. In this capacity he participated in the heated debates over Scripture, creation, and evolution that culminated in the celebrated dismissal of James Woodrow from the Columbia Theological Seminary in December . Woodrow regarded himself as doctrinally orthodox, and affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible. At the same time, however, he was persuaded that organic evolution was a further revelation of God’s truth that no “reasonable” person could deny. Scripture was, as it were, summary truth, suitable to the needs of Testamentary times but progressively qualified to the understanding of later ages by the trial and error of the sciences. Thus it was at the same time true to say with Genesis that man had been created from the dust of the ground, and with Darwin that his physical origin was similar to that of other animals. Both statements were simply different ways of affirming God’s creative power. The Presbyterian General Assembly was unappeased by this. It stated, as a matter fundamental to Christian faith, “That Adam’s body was directly fashioned by Almighty God, without any natural animal parentage of any kind, out of matter previously created from nothing.” Woodrow’s dismissal from his teaching post followed shortly upon this.2 The General Assembly’s categorical rejection of human evolution was not typical of late nineteenth-century Protestant responses to Darwinism in America. Evolution, like other natural laws previously disclosed by science, could be regarded as the means ordained by God for the operation of the world. The American Spencerian John Fiske cast the doctrine of special creation into “the limbo where hover the ghosts of slaughtered theories that were born of man’s untutored intelligence in early times.” Rather, he affirmed, spiritual progress depended on “a continuous process of deanthropomorphization,” by which the human intellect purged its conception of the deity of attributes such as will and personality, which were merely the devices by which man himself adapted to his creaturely environment. Fiske’s own theism was grounded in the conviction that the phenomenal world could not be explained or even meaningfully posited without a conception of what he variously denoted as Absolute Existence, Absolute First Cause, or Unconditioned Power, but which he abstemiously refused to call God. This deity he defined as “an unconditioned Power existing independently of consciousness, to which no limit is conceivable in time or space, and of which all phenomena, as known to us, are manifestations.” Noth98



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ing could be stipulated of this Power but its self-sufficiency, its limitlessness, and its potency. Like the Kantian Noumena, it could never be directly known in itself, but only as reflected in phenomena. This meant that natural science alone could describe divinity, or more properly its effects. This was secondorder knowledge at best, but it was the only kind available: a direct experience of the deity would be, by definition, annihilating. As for revelation, it belonged to the speculative infancy of humankind, an attempt to cope with the essential intuition of divinity through myth, fable, and the primitive identification of the Godhead with human personality. It had served its turn, but the maturation of the race had exposed its fallacy, for, as Fiske explained, “Personality and Infinity” were “mutually incompatible” concepts.3 The dissociation of divinity from any concept of personality will readily recall Emerson. It placed Fiske, as it had Emerson, on the margins of Protestant thought, if not beyond the pale. Fiske continued to regard himself as a Christian, and Spencer’s synthetic philosophy as a means of renewing religious if not dogmatic faith. Others disagreed. They argued that Spencer, Fiske, and their like were not the vanguard of a new religious truth, but a throwback to the animism that deified nature itself, and denied any independent province to the spirit. This was nothing but the ancient heresy of pantheism, which drowned God in the world. Mainstream Protestants were equally unwilling to jettison revelation. If nature did not natively reflect the truths of Scripture, as correspondence theory held in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, neither did it disconfirm them— or, for that matter, affirm the Fiskean First Cause. What Fiske had simply done was to substitute his own, arbitrary conception of divinity for that professed by eighteen centuries of Christianity. All he could bring to demonstrate it was the findings of natural science, which by his own admission could say nothing about it. If Scripture was not to be taken as a literal description of phenomena, if it had rather been adjusted by the divine hand to the understanding and perhaps the credulities of a pre-scientific age, this in no sense invalidated it as a statement of supranatural truth. Scripture could be true in essence without being accurate in every detail, where “accuracy” itself was the function of an evolving discourse. This was not a new idea; Cardinal Bellarmine had counseled the Church not to affirm the literal truth of biblical passages that science had rendered problematic as statements of natural fact in the early sevententh century. But evolutionary biology, and much of nineteenth-century physics, mechanics, and 99

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geology, had pushed Scripture to the point where essential dogma was in question. If Genesis were a fable, what was not? It was at this juncture that James Woodrow had proclaimed his version of scriptural inerrancy, which declared the Bible to be a closed book of wisdom and science the new revelation. This was more of a concession than most divines were willing to make.4 Essentially, Darwinism had presented Christian thought with a crisis of theodicy. One could assert, with Fiske, that the multiplicity of natural causes implied a transcendent First Cause that lay beyond the purview of scientific inquiry but was a prerequisite of any philosophically cogent account of the universe. That saved God—the term Fiske declined to use—but not Christianity. The Darwinian cosmos did not refute the idea of a salvific deity as such, but it gave abundant counterevidence in the struggle for life and the extinction of species. If the First Cause had any discernible qualities, goodness and mercy did not seem prominent among them. One answer to this problem was a new Calvinism. Writers such as James McCosh and George Frederick Wright scoffed at those who recoiled from the conclusion that struggle and suffering was the price of life. Was Christianity itself not founded on a vision of universal suffering and a world given over to sin? If the great majority of organisms were fated to perish, had America’s Puritan founders not lived in the conviction that the great majority of sinners were destined to eternal hellfire? Calvinism, as Wright declared, was as much “a foe to sentimentalism in theology [as] . . . Darwinism in natural history,” and if the doctrine of predestination was no longer to be accepted in its literal sense, it conveyed the more general truth that the “temporary good” of particular individuals or even species could not be preferred to the ultimate divine design. If one subscribed to a biological progressivism in which less complex organisms were the foundation of more complex ones, culminating in the birth of spirit and consciousness in man, evolution’s bloody experiments subserved a higher goal that could not be properly judged from an individual perspective. The grandeur of Darwinian theory, declared Joseph LeConte, was that it expressed God’s “infinite design,” one that embraced not merely organic evolution but every aspect of the cosmos, the constant unfolding purpose of divine will.5 Evolution’s ultimate significance might thus be seen as reinstating the divine presence in the natural world. A single fiat of creation enabled God to withdraw from the world, leaving him taskless. This had been the conclusion drawn by the Deism of the Enlightenment. The immensely complex and dy100



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namic processes of evolution, where the minutest adjustment of climate and environment could advance or doom a particular line of organic development, required a much more active deity, in fact a continually engaged one. If such a deity were transcendent over the world, he was also immanent within it. Immanentism became a force to be reckoned with in late nineteenth-century Protestant thought.6 In effect, it diffused the idea of divine personality throughout nature: the world was, everywhere, God. This, as anti-immanentists such as George Frederick Wright contended, was only a short step, if that, from a pantheism that confounded matter and spirit, and led not to a renewed Christianity but a revived paganism. Immanentists defended their position by arguing that a God diffused through nature was at the same time one fully integrated in his transcendent relation to it. Was this not precisely the meaning of the Trinity? Had God not revealed his own suffering, and the infinity of his compassion, through the mediatory figure of Christ? Seen from this vantage, God’s love was fully compatible with his arguably somewhat ruthless experimentation with phenomena. If for a John Fiske “infinity” and “personality” were logically opposed concepts, for the immanentist Joseph LeConte, the final vision of the universe was precisely the transcendent and “Infinite Personality” of God.7 It was also the nexus between God and man. What God had created in his own image, or permitted to evolve, was the human personality that corresponded, however faintly and partially, with his own. Personality was, then, the crux of the issue. In denying such an attribute to the deity, Emerson had denied the possibility of a subject relationship between God and man. Humanity was, with the rest of creation, the object of God’s action. God was expressed in the world only as force, not as Providence. Force might be worshipped, as natural power once had been or as natural sublimity might yet be, but piety required a relation between persons, whatever the disproportion between them. Without that reciprocity, divinity was a metaphysician’s conceit or a poet’s device, but it could be of no vital concern. To stipulate a divine personality, however, was only to imply, not to negotiate a possible relationship to human personality. A conscious and purposive God might well go about his business without any providential concern for humankind, or even any special awareness of it. In that case, creaturely consciousness of such a divinity might well be a disadvantage—a practical handicap in the Darwinian struggle for life, since its logical consequence was despair. What was required of divinity, then, was not merely personality but goodness, the constant benevolent intention of God toward man; indeed, that benevolence 101

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was, insofar as man was concerned, the actual or at any rate the relevant content of divine personality. Such goodness, to be efficacious, had to be communicated. Many Protestant theologians had abandoned the notion that God acted outside of secondary natural causes in the world; i.e., by miracle. This left only inspiration: direct communication with man himself. That way, of course, lay potential delusion, or the circular reasoning of Cartesianism: that God existed because man conceived him, and God was good because man conceived his goodness. If it were to escape this dilemma, divinity had no choice but to bring the world to its aid. Evolution supplied the master narrative that Scripture no longer could. Scripture affirmed that the world had been made perfect and entire at once, and so testified immediately to its creator. In the Darwinian rescission, creation was progressive and continuous, and with man had reached its destined term. The old narrative and the new were not, after all, so different, because man had been the final act of creation in Genesis. The problem, however, was that the new narrative was purely inductive, because it expressed no revelation, but only the mute evidences of nature. And nature went only so far. There was nothing in it to suggest the passion of the Christ, or the concord of the angels, or the consonance between human striving and divine intent. There was no direct avenue of communication other than, perhaps, the experience of the sublime, and no clear indication of what such an experience might mean. There was, in short, the problem of personality again. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Protestant theology of any sophistication had, after an initial recoil, become dependent on one version or another of Darwinian theory. This was not surprising, for most other social ideologies had attempted to co-opt evolution to their cause as well. To a certain extent, the residual elements of teleology in Darwinism lent themselves to such appropriation. But evolutionary theory, like any other scientific account of natural causation, did not require such dressing, and would come gradually to discard it. This was also to be the case with the widespread concept of force in the physical and mechanical sciences, as we shall see. Whatever comfort religion had taken from Victorian science, it had none to offer in return: scientists, like other men, might seek faith, but science needed none. A physical account of phenomena without reference to God required no justification; a religious account of the world that failed to engage the latest scientific discovery was inadequate or obscurantist. Whatever the perils of immanentism, a God who failed to enter the world was doomed to irrelevance in it. 102



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Divinity thus found itself framed in terms of science, now the hegemonic discourse of modern culture, and to a large extent limited by its terms. Theologians fretted at this, and religiously-minded scientists, like LeConte, urgently tried to bridge the two discourses, as they do to this day. Divines warned that a God limited to the world was one merely trapped in it, and some feared that if God were defined in terms of evolution, the logical consequence was the ultimate heresy: a god who himself evolved. In the new century, the scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the philosopher Martin Buber would not shrink from this conclusion. Theologians worried that a God caught in the toils of the world—or, no less fatally, exiled from it—would leave man in the same case. Science might be a hegemonic discourse, but it could not be a universal one. It could not teach men how to live. Scriptural decree, the civil ordinance derived from it, and the practical divinity that applied it, had shaped Christian civilization for two thousand years. It was no more thinkable for most to imagine that the West could retain its moral compass without a robust faith than to expect a man to breathe without air. Even the defiantly faithless apprehended the calamity to come: perhaps they sooner than any. The Lutheran clergyman’s son Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God was dead, was also the one who predicted that the coming age would be one of “monstrous wars.” As Europe stood on the verge of those wars in the year , Robinson Jeffers spent a day in the Carmel Valley, a “God-forsaken man-of-letters” as he ironically described himself. The trouble he found himself in was being a poet in an age that had all but rarefied poetry out of existence: It seemed to me that Mallarmé and his followers, renouncing intelligibility in order to concentrate the music of poetry, had turned off the road into a narrowing lane. Their successors could only make further renunciations; ideas had gone, now meter had gone, imagery would have to go; then recognizable emotions would have to go; perhaps at last even words might have to go or give up their meaning, nothing be left but musical syllables. Every advance required the elimination of some aspect of reality . . .8

The young Jeffers was thinking of his profession, but he might as easily have been thinking about the fate of God in modern culture. In a sense, he was. One by one, God had been stripped of the attributes by which he was recognizable. He had surrendered his powers to natural causes, causes which separated the operation of his will from its effects by long aeons. He no longer ministered with care and providence for each human soul, or guaranteed an afterlife. He 103

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had even renounced divine personality. No longer omnipotent, no longer a father, no longer even an intelligible entity, he had no gospel to communicate and neither justice nor mercy to bestow. Every advance in human thought had required the elimination of another divine attribute or power, until nothing remained, or shortly would remain, but an empty abstraction. Jeffers had worried about the increasing divorce of poetry from reality in his time. Further reflection would have taken him—as it soon did—to the vexed question of “reality” itself, for a poetry unsure of the external world would naturally falter in its description of it, or retreat from it, or redefine it intersubjectively. This is what Jeffers perceived in Mallarmé and his followers. The private worlds of the Decadents and Symbolists, like the increasingly fragmented narratives of the modern novel or the broken imagery of the Cubists, attested a general epistemological crisis.9 Those poets willing to state the crisis, such as Tennyson and Arnold, did so only to retreat into nostalgia, the “dead men’s” music that Jeffers forswore in his account of his own crisis. What was needed was a vision, steady and whole, that would confront the post-Darwinian world on its own terms, neither retreating from its implications nor ‘redescribing’ it according to the heart’s desire. Without yet knowing it, that was the task toward which Jeffers had directed himself.

II There is only one direct reference to Charles Darwin in Jeffers’ published corpus. It occurs in Section  of “The Inhumanist,” where the poem’s protagonist, the self-appointed guardian of the abandoned farm that had been the site of tragic action in the poem that precedes it, “The Love and the Hate,” finds it disturbed, and heaps up a small “cairn” of stones to protect it. Appreciating the quality of the stones themselves, the “old man”—he has no other name—finds himself “Taking an artist pleasure in his little pyramid,” and muses, mock-ironically: “To whom this monument: Jesus or Caesar or Mother Eve? No,” he said: “to Copernicus: Nicky Kupernick: who first pushed man Out of his insane self-importance and the world’s navel, and taught him his place.” “And the next one to Darwin.” (CP : )

There is a good deal of compressed symbolism in this passage. The old man plays at being a craftsman, converting the simple and primitive task of heaping stones into an artistic performance, while at the same time bridging the cul104



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tural divide between the quasi-religious act of building a “cairn” into the deliberative, civilized one of making a pyramid. This act is also a doubly ironic one. Jeffers, who had built his own home of stone partly quarried by himself, mocks his role as a builder in his surrogate’s act of erecting a meaningless marker on the unclaimed site of a smoldering ruin. Tor House was (and remains) Jeffers’ own monument, but like all monuments to selfhood, whether to oneself or to another and whether in stone or verse, it was, as he noted, doomed to ultimate dissolution: “Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated / Challengers of oblivion / . . . / The poet as well / Builds his monument mockingly” (“To the Stone-Cutters,” CP : ). The old man decides nonetheless to baptize his stones. He rejects the figures of Jesus, Caesar (not intended as a specific individual, but, as elsewhere in Jeffers, the prototype of grandiose, secular authority), and “Mother Eve”—a nod at the founding Western myth, but also, perhaps, to the eternal feminine. Instead he chooses Copernicus, whose significance, in contrast to the self-exaltation of the savior or the emperor, is to reduce man to his proper station. The old man then strips Copernicus of his Latinized name, reducing him to the childhood diminutive, “Nicky Kupernick.” This doubly ironic reduction (of man by Copernicus, of Copernicus by an anonymous caretaker) might suffice to make Jeffers’ point, but, with the pause of the line-break, he adds the copula, “And the next one to Darwin.” In doing so, he suggests that the process of deflating human self-importance begun by Copernicus has only been cinched by Darwin, who endured equal hazard and deserves coordinate honor. More: he suggests that Darwin’s contribution is of particular personal significance, as forming the immediate intellectual background of anyone his own age. The careful placement of “And the next one to Darwin” is meant not only to emphasize the importance of evolutionary theory; it is also the last line of the section. None of the fifty-one other sections of the poem is set off in this way, isolated textually both before and after. Jeffers’ position is clear here. The development of modern science from Copernicus to Darwin is an epochal revolution in human consciousness; this revolution is deeply salutary and essential; and—as the rest of the poem, with its evocation of nuclear holocaust, makes clear—it may have come just in time. The nature of this revolution is to dethrone man from the center of the world, and, by revealing something of its true extent and nature, to force him to relinquish his “insane” self-importance and to accept a far more modest place. The modifier Jeffers uses here is strong and even jarring, but it echoes the statement 105

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he makes directly in the Preface to the volume in which “The Inhumanist” was published, The Double Axe: “It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or an insane person” (CP : ; emphasis added). An insane person is one who is out of touch with reality, which is frequently described in Jeffers as the source and condition of sanity itself, as in “Calm and Full the Ocean”: “This is the sanity, the mercy” (CP : ). To set oneself up as the lord of a creation of which one forms but an infinitesimal part is to misconstrue reality as thoroughly as possible; on a collective level, it is to do what deluded persons do as individuals; it is, in short, the most encompassing case of insanity. If science had at last given man a working map of reality, it was clear that organized religion had been, if not the source of man’s former delusion, its self-interested enabler. Tribal religion had sought to propitiate the gods, and shamanism to assume their powers. Monotheism proposed to incorporate godhood itself, whether as part of tribal destiny or in the person of a savior. In however primitive (or sophisticated) a form, primal religious intuition was an essential if flawed aspect of apprehending reality, indeed perhaps its most crucial one, since it gave access to the Godhead who stood behind the phenomenal world, and, in Jeffers’ own conception, participated directly in it. Before the rigorous development of modern science, it was, inevitably, the principal ‘science’ itself, as Vico, Hegel, and Comte had pointed out. But religious truth—certainly the truth as apprehended by Robinson Jeffers—was far too bitter a cup for mass consumption, and so it was the fate of all great religious founders to grasp only “stained fragments” of the whole, and even these to be vulgarized by the priestly castes that appropriated them. The poem that most fully interrogates this process, “Theory of Truth” (CP : –), makes interesting dialectical use of the trope of “insanity.” Because, as Jeffers says, “only tormented persons want truth,” the great religious founders—Lao Tze, Jesus, Siddhartha—could perceive it only through the distorting mirror of their personal suffering, and this fatal subjectivity, this “private impurity,” both compelled and corrupted their vision. To be “insane” in this fashion was to be both freed from worldly wisdom—the condition of attaining truth—and, inevitably, doomed to confound partial truth with gross error.10 If saviors had played a vital role in the discourse of truth, priests (a word Jeffers never utters without contempt) had turned their insights to cynical advantage, exploiting man’s inherent narcissism and manipulating his deepest hopes and fears. Thus it had been the fate of the monotheistic religions to place 106



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humanity at the center of divine intention and concern, to declare it immortal in spirit and even flesh, and at last to confound God and man altogether. The great merit of modern science was to break this cycle of mystification, and to enable men to approach the truth, as the best philosophy always had, through disinterested contemplation: “A few centuries / Gone by, was none dared not to people / The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations. / But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier, / And death is no evil” (“Night,” CP : ). In the struggle over the reception of Darwinian thought that had formed much of the milieu of Jeffers’ youth, it was clear, then, where his sympathies lay. The attempt in Protestant circles to preserve a residual providentialism was, for him, the last gasp of an exhausted faith. He parted company from it with filial regret, as “To His Father” shows; but he did so decisively. Darwin’s thesis was compelling to him precisely because it cleared away the last vestiges of Christian sentimentalism, revealing man to be part of a great biological continuum and not a privileged exemption to it. At the same time, Jeffers would not draw Nietzsche’s conclusion from Darwin, which, for all its heroism, was simply a way of reinstating man’s false pride. The God that had died was the God of the cross, not the God of the cosmos, whose reality Jeffers deeply felt. To affirm this God, while fully embracing the implications of Darwinism, would be his poetic task.11

III Jeffers took the materials for this task from the coastal country where he lived. Others had interpreted Darwinism as a challenge to man, whether in his relation to deity or society. Jeffers would take up this challenge too, as we shall see in a later chapter, but for him the prime implication of Darwin’s thought was the necessity to reconceive the natural world. Tennyson had recoiled from a nature red in tooth and claw, but for Jeffers it was precisely this world that had to be embraced, as in “Fire on the Hills,” a poem of the early Thirties: The deer were bounding like blown leaves Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brush-fire; I thought of the smaller lives that were caught. Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned Down the black slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle

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One could hardly imagine a more archetypally Darwinian scene. Its first quality is the commonplace: a brush fire on Jeffers’ coast was an ordinary event, a part of nature’s routine economy. It is the human observer who gives it aesthetic significance (“beauty”) and pathos (“I thought of the small lives that were caught”). The beauty is, but the antiphonal response it strikes in the observer, expressed in the language of the poem itself, translates and recreates it for consciousness. Beauty is thus the frame that contains the whole, and its subordinate elements must exist within it. “The deer were bounding like blown leaves” is a beautiful line, with as yet only a hint of pathos; but as its full context becomes clear in the description of the fire, it acquires a retrospective property: it is terrible. Jeffers acknowledges this, and insists on its subsumption to the whole: “the fire was beautiful, the terror / Of the deer was beautiful.” The deer’s terror is not beautiful in itself, but as an aspect of the fire that has caused it and that synedochically represents the whole. This is a different kind of beauty, indeed a different aesthetic as such: not the beauty of harmoniously placed and balanced elements, or even the disruption that reveals their overall unity, as in a dissonant chord resolved in the tonic. It is rather the beauty of process, a unity that precedes its elements, and, as Jeffers says in “Natural Music,” “From different throats intone one language” (CP : ). It is a beauty that contains, indeed requires terror and destruction, and it is Jeffers’ prime intention in “Fire on the Hills” to accustom his readers (and himself) to this idea: “Beauty is not always lovely.” The introduction of the eagle crystallizes the issue. The eagle, as national symbol and cliché, is the very embodiment of our sentimental construction of the wild: soaring, noble, majestic. Jeffers presents him as “Insolent and gorged,” surveying the devastation of which he has been the happy beneficiary from “the jag of a burnt pine,” itself an object of some revulsion. The speaker’s pity for the panic-stricken animals is quite antithetical to him, whose “good fortune” it is and who takes his pick of them at leisure, as if the fire were at his service. He im108



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mediately becomes the central presence in the poem, however, and the “folded storms of his shoulders” suggests an embodiment of the natural force of the fire itself. This suggestion is reinforced when, a few lines later, Jeffers places him as a third element between the blue sky and the blackened hills, giving them all the shared quality of mercilessness, and stipulating it of each in turn.12 The insistence on mercilessness returns us to the speaker’s own perspective. It is he who offers the pained (if lovely) observation that the deer are like “blown leaves,” and he who gives thought to the “smaller lives” that are merely sacrificed in the fire without even the apparent purpose of feeding a predator. It is the speaker, indeed, who gives apocalyptic significance to what is otherwise a fairly commonplace event of the Big Sur region, a brushfire that, whether natural or man-made, clears out undergrowth and renews the soil. That such fires would have been regularly set by local ranchers (though there is no indication of this in the poem, whose speaker remains its only human component) would, in fact, range men even above the eagle among the ‘merciless’ elements of the landscape, for they knowingly condemn the ‘small lives’ that will be consumed, whereas the eagle merely profits from their destruction. The paradox, represented by the speaker himself, that men are the only conscious destroyers in the world while also being the only ones to raise pity to a conscious value, is a matter to which we will return, for it lies at the core of Jeffers’ ecology. In “Fire on the Hills,” the speaker is alone, and it is his pity that floods the devastated field with the chant of “merciless.” Of course, this judgment is cannily suspended by Jeffers, who offers it as if it were a neutral fact of observation that skies, hills, and, for that matter, birds of prey, can be merciless. The withdrawal of poet from speaker is accomplished by the insertion of the “He” in the sextet line of the sonnet, which, momentarily but crucially, shifts the impetus of the poem from the speaker’s perception to the eagle’s intent (“He had come from far off for the good hunting”). This anthropomorphic characterization is reinforced by the succeeding line (“With fire for his beater to drive the game”), which suggests the eagle in the conscious human role of manipulating the environment to produce a desired result. This caesura, broken off by a semicolon, has the effect of making uncertain the provenance of the lines “the sky was merciless / Blue, and the hills merciless black, / The . . . great bird sleepily merciless between them.” Only with the concluding couplet is the “I” of the poem’s third line reinstated as its centering perspective. The maneuver that substitutes declarative assertion for emotive response, or rather layers it over, is critical to the success of the poem. If the speaker were 109

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permitted to thrice cry out the accusation, “merciless”, “merciless”, “merciless” in his own voice, the effect would be clearly bathetic, and the poem’s conclusion impossible. By casting the statement instead in a neutral, indeterminate one, Jeffers is able to offer it as a credible, indeed compelling statement of fact. Yet the speaker’s suspended judgment resonates under it, like a subordinate figure that supports the main theme, for without it the statement would seem merely heartless and chilling. As we approach the final couplet, the poem has established that the landscape is merciless, at least in terms of its indifference to human purposes and responses, and the speaker is left with the task of adjustment. He can, of course, flee the scene in horror, or, like a good Symbolist or Decadent, declare his intention to withdraw into a world of fantasy. Instead, he faces it, though with a profound wrench of consciousness: I thought, painfully, but the whole mind, The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.

In these lines, the two apparently opposed values of the poem—“beauty” and “mercy”—find their reconciliation. Watching the fire, the speaker finds it beautiful, and the terror of the deer—which he has duly registered—beautiful as well. Returning to the charred landscape (and it is important that he does return), ‘he’ (or whosever’s voice we assume to be that of the passage) is struck by its implacability. Beauty is without mercy, is even, perhaps, inimical to it. In this case, one must make a choice, if not of values then at least of precedence. In the Christian realm of value, mercy is supreme, an attribute of Godhood itself. In the realm of natural process, as the speaker is forced to admit, it is wholly absent, if not replaced (at least to consciousness) by its opposite. Beauty is the only universal predicate. If it is true of the fire, it is true of the eagle, which serves to embody it, and true again of the God of natural process who manifests himself through both. That God is not mentioned directly in the poem, but he is figured in the “heaven” of the last line. Again, the play on Christian symbolism is striking. After Noah’s flood—a divine visitation—God sends a dove as a signal of his mercy. In “Fire on the Hills,” the eagle is not sent but ‘brought’ from heaven, and he signifies not mercy but the final consummation of process, the gross repletion of the satisfied predator. The difference between ‘brought’ and ‘sent’ is a significant one. In the tale of Noah, both the wrath that brings destruction and the mercy that sends the dove are immediate acts of God’s will. In Jeffers’ fire, the eagle is a response to a natural event; causation proceeds not from above to below, but rises upward. 110



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In this sense, the fire may be considered a sacrificial act, a burnt offering that invokes the deity. The eagle’s presence, readily enough explained on a naturalistic level (a predator invited to a kill), is epiphanic on a symbolic one: he represents both natural process, the fire and the forces that have produced it, and the divinity immanent in this process. This “wild God of the world,” as Jeffers characterizes him in “Hurt Hawks,” is both fully realized in the world and the lord who transcends it. We will recognize in this, of course, the immanentist strain in post-Darwinian Protestant theology we have already discussed, with its distinction between a God who operates through secondary causes while remaining supreme as First Cause. The eagle, on this reading, may thus be regarded both as an emblem of divinity and as an actual manifestation of it. The speaker, tacitly acknowledging this in his recognition of the eagle as brought “from heaven,” is then presented with the challenge of accepting it. The question is not an epistemological but a moral one. If a God of natural process is to be accepted, then he must be accepted in his most awful and forbidding aspect, as a predator gorged on his prey. Whereas Protestant commentators had striven to reconcile a Christian God with a Darwinian world, and Spencerian ones to solve the problem of theodicy by positing a god with no moral relation to his creation, Jeffers faces the problem without equivocation: if Darwin’s world is our world, then its God will not necessarily be to our liking, nor our own interests paramount to him. This is the issue the speaker faces in the couplet. If we wish a God patterned after our desires, then we must evade reality as it presents itself to us, and God as he truly appears to be; if we wish to know that God, then we must accept his order, and our difficult place in it. The speaker thinks this painfully, because it requires the acceptance of much pain, both in himself and in the world in which God enacts his will, but also with the whole mind (notice how Jeffers himself suppresses the preposition in the text, thus emphasizing the concurrence of pain and acceptance rather than any overcoming of the former by the latter). The whole mind is the mind at the full stretch of exposure, denying nothing of what it sees and accepting the full consequences of its vision. This is a moral act, but even more strongly an intellectual one, for the speaker thinks the sentiment expressed in the last line; that is, he processes the experience he has just had, draws the difficult but inescapable conclusion it imposes on him, and embraces it as value: I thought, painfully, but the whole mind, The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.

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Faced with a primal Darwinian scene, the speaker gives it full recognition, including acknowledgment of the pain and beauty it simultaneously brings him. The inseparability of this experience, the accompaniment of beauty by pain, is a critical affirmation. “Beauty is not always lovely,” he says, that is, anodyne; in fact, it is rarely that, and often then the hothouse product of human artifice (“Loveliness will live under glass,” Jeffers says in the slightly earlier poem, “The Broken Balance”). Beauty in its most comprehensive as well as its most typical sense incorporates pain, because pain is knit into the very fiber of experience, and thus suffuses it. As we shall see later, it is pain that in fact produces beauty as such. The eagle, then, “Insolent and gorged,” “sombre-feathered,” “sleepily merciless,” is beautiful—beautiful beyond the fire, beyond the deer, beyond the “terror”—because it is its result, and because as the result of process it figures the divinity implicit in it. This beauty is very different from that of postcard sentiment; it is, indeed, the very reverse of it. It does not necessarily appeal to the physical senses and may well offend the moral one; it can be apprehended only by “the whole mind.” But it is essential, not superficial. It is the vestment of reality, the quality by which divinity manifests itself. Where, then, does that leave mercy? The sky that witnesses the fire’s destruction, the earth that suffers it, and the eagle that profits by it—all are “merciless,” not in the sense of refusing compassion or relief but rather of being outside such categories. Mercy is not denied by these natural elements, but simply absent from them. That is obvious enough, but there is a further implication: if these elements figure divinity, and in the sense of an immanent God are divinity, then God, too, is merciless, at least in terms of the ordinary workings of the world. No Christian theodicy can tolerate such an assumption. Faced with their own primal Darwinian scenes, nineteenth-century theologians searched for evidences of mercy, if not in the immediate circumstance then in an ultimately providential divine will. Spencerians like Fiske finessed the question by stripping their God of all personal attributes, so as to avoid imputing mercilessness (or anything else) to him. In “Fire on the Hills,” however, Jeffers will have none of these palliatives. Mercy is absent from this scene, and if that is the case, then Providence—mercy deferred while pain is being suffered—is a cruel joke. Yet mercy is not wholly evicted from the world, for if it were then the concept of ‘mercilessness’ itself would be otiose. It is present, if all too rarely exercised, by humans, and since humanity, like all other elements of Jeffers’ cosmos, is an aspect of the immanent Godhood, it is not unknown to divinity itself. In “Fire on the Hills,” the speaker expresses the pity that might precede mercy, if it 112



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were possible to be had. He can only observe, in the fire’s aftermath, that mercy has not obtained, and that the scene is therefore without mercy, “merciless.” But this view is partial and subjective, as the speaker himself recognizes. There are many ways to describe the blue sky, the black hills, and the sated predator. They are not merely, or primarily, or even necessarily at all merciless; they would not be, for example, from the perspective of the eagle himself. They are so only from the standpoint of the human observer, and even in his case consciousness is divided. He does not wish the scene undone or reversed; nor does he wish it had not occurred, for in that case the beauty—the particular beauty of that particular scene—would not have occurred either. He even concludes that beauty is “better” than mercy, though in so doing he adds his own pain to the scene. As a universal predicate, beauty is not only intrinsic to the world, but is tautologically interchangeable with it. If, however, mercy were universalized, the cosmos as it exists would be impossible. The Kantian imperative cannot hold in a Darwinian world. Mercy is a value, but also a luxury, for humans. As Jeffers suggests, it may be even more of a luxury for God. The speaker of “Fire on the Hills” is outside the scene of action; he does not participate in what he sees, except emotively. In “Hurt Hawks” (CP : –), the speaker becomes an agent in the poem; he has, that is to say, not only moral impulses or perceptions, but he makes a moral decision, and intervenes actively in the world. The poem’s first strophe sets the scene: The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famine And pain a few days: cat nor coyote Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream; the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment him At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

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The ‘jag’ of burnt pine that suggests the spent agony of the scene in “Fire on the Hills” is here, as an active verb, representing the focal point of unassuageable pain. The very power that enabled the hawk “to use the sky forever”—that is, as if immortally—now, disabled and irreparable, reduces it below the level of the landbound creatures who can forage in an environment that condemns the bird of prey to slow starvation. His talons keep the “curs of the day” at bay, but also prolong his suffering, which, as Jeffers suggests, is more a matter of spirit than flesh, the memory of lost freedom and power. We think of mercy as something reserved for the weak, but Jeffers points out that “pain is worse to the strong,” not because they cannot withstand it but precisely because they can: the formula he will employ in his later tragic narratives, whose protagonists are formed for exemplary suffering. The strong do not ask for mercy; that is a part, one might almost say the condition of their strength. The “wild God” who thus, Jeffers suggests, sometimes does grant (or permit) mercy, will withhold it here. Death alone, in this case, will be “the redeemer,” but the ‘salvation’ he brings has “lame feet” because the hawk’s death cannot, in the natural course of things, be hastened or assisted. The play on Christian symbolism is again striking. Death alone can redeem or save, because it is, in itself, the one reward that life can offer. The God of the world who endlessly endures has more in common with the hawk than with the cat and the coyote, though he inheres equally in each, just as he does in the eagle of “Fire on the Hills.” Jeffers calls the hawk “arrogant” as he calls the eagle “Insolent,” but these terms are slippery with irony, for it is clear that the qualities they stand in for—fierceness, solitariness, independence, and pride—are ones he admires, and which he suggests are closer to the attributes of the “wild” God than those of the meek and abject. Indeed, he states quite explicitly that the hawk “remembers” him more faithfully than the “communal” people who would domesticate him, and thus ignore his nature. Paradoxically, then, it is only the dying, those who are about to return to nature themselves, who can apprehend him. At this point Jeffers turns to the second strophe, and gives the implied speaker of the first one identity and circumstance, beginning with a notoriously misunderstood line: I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail Had nothing left but unable misery From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

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Darwinian Redemptions We fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers, but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

The first person speaker plunges at once into this highly compressed narrative. That he would, as he says, rather kill a man than a hawk, has been taken as a classic example of Jeffers’ alleged misanthropy. But men sometimes ask for death as a mercy, and it is often, though quietly, given on the battlefield or in hospital wards. Wild creatures do not ask for death, nor do they contemplate suicide. The speaker betrays himself not as lacking in mercy, but as all too suffused by it, for he interrupts the action of natural process to prolong the life— and hence the suffering—of the redtail. This is, of course, not mercy but its opposite, an inefficacious pity that is very nearly cruel. The “we” who feed the hawk suggests a sentimental, perhaps familial cabal. The hawk cannot forbear to eat; unable to serve his own purposes, he finds himself subordinated to those of his benefactors, and thus robbed of dignity as well as power. The speaker is even further deluded when he describes his act as liberating: “I gave him freedom.” Freedom is precisely what cannot be given, except under the rarest of circumstances, and the single freedom left to the redtail—to die his own death—is denied him. He ‘wanders’ the foreland hill, a useless expenditure of energy that has no consequence but to sharpen pain, but when he returns in the evening it is not, like the domesticated creature the speaker would make of him, to ask for feeding, but “for death.” Even this is not a request, nor even a demand, but a natural due. The hawk yields none of his pride; it is he, and not the speaker, who is “Implacable.” With that single word, the power relation between man and hawk is reversed, and the natural relation righted. The speaker, belatedly enough, realizes his error; both fiercer and truer to his own nature, the hawk cannot be reduced to anything less than itself, and cannot be ‘placated’ for the offense the man has committed in making such an attempt. The question of the speaker’s actual motivation comes into play here. We impute pity to him, but there is no firm textual ground for this: he merely offers the problematic comment that he would rather kill a man than a hawk, and observes that, the hawk’s wingbone being too shattered for mending, it is left only 115

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with “unable misery.” We infer pity from this, but these statements are equally compatible with a calculation of cruelty, and indeed, as we shall discover in Jeffers’ treatment of them in “Dear Judas,” the two are dialectically connected. Of course, the speaker does not torture the hawk overtly; he gives him food and offers him “freedom.” He does so, moreover, over a span of fully six weeks, although he knows from the beginning that the hawk cannot recover. What, then, is his purpose? We may say that the speaker refuses to let nature take its course, whether from admiration or pity; but there is also, in his description of his final encounter with the hawk, the suggestion of a failed experiment: the redtail asks for death “Not like a beggar,” but still “Implacable.” Is it the beggar the speaker has been seeking? Is it for him that “the lead gift in the twilight” has been reserved, or is it the speaker’s own surrender that is signified by it? In any case, by insisting that the hawk’s death is in the speaker’s “gift,” as was his “freedom,” he would seem to be affirming his power to the end. These readings are speculative, of course, but they indicate that the speaker’s role in “Hurt Hawks,” like that of his counterpart in “Fire on the Hills,” is by no means unproblematic. As the latter is divided by his admiration for the fire and his pity for the creatures trapped by it, so the former both admires the hawk and yet—wittingly or not—acts to degrade it. The difference between them is in their capacity to act. The speaker in “Fire on the Hills” remains an observer, unable to intervene in the scene before him. It is true, certainly, that the ‘painful’ thought he comes to is an action in terms of the poem itself, indeed ultimately its critical one. But it is action on a moral plane alone, with no effect on natural process.13 As the speaker in “Fire on the Hills” is confined to the role of an observer and denied the capacity for intervention, so that of “Hurt Hawks” is denied the luxury of mere observation and finds himself compelled to act. Were the latter merely transient on the scene, the hawk’s plight might elicit no more than a glance. But the speaker resides in it, and the hawk is, so to speak, within his moral ambit, its plight a daily spectacle. He must act, for even inaction is a form of acting under these circumstances, and his choices are simple. He cannot nurse the hawk back to health; he can only feed it or kill it. Whatever his purposes are for choosing the first course of action, they fail, for the hawk’s nature forbids domestication and its pain remains unassuaged. When the speaker realizes this, he acts in the only other way available to him. As we can see, it is really the only choice he has had, but we may say in his defense that he, like the speaker in “Fire on the Hills,” needs time to make a moral calculus before com116



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ing to the conclusion entailed by the circumstances. Even so, he persists in regarding as a “gift” what is really an obligation. It is not the speaker, after all, who is the “redeemer,” and who comes on “lame feet of salvation,” but death itself, of which he is merely the agent. The week of agony decreed by nature has been extended sixfold by the speaker, yet he cannot resist congratulating himself even at the end, and still fails to comprehend his own fated role in the drama. The speaker finds himself within natural process, and therefore under compulsion. He does what he must, but only after misconstruing the nature of his task—or, by wilfully setting himself up beyond natural process, denying it.14 The poem concludes, as does “Fire on the Hills,” with a brief but telling evocation of the sublime. In “Fire on the Hills,” it descends in the form of the eagle; in “Hurt Hawks,” it rises, as the hawk’s spirit, released from from physical confinement, ‘soars’ upward in the “fierce rush” whose violence terrifies the night herons who are its witness. Sublimity is normally associated with a vision from on high, but in a God-saturated world it is apparent everywhere, as in the passage from “Point Joe” (CP : –) whose speaker remarks how the fog-sifted light “beat up from earthward, and was golden.” The hawk’s liberated spirit knows a moment of perfect self-realization, unencumbered by bodily contingency, as if it flared into divine essence itself before becoming “quite unsheathed from reality.” Jeffers famously develops this idea in the passage from “Cawdor” in which a wounded eagle, similarly dispatched by gunshot, moves through a kind of epiphanic investment to final “peace.” We shall consider this passage in dealing with Jeffers’ construction of divinity itself, but another one, from the brief poem “Fog,” is also pertinent: You dream, wild criers, The peace that all life Dreams gluttonously, the infinite self that has eaten Environment, and lives Alone, unencroached on, perfectly gorged, one God. (CP : )

Here, too, another species of predator—in this case, gulls “Invisible” in a sea-cloud—‘dream’ of an “infinite self ’ that can devour the world; that is, of a universal predation that, “perfectly gorged” like the eagle in “Fire on the Hills,” is—or represents an epiphanic embodiment of—the “one God.” Far from evading the consequences of the Darwinian vision, Jeffers seems here not only to embrace but to exult in it. Of course, the God who is all is no less prey than predator; what he consumes is himself. This, poetically construed, is the per117

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petual round of natural process, in which transformation is the sole principle and the only constant. Its operation is not simply mechanical; ‘mercy,’ too, which both by its presence and its absence figures so prominently both in “Fire on the Hills” and “Hurt Hawks,” is also a part of this world. But its place is limited and subordinate, and it is as apt to fail as to succor.

IV In these and other poems of his early maturity, Jeffers tried to work out the implications of a Darwinian world from a theistic perspective, just as in his narratives he sought to find a place for man in it. Neither task was simple. The speaker of “Fire on the Hills” must strive to accept a world of random pain and death he is powerless to affect, while that of “Hurt Hawks” finds himself compelled to act in one whose only choice is, ultimately, hard duty. If both are rewarded at the end with a glimpse of epiphany, it is only through internalizing the world’s pain in themselves; knowledge, that is, is only won through suffering, and experienced as suffering. The Darwinian vision yields, for man, only tragedy. We will consider more briefly two poems from Jeffers’ later career in which these issues are particularly addressed, although it is fair to say that there is virtually no poem of his maturity that does not involve them. “Orca” (CP : –) is a poem from the immediate postwar era, and bears its marks. The speaker—less disguisedly, Jeffers himself—is again an observer-commentator, watching two killer whales attack a pack of sea lions. The sea lions initially bask in their environment, “long fluent creatures / Bigger than horses, and at home in their element / As if the Pacific Ocean had been made for them.” There are other, no less interested observers of the scene, the sea birds who stand “thick as grass” in a narrow inlet. The scene is one of peace and plenitude; in short, one ripe for predation. The whales enter silently but with deadly purpose, and in a vocabulary enriched by death’s new arsenals, Jeffers likens their approach to V- rockets homing on their targets. The sea lions panic and attempt to flee, and in an instant the scene is transformed: The water boiled for a moment And nothing seen; and at the same moment The birds went up from the islands, the soaring gulls, laborious pelicans, arrowy cormorants, a screaming And wheeling sky. Meanwhile, below me, brown blood and foam Striped the water of the inlet.

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Jeffers unfolds a scene of exemplary Darwinian mayhem here, in which the excited bloodlust of the birds turns both sky and sea into sudden pandemonium. A conventional response to it might be horror, or at least the exacerbated pity shown by the speaker in “Fire on the Hills”; but the poet has borne witness to far worse, and the ordinary imperatives of biology not only pale before the manmade disasters of a world war, but even appear relatively benign: Here was death, and with terror, yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful. Why? Because there was nothing human involved, suffering nor causing; no lies, no smirk and no malice; All strict and decent; the will of man had nothing to do here. The earth is a star, its human element Is what darkens it. War is evil, the peace will be evil, cruelty is evil; death is not evil. But the breed of man Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.

“Clean” and “bright” might seem strange, not to say wilfully inappropriate adjectives to apply to torn viscera and streaming blood; but if the peaceful seameadow of the poem’s opening lines is “beautiful,” then so is the violence that transforms it. Both are equally a part of natural process, and the dynamic equilibrium on which it rests. The violence is “clean” because it is brief and swift, and also because it is economical: life takes of life what is necessary for sustenance, and no more. It is “bright” because of the clarifying vividness that sudden jeopardy brings, in this case the “terror” felt by the sea lions under attack. The very act of predation brings the sense of life to its highest pitch of consciousness, its fullest and most furious activity, for predator and prey alike. It is from this perspective a supremely natural event, the condition of life itself. But man is a part of nature too, not an exception from it; indeed, he is nature’s master predator. This fact is cloaked by his capacity for pity and empathy, the qualities putatively on display in “Fire on the Hills” and “Hurt Hawks.” It is in war, however, that his truest nature is revealed: Homo homini lupus. As we have noted, Jeffers tried to see the Second World War as a species of natural grandeur in “Invasion,” a poem composed shortly before D-Day. It was, despite its folly and criminality, “also . . . ghastly beautiful”: Look: The enormous weight is poised, primed, and will slide. Enormous weight and doomed pity will reply. It is possible

119

Darwinian Redemptions That here are the very focus and violent peak of all human effort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [A]dmire the vast battle. Observe and marvel. Give it the emotion That you give to a landscape. (CP : –)

Jeffers here tries to accommodate the war within his conceptual and aesthetic scheme by likening it to a natural catastrophe, imagining its opposed sides as abstract weights and forces. It is a mighty effort to overcome the horror and disgust that courses through the poem, and wins through only with much difficulty and qualification to its final assertion: “the beauty stands.” In “Orca,” however, the effort is, at least temporarily, cast aside. The scene in the inlet is “strict and decent” because—here the poem’s speaker suppresses even himself—there is “nothing human involved.” All unfolds as it must, with “no lies, no smirk and no malice”: the human element alone is what “darkens” the earth. Even God is implicated in the “botched experiment” the human race seems to represent. For Jeffers, “Orca” was a moment of despair, the nadir of his response to the history of his times. For three decades, the thrust of his poetic project had been to reconcile the ways of God to man as revealed in natural process; now, it was man who appeared irreconcilable with God. The speakers of “Fire on the Hills” and “Hurt Hawks,” however problematic their roles might be, were a part of the scenes they described and to some degree enacted. The speaker of “Orca,” however, has no purchase in the poem. He describes the scene presumably before him while at the same time implicitly absenting himself from it, lest his presence taint it. He cannot entirely suppress himself without suppressing the scene as well, or making of it a mere figment of his imagination. This was the way of the Decadents and Symbolists Jeffers had forsworn long before. But the speaker renounces all possible agency, thereby confining himself to the purely passive role of witness. “Orca” thus represented for Jeffers an epistemological crisis, no less than a moral one. The world, as he posits it in “Orca,” can well survive without man. But man cannot survive without the world, and while he exists, he must be somehow in it. If we consider all this from the standpoint of the Darwinian episteme, the terms of “Orca” are even more striking. For the Protestant intellectual milieu from which Jeffers emerged, evolution posed the question of whether the world was worthy of man, or, put differently, whether Providence could still be detected in it. Jeffers had offered his own answers to these questions, but his start120



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ing-point was always divine reality rather than human need. It was man who was required to find his place in the world, not the world to suit itself to man. If that place were a far more modest one than he had accustomed himself to, the Bible had not erred in one respect at least: the truth would set him free. By the time of “Invasion,” human activity itself had become so problematic for Jeffers that it could only be rationalized by likening it to natural cataclysm. To be sure, war had always been an aspect of human behavior, and as such a part of natural process. The two world wars of his lifetime, however, had so exceeded any previous conflict in scope and devastation that they could not be fit into any moral or prudential calculus: their destructiveness was mere degradation. They were, moreover, only precursors; Jeffers foresaw that “more wasting / Wars [would] bleed the long future.” It is in this context that we must view “Orca.” Its subject is death, but a death that is “clean and bright,” “strict and decent”; that is, a part of the natural order. This death is “not evil,” but the way that nature conducts its business, and so it remains “beautiful,” the term Jeffers uses to valorize natural process and the divine presence it manifests. In contrast, both war and peace—the sum of human activity—are evil, because they are under the aspect of “cruelty.” The killer whales are not cruel, because nothing in their behavior is gratuitous; they inflict no unnecessary pain. Cruelty is a near human monopoly, and certainly its refinement is. In war, when it exceeds all benefit, it is all there is. This is the situation of “Orca.” In terms of Jeffers’ original Darwinian project, then, “Orca” amounts to a reversal of terms. It is not the world that has proved unworthy of man, but precisely the opposite. The speaker of “Fire on the Hills” struggles to accept the terms of life. “Orca’s” speaker has no right to life, and, ontologically speaking, he effaces himself. Yet this cannot be satisfactory either. Man does exist, and though it is now, for Jeffers, his existence that scandalizes the world, the task of integration and, as it were, redemption, remains. “Inhumanism” was the name Jeffers gave to this effort. True to his Protestant origins, he saw this redemption as personal and individual. As he noted in “Meditation on Saviors,” whatever the destiny of the race, each man might yet “make his health in his [own] mind, to love the coast opposite humanity” (CP : ). That was the coast that Jeffers himself faced in “Orca,” where all was yet “strict and decent,” and beauty had not been ‘darkened.’ For some, if not for all, it was a place that might yet be reached. “Birds and Fishes” (CP : ), the poem which, as we have noted, concludes The Beginning and the End, may serve as a coda to our own discussion: 121

Darwinian Redemptions Every October millions of little fish come along the shore, Coasting the granite edge of the continent On their lawful occasions: but what a festival for the sea-fowl. What a witches’ sabbath of wings Hides the dark water. The heavy pelicans shout “Haw!” like Job’s friend’s warhorse And dive from the high air, the cormorants Slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves Through the green half-light. Screaming, the gulls watch, Wild with envy and malice, cursing and snatching. What hysterical greed! What a filling of pouches! the mob Hysteria is nearly human—these decent birds!—as if they were finding Gold in the street. It is better than gold, It can be eaten: and which one in all this fury of wild-fowl pities the fish? No one certainly. Justice and mercy Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God. The wings and the wild hungers, the wave-born skerries, the bright quick minnows Living in terror to die in torment— Man’s fate and theirs—and the island rocks and immense ocean beyond, and Lobos Darkening above the bay: they are beautiful? That is their quality: not mercy, not mind, not goodness, but the beauty of God.

Jeffers sets a scene very similar to that of “Orca” here, only with the gallery of birds as protagonists. The tone is more casual, even bemused; the fish come on their “lawful” occasions, presumably to spawn, and the birds await their feeding frenzy as if at a “festival.” Far from being concerned to screen out the human presence, Jeffers freely anthropomorphizes: the festival, turning suddenly grim, becomes a “witches’ sabbath”; the pelicans evoke Job; the gulls exhibit “envy and malice,” and even ‘curse.’ Altogether, the “decent” birds—that adjective again—are “nearly human” in their greed and hysteria. They squabble as if for found gold, but, as Jeffers says in the line on which the poem pivots, their prey “is better than gold / It can be eaten.” The Darwinian utility of the birds’ feeding frenzy absolves it of the human attributes it seems to display. Eating is a necessary business; the lust for gold is unconnected to any natural need. ‘Pity’ is likewise a superfluous emotion that cannot enter into the equation between spawning and feeding. The birds cannot feel it nor the fish expect it, and the speaker who invokes it not only knows, like the observer in “Fire on the Hills,” that pity is inefficacious, but that it is otiose. Similarly, the grand values built on it—justice and mercy—are not only irrelevant to the scene, but 122



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to the God of such a nature himself. They are only “human dreams,” a peculiar decoction of cosmic process, and a dangerous delusion when applied to characterizing it. If man cannot resist such dreams, he can at least recognize them for what they are. The human world is within nature, but also apart from it; its “health,” as Jeffers puts it in “Meditation on Saviors,” is to recognize this dual condition. Civilization all but locks nature out of doors, even while exploiting it, and so it comes to take its own norms for natural ones and to scold nature for failing to exhibit them. In the first part of “Birds and Fishes,” Jeffers almost presents a satiric account of what nature would look like if seen in terms of human behavior. The poet’s task is to cleanse his vision, and that of his tribe, as far as possible, and to see reality unencumbered by desire. To do so is to see the agony of the particular—“the bright quick minnows / Living in terror to die in torment”—but also the beauty of the whole, and that agony as constitutive of it. The minnows are, after all, “bright” and “quick,” and their glitter at the same time attracts death. The flash of pity the speaker allows himself for them does not blind him to the reality of his own condition, for “Man’s fate,” too, is no other than theirs: tragedy hunts, and will inevitably find him as well. The final lines of the poem are a last act of testament and reconciliation. The speaker, anticipating his own death, urges himself to “look again before you go,” invoking the full spectrum of the landscape—the interlock of beating wings and surging waves, of hunger and torment, of rock and ocean—in a totality whose unity is beauty, both natural and divine. Against this overwhelming vision of majesty and force, human conceptions are partial and ethereal, human values subordinate. And it is to this, finally, that humans must aspire—“not mercy, not mind, not goodness, but the beauty of God.”

V The question of man’s significance and role in the continuum of biological life was only one aspect of the nineteenth century’s concern with the implications of modern science. The size and age of the cosmos, its mode of operation, and its ultimate destiny all impinged on the sense of a divine, providential order. Nature in its generalized sense was still, for the Emerson of “Fate,” a quasipersonal force of storms and eruptions, theatrically impressive and sometimes randomly destructive, but in the last analysis subject to human will and intellect. In this essentially Romantic conception, the problem posed by nature was one of indiscipline. A world that had preexisted man for long ages, however, 123

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and in which life itself was a chemical exception in what Jeffers called “the run of cold substance” (CP : ), the epiphenomenon of a minor planet circling a middling star in a universe of indeterminate dimension, raised another issue entirely: indifference. In traditional Christian eschatology, the physical universe was a stage set on which the human drama was played, to be struck and discarded on Judgment Day. It had no ontological value in itself, and, considered in itself, was simply an instrument of God’s intention and a mirror of his will. What modern astronomy and geology had revealed was its vast superfluousness, both in space and time. To what end were worlds beyond human sight and ken; to what end long aeons without life, extinct species, and yet-unknown ones? These questions, as they eroded faith in a providential order, brought the issue of the physical universe itself to the fore. If this were, in fact, man’s permanent and only home, what was its character and fate? Whereas the presumed annihilation of the stars on Judgment Day could once be contemplated with equanimity, the prospective heat-death of the universe prophesied by the Second Law of Thermodynamics—the slow dissipation of stellar energy into a uniform but insipid heat incapable of sustaining light or life—was deeply troubling, even alarming, to mid-century Victorians. Jeffers’ immanentist, or more accurately panentheistic position offered a solution to such dilemmas, albeit one to which, as we have seen, most Protestant theologians were averse. If the universe were not a separate creation but a direct material manifestation of the deity, then it would exist, or recur, at divine pleasure. Similarly, the difference between organic life and inorganic matter would be one merely of degree and not of kind. This was already the case in biochemical terms, in which life was simply the by-product of certain inorganic combinations. Jeffers, however, went further. Since God inhered equally in all matter, the entire cosmos represented a single continuum of being in which no element could be valorized over any other. Life held no special privilege because, as penetrated by God’s vitalizing action, the universe as such was alive, and organic existence might be read not, as Darwin’s more teleologically-oriented followers had, as a kind of progress or ascent, but as devolution: For often I have heard the hard rocks I handled Groan, because lichen and time and water dissolve them, And they have to travel down the strange falling scale Of soil and plants and the flesh of beasts to become The bodies of men; they murmur at their fate In the hollows of windless nights, they’d rather be anything

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Than human flesh played on by pain and joy, They pray for annihilation sooner, but annihilation’s Not in the book yet. (“Margrave,” CP : ).

This passage suggests the praise of “permanent things” in “Point Joe,” as if that which naturally endured and preserved the integrity of its nature were superior to that which, like life (and especially the ‘highest’ life) was mortal and unstable. It also, however, presages a destiny for inorganic matter in life, as the fatal tendency of the former to result in the latter. This is figured in the passage as a tragic decline, but the same process can also be seen in terms of aspiration, as in the short but significant aside in “Cawdor”: “But as for me, / I have heard the summer dust crying to be born / As much as ever flesh cried to be quiet” (CP : ). The point is that material process is inherently double-aspected; all transformation is simultaneously gain and loss, and can be experienced as such by that portion of divine consciousness that is represented by each element of the cosmos. In this sense, and indeed in the most fundamental one, the universe for Jeffers is alive, “one being,” as he would say in a late poem, “one consciousness, one life, one God” (“The Beginning and the End,” BE –, CP : –).

VI The notion of a God-informed universe, equally vivified and valorized throughout its entire phenomenal range, was profoundly monist. It blurred distinctions between great and small, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, creator and creation. Accordingly, God was to be sought not beyond the world but within it. It was this postulate that rescued Jeffers from pathetic fallacy, to which his apprentice verse had been much inclined. To ascribe human consciousness and volition to inanimate objects was indeed an error, and, as he came to recognize, a deeply dangerous one; to see them as aspects of the great divine life that inhered in all forms and was neither “higher” nor “lower” in any was, precisely, to reject anthropomorphism. In this sense, the sublime was present everywhere, and it was the task of the poet to particularize it. We have seen how Jeffers was able to construe natural occurrences—a conflagration in “Fire on the Hills,” the death of a wounded hawk in “Hurt Hawks”—as epiphanic events. It was, obviously, more difficult to valorize objects that did not readily lend themselves to dramatic alteration. In “Winged Rock” (CP : ), one of numerous poems in which Jeffers takes his own stone-built house for a subject, he joins “the heavy 125

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rock walls commercing / With harbors of the far hills and the high / Rills of water, the river-meadow and the sea-cloud,” and, finally, “The sudden attentive passages of hawks,” in a single panoptic vision. With even greater economy of means—no more scene than a falcon perched on a crag—he suggests, in “Rock and Hawk” (: ), a profound continuum of being: Here is a symbol in which Many high tragic thoughts Watch their own eyes. This gray rock, standing tall On the headland, where the seawind Lets no tree grow, Earthquake-proved, and signatured By ages of storms; on its peak A falcon has perched. I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this, bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon’s Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud.

The rock has primacy here, inorganic matter uncontaminated by life (“where the seawind / Lets no tree grow”) and proof against earthquake and storm; it needs nothing but itself. Yet we attend to the fact that the rock itself is alive in Jeffersian terms, and that the falcon, symbolically mating it, completes it in a richer if not ‘higher’ form. This is the wedding of “fierce consciousness”—the undiluted desire of the predator—with the “disinterestedness” of the stone that represents pure endurance, the perfect silence of desire. These, in turn, comprise the essential elements of the embodied deity, the desire that is apparent in the ceaseless flux of natural process, and the perdurability of divine will that is 126



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continuous with it. Jeffers’ prophetic testimony is nowhere more audacious, for here, as he says, “is your emblem / To hang in the future sky”—here, in short, the purified symbol of divinity to replace the cross and its equally bankrupt competitor, the collectivized “hive” of communism or fascism. Jeffers himself sees the trap of grandiosity in these lines, and his conclusion is, like the selfwarning in “Meditation on Saviors,” a disavowal of personal ambition: neither the “failure” of his testimony (his first expectation) nor its “success” will alter its temper, and his own. That there is pride as well as resolution in these lines is, no doubt, inescapable, but the cure for it, as for all human failings, is immersion in the natural world, and particularly the “massive / Mysticism of stone.” This is a recurrent theme in Jeffers—the insistent theme of all his work. It is most didactically expressed in poems such as “Return” (“It is time for us to kiss the earth again”) and “Love the Wild Swan,” whose very title (repeated as its concluding phrase) conveys the message. Stone, however, remained Jeffers’ abiding element, and the one he most frequently identified himself with, especially when expressing the limits of his personal capacities: (“my tongue is stone how could I speak him?”; “how should one caught in the stone of his own person dare tell . . .”).15 It was the one he imagined himself aspiring to (“my desire . . . / . . . will go down to the deep rock”) and even ultimately immured in, a “long sunset shadow in the seams of the granite,” “a spirit for the stone.”16 But it was also the one in which he searched particularly for the divine essence, the life buried in the most seemingly obdurate and insentient core of matter. Such a revelation is afforded in “Oh Lovely Rock,” a poem considered in the previous chapter (above, –) that describes an overnight trip up Ventana Creek, then as now a pathless wilderness. There, we took notice of the interplay of a flickering campfire with the surface of the rockface it discloses. We may recall a few lines for convenience: it was the rock wall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. (CP : –)

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Like the crag in “Rock and Hawk,” the rock wall is “pure” and “naked,” with no organic excresence. The light that dances over it not only illuminates it, but suggests, as we have noted, the rock’s own fiery annealment. This helps the poet to ‘peel’ back the material surface of the rock to its vital substrate. The appearance of the rock is unchanged (“Nothing strange”), yet all is transformed (“I cannot tell you how strange”). The rock undergoes a passion; it possesses nobility; it exhibits a loveliness that appears innocent, yet somehow purposive. The term “passion” has an obvious religious significance, relating the rock to the informing deity. We will explore the ramifications of this association shortly. “Nobility” is a term frequently invoked by Jeffers, either as a general descriptor (“This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen” [“The Place for No Story,” CP : ]) or with specific reference to great rocks and mountains (“Oh noble / Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble” [“Return,” : ]). “Loveliness” is, as we have seen, a subordinate element in Jeffers’ larger concept of beauty, and usually associated with its more superficial aspect. The important word here is “childlike,” surely surprising in the context of “passion” and “nobility,” or for that matter any description of monumentality. But it is immediately picked up in the “grave smiling child” of the next line, a figure associated elsewhere with fate and death, as in “Death, the gay child with the gipsy eyes” (“Margrave,” : ). The rock’s fate will be different from humanity’s, and in some sense a witness of it: 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.

Jeffers is describing a rarely attentive and empathetic encounter with a natural object; that is, one that is relational and not merely observational. The rock, too, though “Outside our fates,” is in some sense companion and even witness to them, since all process is one. As human life proceeds slowly in comparison to the “rapid and furious lives in the sun” described in “Animals,” so its own agonies of change and discovery are “rapid” in contrast to the slow, aeonic changes in the rock, worn by “endless attrition.” It is not merely because the rock endures for so long that it is admirable, however, but for what it endures: 128

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it is not inert, “not passive,” but bears with all its “energies” the whole mountain above. This is the “silent passion” referred to above, a kind of natural crucifixion, an Atlas-like assumption of the world’s weight that is without expression or protest, and thereby achieves a “nobility” denied to the lesser or at any rate less steadfastly borne suffering of organically sentient creation. If we recall Jeffers’ insistence that all creation is a continuum, and that consciousness is exhibited throughout natural process, we will better understand the sense in which such qualities as gravity, earnestness, and nobility are not imputed to inorganic matter—that, indeed, would be pathetic fallacy—but discovered in them. Such qualities are merely analogous to the corresponding ones found (rarely enough) in human endeavor, but they are nonetheless pertinent for Jeffers on the particular level of being and the particular forms in which they manifest themselves. The “lovely” rock—“lonely” at the end when its profound insularity has been grasped—is earnest in its own way, just as the objects in “Boats in a Fog” are in theirs, and natural process as such in its totality. Indeed, it is precisely as an aspect of the universal earnestness of being that their value appears, and in which their “loveliness” consists. We may recall the final lines of this latter poem, in which the fog-bound boats creeping back to harbor invoke the full spectrum of that value: A flight of pelicans Is nothing lovelier to look at; The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue Against the essential reality Of creatures going about their business among the equally Earnest elements of nature. [Emphasis added]

VII The tension in Jeffers’ thought between the seeming endurance and perdurability of the material world and the inner processes that simultaneously sustain and transform it reflect another concept of nineteenth-century physical science, that of force. As Newtonian gravity explained the relations of motion between bodies, so “force” was held to explain motions within them, which were most visible when they produced changes from one state to another, as in the freezing, liquefying, or gasification of water. Such conversion phenomena expressed the essential nature of the material world as force, conceived as the underlying entity behind all exchanges of matter and energy. Force alone, in 129

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the last analysis, was stable and “real,” for, according to its covering law, the total quantity of force in the universe, whether expressed as matter or energy, remained constant: it could neither be created nor destroyed, but only transformed in the zero-sum economy of physical events. Put simply, the world was the sum of processes by which force was transformed. The existence of force itself was a metaphysical stipulation, since it could never be beheld in itself but only through its effects, and its existence could not be accounted for.17 As a concept, force possessed the attraction of being a universal signifier. It suggested aesthetic rationality and coherence, and guaranteed the durable eternity of the cosmos. Since, moreover, force drove the human world as well as all others, it could also be conceived as a moral agent. This recommended it to divinity no less than Darwinian teleology had. In a world of otherwise soullessly mechanical processes, or one in which, at best, matter and spirit seemed hopelessly divided, force was the connective tissue that could unite the two. But force was not necessarily sanguine or benign. If it could be read in providentialist terms, it could be equally conceived as “blind,” a mere epitome of material processes without purpose or direction. Clausius’ Second Law of Thermodynamics, which suggested heat dissipation as an inevitable by-product of such processes, reinforced this more pessimistic view. Dissipation—the gradual dispersion of matter in a form suitable neither for substance nor energy—led to end-stage entropy, the so-called heat death of the universe. The universe would persist, but the cosmos would fail. This kind of eternity was a mockery of all meaning, indeed of creation itself. The career of force had largely run its course by the late nineteenth century. Science had downgraded it from an entity to a mere relational expression between phenomena; from there, it soon appeared superfluous altogether, for the generic name added nothing to the description of particular events. As a metaphor of social causation, however, its afterlife was protracted. Herbert Spencer made it the cornerstone of his synthetic philosophy, which attempted to unite all phenomena in the universe—physical, mental, and biological—under the rubric of evolutionary force, by which all things tended toward greater complexity and heterogeneity, thus dividing existence into “higher” and “lower” forms. Social Darwinists, who had adopted evolution as a rationale for capitalist and imperial competition, embraced force in similar terms, as the irresistible impulse behind expansion, monopoly, and dominion. It entered Freudian psychology in the form of instinctual “drives.” Literary naturalism took it up in the work of Zola, and, in the United States, of Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser.18 130



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Even today, it is common to hear members of the learned community speak in terms of social or market “forces,” as if of the self-evident facts of life. Jeffers adopted the concept of force under the idea of strain. If force seemed both process and substance to the physics of the nineteenth century, it appears as an inner principle of transformation in Jeffers whose epitome is the fissile atom but whose pivot is man himself. Force had stopped short of the atom in classical mechanics, but with the discovery in Jeffers’ own day that the atom was divisible, the universe itself became fully permeable and relational: The atom bounds-breaking, Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, with recognition Not praying, self-equaling, the whole to the whole, the microcosm Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally, more utterly, more incredibly conjugate With the other extreme and greatness; passionately perceptive of identity . . . (“Roan Stallion,” CP : )

That atomic structure replicated the stellar one created, as it were, a community of fire separated only by a membrane in which the lesser was embraced by the greater, each achieving awareness in the common reflection. The universe, that is, was a striving toward consciousness, an agon in which it perpetually surpassed itself. Humanity was both the symbol and agent of this process, the most brittle and unstable of its compounds: Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split. Tragedy that breaks man’s face and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural crime, inhuman science, Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fencevaulter science, Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom, These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets, The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him, the last

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The phrase with which Jeffers sets off this passage—“Humanity is the start of the race”—is the key to its explication. The human race itself, already the product of aeons of evolution, is but situated in mid-passage, the avatar both of a potential successor species and of the fathomless universal intelligence it dimly reflects, an intelligence we can only call divine although we can hardly guess at its purposes. At the same time, humanity, as the first creaturely manifestation of conscious intellect, is a radical point of departure, a turning-point in cosmic evolution as such. Its nature is self-transcendent and its mode of transcendence is tragedy, as the physical process by which the atom is split to liberate energy is reflected in the tragic agon that “breaks man’s face” and releases “white fire.” The discovery that the atom could be split—the ultimate application of force—suggested to Jeffers not only a metaphor of human tragedy but of human destiny. As fission was the violent rupture of matter, so tragedy was of identity, and as the former produced energy, the latter did knowledge. Tragedy had its source in transgressive desire, including the desire for knowledge itself, which, as “the muddy root / Under the rock of things” (“Tamar,” CP : ), was ultimately the search for—or, in the tragic agon, the appropriation of—universal origin. The implicit equation of energy and knowledge bound both under the sign of force, which, as we have seen in Spencer and others, was held to operate on mind and matter alike. Like energy, knowledge was simultaneously creative and destructive, a violation of boundary and limit, and therefore transgressive as such. The quest for it was, accordingly, ‘criminal’ in the Nietzschean sense, whether expressed (as typically in Jeffers’ early narratives) in terms of sexual incest, or as “the wild fence-vaulter science.” This opposition may seem paradoxical at first glance, since Jeffers regarded incest in its most general sense as narcissistic inversion, while science was, in its ideal essence, disinterested and outer-directed, a “Useless intelligence of far stars.” In both cases, however, man was “fool[ed] . . . out of his limits,” i.e., driven beyond his previous capacity and experience, and thus “unnatural crime” and “inhuman science,” as equal conspirators, were ultimately one. Their joint purpose was to disclose the sublime, first by ‘breaking’ the “crust” of convention, and then—the verbs pile up in grand concatenation—to “leap,” “break,” “pierce,” “deify,” and, finally, to “praise” the God thusly conceived. Jeffers’ choice of verbs in this passage suggests both man’s connection to 132



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the “music” of ocean and rivers, and, in more individuated form, the predatory activity of coastal birds and fish: The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From different throats intone one language. (“Natural Music,” CP : ) The fierce musical cries of a couple of sparrowhawks hunting on the headland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression . . . (“Birds,” CP : ) Invisible gulls with human voices cry in the sea-cloud (“Fog,” CP : )

The hawks that, at the metaphorical remove of “Gray hungers,” desire transgression, and the gulls whose voices are directly characterized as “human,” suggest a universal quest for transcendence in which the human voice of tragedy is only one strand. If, then, human desire is particularly explicit as a mode of transcendence, and humanity itself, as a project, “the mould to break away from . . . / . . . the atom to be split,” man’s aspiration is only one among many, organic and inorganic, and his voice only one in a chorus whose objective is discovery and “praise.” Reversing perspective, Jeffers views man from the standpoint of divinity as “the last / Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution” before affirming again that he is in particular ‘the atom to be split.’ The “God” of whom he speaks as approving his praise is, however, “not in a man’s shape”—the anthropomorphic delusion—but one who “walks lightning-naked” on the ocean’s expanse; that is, as both apparent and concealed in the violences of natural process. If God is ultimately other than the process in which he manifests himself, he is not apart from it, and the world, in seeking him, simultaneously expresses him as well. With this in mind, we can better appreciate how Jeffers employs the inherited concept of force, no longer conceived as entity or relation but as universal process, and in particular his reconception of it as “strain.” The locus classicus of this occurs in the Prelude to “The Women at Point Sur.” Jeffers recalls his earlier apostrophe: “I said ‘Humanity is the start of the race, the gate to break away from, the coal to kindle, / The blind mask crying to be slit with eye-holes’” (CP : ). This task he now regards as accomplished (“it is done, the mask slit, the rag burnt, the starting-point left behind”) but not, he adds, “in a fable.” The reference, though indirect, is to the Great War, in whose wake culture is “outlived” and art “root-cut.”19 The poet’s task is to describe the “Match-ends 133

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of burnt experience” that remain from the universal conflagration, the remnant of a world “stalled,” as Jeffers will say, between death and rebirth. This will be the narrative proper, Jeffers’ longest and most ambitious, that is called “The Women at Point Sur.” That narrative is not our present concern; rather, we will focus on the lurid scene of storm, the symbol of natural process at its most exacerbated, that is both the subject and the setting of the Prelude itself. Jeffers invokes the storm in terms, that, again, recall the God who “walks lightning-naked on the Pacific” from “Roan Stallion”: I was calling one of the great dancers Who wander down from the Aleutian rocks and the open Pacific Pivoting countersunwise, celebrating power with the whirl of a dance, sloping to the mainland. I watched his feet waken the water And the ocean break in foam beyond Lobos. The iron wind struck from the hills. ()

Jeffers links this passage to the beginnings of his narrative in the crucifixion of a wounded hawk, which acts as a kind of witness to the progress of the storm and the events that unfold with it: O crucified Wings, orange eyes, open? Always the strain, the straining flesh, who feels what God feels Knows the straining flesh, the aching desires, The enormous water straining its bounds, the electric Strain in the cloud, the strain of the oil in the oil-tanks At Monterey aching to burn, the strain of the spinning Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder, Straining to rest at the center, The strain in the skull, blind strains, force and counterforce, Nothing prevails . . . ()

Jeffers again quotes a phrase, “the spinning / Demons that make an atom,” from the seminal passage in “Roan Stallion.” In characterizing the atom as volitional, he links process to desire (“The strain in the skull”), the ocean’s cleansing storm to the unpurged human one. All is process, and process, in its essence, is “strain,” the deadlock of forces that strive simultaneously for containment and release. In the Prelude, it is release that is granted: 134

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Black pool of oil hidden in the oil-tank In Monterey felt the sword plunge: touched: the wild heat Went mad where a little air was, metal curled back, Fire leaped at the outlet. “Immense ages We lay under rock, our lust hoarded. The ache of ignorant desire, the enormous pressure, The enormous patience, the strain, the strain, the strain Lightened we lay in a steel shell . . . what God kept for us: Roaring marriage.” (–)

In alternating stanzas that contrast the conflagration of the oil tanks with the desire wakened in the protagonists of the narrative by the storm, Jeffers suggests the universal sense of release that will propel his story forward, “the ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air, / The marriage-bound thighs opening, on the stiff white straw, the nerves of fire, the ganglia like stars” (). The principle of strain remains, however, and even the most apocalyptic release does not exhaust it, any more than natural process can exhaust the world itself. Indeed, each moment of ‘release’ is simultaneously an adjustment that restores the primary balance between containment and release. Thus, the impulse to unity, identity, and persistence, both in organic and inorganic matter, is forever pitted against that of rupture, transformation, and transcendence, and ‘process’ itself is the saga of their interaction. This is evident in the growth and decay of living organisms, the rising and settling of the seas, and the uplift and subduction of continents; it is most dramatically manifest in earthquake, storm, and, on the human level, in tragic desire. According to the principle of the conservation of force, one of the key constructs of the idea, force can never be created or destroyed, but only redistributed. In a similar fashion, ‘strain’ too is a universal constant, since it embodies the totality of process, and is, as it were, the lived experience of the material world. It manifests itself, to the observer, principally at moments of extreme stress and disjuncture, but its action is continuous, and its intensest pressure—the most perfect balance of its conflicting forces—is endured in silence.

VIII For the Jeffers of the early mature narratives and verse dramas, tragedy is expressed through transgressive violence. I have called the protagonists of these stories—Tamar in the narrative named for her, Orestes in “The Tower Beyond 135

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Tragedy,” the California of “Roan Stallion,” and the Reverend Arthur Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur”—heroes of transgression, exemplars of the illimitable “desire,” the “unnatural crime,” and the “wild loves” of which Jeffers spoke in “Roan Stallion.” These included incest (Tamar); matricide (Orestes); bestiality (California); and self-deification (Barclay). Although actualized or at least attempted, however, these acts all pointed toward transcendent goals: in Tamar’s case, the wish to annul genetic heritage and temporal process as such; in Orestes’, to overcome guilt and renounce narcissism; in California’s, a personal fusion with the sublime; in Barclay’s, the renewal of religious experience through immersion in sin. In each case, tragedy lay in the unfulfillable nature of the quest and the consequences of its pursuit; in each, catharsis was effected in the ‘firing’ of the coal, the enlargement of human possibility through immolative sacrifice. With the figure of Barclay, the half-mad prophet and orgiastic savior, Jeffers exhausted this mode of tragic representation for himself. Effectively, he could go no further in the transgressive mode that had won him his initial acclaim—reputable critics had likened him to Shakespeare and Sophocles—but that, with “The Women at Point Sur,” appeared to have sated his public, and, perhaps, satisfied his invention.20 But the same principle of strain that had suggested the Nietzschean excesses of his early protagonists also embodied their opposite model. The tendency of matter to cohere in a given form was no less than than its tendency to spend itself as energy, “the ring-bound molecules” no less “Straining to rest at the center” than to “fly asunder.” Indeed, strain as such was nothing other than the product of violently oppositional tendencies, and release only the basis of new configuration. If, then, the hero of transgression had served to illustrate the transformative aspect of natural process as embedded in the notion of strain, a very different kind of protagonist might emerge from the contemplation of material resistance. Resistance was no less active a principle than transformation, because coherence was no less, indeed perhaps a more strenuous process than transformation: molecular structure did not merely “rest” in its condition until disturbed, but ‘strained’ to do so against the centrifugal pressures that continually worked to tear it apart. The literary figuration of this would be, for Jeffers, the hero of endurance. Such a protagonist would embody tragic guilt rather than transgressive desire; his prototype is the blind Oedipus of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus stands at the beginning of tragic literature because he embodies both poles of tragic experience, transgression and guilt, and the 136

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impulse that binds both. Oedipus transgresses without knowledge or intent, yet his character as it unfolds in Oedipus Rex, with its overweening pride and confidence, reveals the transgressive personality. His self-blinding at the end of the play is equally impulsive and, one might almost say, equally hubristic, but his gradual approach to wisdom and acceptance in Oedipus at Colonus completes the work of destiny in him, and the unity of tragedy itself. Jeffers attempts no hero of such scope (nor, indeed, did anyone else but the Shakespeare of Hamlet).21 His interest is in suffering guilt rather than accepting it; or, as one might better say, in guilt as the occasion for suffering, since it is the latter, as irremediable strain, that he wishes to portray. To Jeffers’ contemporary critics, the immersion of his later protagonists in such suffering was often read as suggesting a taste for cruelty, as his earlier emphasis on transgression was seen as reflecting an at least literary predilection for vice. It is only, of course, in the full context of his art that either the hero of transgression or the hero of endurance can be understood. For Jeffers, they were two sides of the same coin, and the metaphor that best expressed their common ground was that of strain. As we have noted, the protagonists of Jeffers’ first mature narratives and dramas were transgressive. They may be summed up in the figure of their last and most formidable exemplar, Arthur Barclay. In “The Women at Point Sur” Barclay, a fifty-year-old minister, deserts his congregation and wanders off to find truth in an unmediated exposure to Godhood. In a sense, Barclay suggests the male correlative of California in “Roan Stallion,” who, in attempting to submit herself to the stallion whose power she identifies with divinity, seeks union with the authorizing power of the sublime. Barclay, in contrast, wishes rather to incorporate the divine into himself. It is true that, in the crucial scene where his vision comes upon him, he is staggered and loses consciousness (CP : –; cf. below, pp. 230–231).22 But he rises with a sense of empowerment, and embarks on gathering the ‘disciples’ who will validate his sense of salvific mission. This leads, inevitably, to disaster, but, even at the point of death (from voluntary fasting), he affirms the divine afflatus in the poem’s last lines: After three days, Having not tasted water, he was dying and he said: “I want creation. The wind over the desert Has turned and I will build again all that’s gone down. I am inexhaustible.” ()

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Jeffers’ ambivalence toward his protagonist is evident in these lines. Barclay is clearly delusional, yet his psychic vitality is undimmed; he is still “the coal to be split,” self-surpassing even in the act of death. In describing the poem to James Rorty, Jeffers declared his intention to show the “danger” of the idea of “‘breaking out of humanity’” in the mind of “a fool or a lunatic” (CL : ). Yet, a decade later in “Theory of Truth,” he acknowledged that Barclay had “touched his answers” before losing them, like all prophets, “in the glimmer of insanity.” Such partial and broken access to the truth—the condition of all aspiration toward the sublime—would no longer serve his artistic purposes, however. Henceforth, his trajectory would be downward rather than upward, a description of suffering imposed rather than enlightenment achieved—or, in the terms we are pursuing, strain absorbed rather than strain released. This change was prefigured in the apostrophe of “Point Sur” that divides the poem into its two halves: Here were new idols again to praise him; I made them alive; but when they looked up at the face before they had seen it they were drunken and fell down. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I made glass puppets to speak of him, they splintered in my hand and have cut me, they are heavy with my blood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I sometime Shall fashion images great enough to face him A moment and speak while they die. These here have gone mad: But stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels. (CP : )

The unrepresentable divinity Jeffers himself aspires toward, the face of the sublime, is no longer to be attempted by direct assault, but rather by the assumption of suffering implied in the very notion of natural process. This is, as we shall see, Christological, but no longer embodied—except when Jeffers depicts Jesus himself—in the transgressive prophet. Rather, it will be portrayed in a succession of new protagonists, formed for endurance as opposed to enlightenment. The chief figures of Jeffers’ next three major narratives, the eponymous protagonist of “Cawdor,” Reave Thurso in “Thurso’s Landing,” and Lance Fraser in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” all exemplify the hero of endurance. Unlike the transgressive hero, fired by imagination and desire and contemptu138



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ous of human limitation, the hero of endurance—in each of these cases, a bluff rancher of the California coast—is content with the few acres of his domain and the competent routine of his days. Whereas fire imagery rules the early narratives—the holocaust that consumes the Cauldwell farm at the end of “Tamar,” the star-swirls above California in “Roan Stallion,” the burning oil tanks in “The Women at Point Sur”—stone is the element of their successors. To be sure, “Cawdor,” too, begins with a fire (“In nineteen-nine a fire swept our coast hills”), but its Tamar-like representative, Fera Martial, though passionate and, in terms of the poem’s action, efficient, lacks the tragic capacity that is brought out in Cawdor by the jealous murder of his son, Hood.23 Cawdor is described early in the poem as “craglike” (CP : ), and the boundary of his canyon is a tuft of granite simply called “the Rock” (). Fera identifies him directly with his marker: “Your voice . . . was as hard as flint. We know that you and the Rock over the canyon / Will not die in our time. . . / . . . . Look, his face now, Concha, pure rock: a flick and it shows” (, ).24 Cawdor’s identification with stone, and Jeffers’ characterization of him as “The self-included man, the self-armored / And never beguiled as to a bull nor a horse” () prefigures both his fatal temptation by Fera—the chink that every armor has—and his response to the discovery that he has slain the innocent son with whom he believes she has been unfaithful. Fera, who has falsely accused Hood, keeps her counsel while Cawdor’s repressed grief at his act festers in him; but she is unable to keep from shattering his complacency. Little by little, she unpacks her lie, and little by little, in his growing agony and remorse, Cawdor progresses toward the truth: He went out-doors And felt a seeming-irresistible desire To go to the Rock [where Hood had died] and lie with those stones On the soft earth, his mouth whispering against it. But now, he must never give in to any desire; Strain the iron forever. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The stars in the sparse boughs, the skies are never Darkened any more, a naughty glitter. How does one commonly spend a winter evening: Not letting the stars glitter through the split boughs. He entered the house and sat down. Strain the iron forever: He had strength for that. (CP : )

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Trapped between his deed and his guilt, Cawdor resolves to internalize the latter, to “Strain the iron forever.” The phrase is repeated at the end of the verse paragraph, and the intervening lines enact precisely what this will entail as Cawdor’s mind begins to wander, preparing to mount watch on himself even as he feels himself exposed to the stars’ gaze. Above all, he must renounce “desire,” the hallmark of the transgressive hero and the aspiration of even the locked stone for release. To accept strain without hope of release—that is, to freeze the dialectic of being in place, to bring the world to a literal standstill by sheer force of will—such is the defining characteristic of the hero of endurance. As such, it is the mirror opposite of the transgressive hero’s desire to transcend limits and to authorize the world anew. Both projects are utopian, because, to recall Jeffers’ succinct dictum, the world cannot be “stopped nor saved” (CP : ). Cawdor does not yet know the truth, which is that Hood is not only innocent of incest but that he had rejected Fera’s advances. Fera, slowly insinuating it, taunts Cawdor with the suggestion that, if such were the case, “you’d hold yourself quiet three nights, / Or four nights, and then wander on the hill scaring the cattle” (CP : )—an anticipation of the Ajax-like fate that befalls Lance Fraser in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks.” When she finally confesses, Cawdor resolves to keep his own silence, because “Nothing, is hardest to do. / . . . / Himself was responsible, / Himself must choose, himself must endure” (–). His agony, however, is so palpable that it renders his guilt transparent to the entire household, and, wearily conceding defeat, he blinds himself with a piece of flint, and sends for the sheriff. This ‘release’ is futile, however, and Cawdor ends in self-accusation: “I’d not the strength to do nothing” (). In Cawdor, the strain that refuses release is a uniquely moral act, nowhere else possible in nature. What makes it so is the recognition of moral guilt, and the determination to impose a self-punishment more severe than any possible from outside: silence. Because Cawdor’s whole being cries out for confession, it is the one thing he chooses to deny himself. Because madness, too, would be an evasion, he resolves to stay sane (“How does one commonly spend a winter evening: not letting the stars glitter through the split boughs”). The “stars” are a celestial sublime that is the witness and judge of Cawdor’s crime; it is the externality to which he dares not appeal and to which he refuses to submit himself. Cawdor, that is, internalizes the sublime, not only assuming the role of judge and executioner but taking upon himself as well as much of the world’s pain—the agony of natural process—as possible, reducing and concentrating it to the single pinpoint of a self-tortured consciousness. Jeffers figures this in re140

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verse perspective in the excursus on the death of a caged eagle kept by Cawdor’s daughter Michal that is the teleological climax of the poem. The eagle’s liberated spirit, rising like that of the injured hawk in “Hurt Hawks,” sees Cawdor’s canyon as a mere “crack,” and Cawdor himself as “A speck, an atomic / Center of power clouded in its own smoke [that] / Ran and cried in the crack” (). This image is clearly related to “the atom to be split” that appears in “Roan Stallion” and “The Women at Point Sur,” except that Cawdor collects power in himself instead of releasing it as transcendent desire. This makes him a “Center of power” rather than a mere agent of it, albeit imperfectly so, since to the eagle’s perception he is partially aflame, “clouded in [his] own smoke.” Cawdor may hide from heavenly judges as he disdains earthly ones, but he is nonetheless observed. A similar drama of guilt and self-judgment is played out in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” whose protagonist, Lance Fraser, kills his brother in a drunken fury when he discovers him making love to his wife, Fayne. Fraser’s impulse to confess his crime is stymied by Fayne, who urges him to bear the weight of his remorse alone. Fayne’s reasons are prudential and, of course, self-interested; she implies, as well, that since she too bears responsibility for the crime, the burden is actually shared. The heart of her argument, however, is that true judgment is self-judgment, not submission to the arbitrary and fundamentally uncomprehending justice of others: The state of California can’t help you bear it. That’s only a herd of people, the state. Oh, give your heart to the hawks for a snack o’ meat But not to men. (CP : )

Fayne’s argument is really an appeal to masculine pride, but she miscalculates, for though like Fera Martial she is more quick-witted than her husband, Fraser is, like Cawdor, “The more sensitive by sex and by his nature” ()—that is, more susceptible to guilt, and more apt to suffer it. In other ways, however, the two men significantly differ. Cawdor is, indeed, proud, and as he turns inward upon himself he withdraws from all but rote contact with the world; even his self-blinding at the poem’s end, though dismissed by him as an act of weakness, is a symbolic rejection of all but the introjected guilt that has consumed him. Fraser, who internalizes his guilt unwillingly, finds by contrast the world revealed in his pain. Seeing a deer impaled on barbed wire while riding, he relives its agony for himself, while taunting the Calvinist piety of his father: 141

Darwinian Redemptions The barbs caught him by the loins, Across the belly at the spring of the haunches, the top wire. So there he hangs with his head down, the fore-hooves Reaching the ground: they dug two trenches in it Under his suspended nose. That’s when he dragged at the barbs Caught in his belly, his hind legs hacking the air. No doubt he lived for a week: nothing has touched him: a young spike-buck: A week of torture. What was that for, ah? D’you think God couldn’t see him? The place is very naked and open, and the sea glittering below; He hangs like a sign on the earth’s forehead, y’ could see him from China . . . But keep the wind side. For a loving God, a stinking monument. (CP : –)

Lance’s new-found sensitivity to pain makes him perversely cruel as well, as though he hoped to tempt retribution from an indifferent cosmos: thus, in the scene immediately following the one cited above, he pits a tethered hawk against a gamecock. But he slashes his own hands to the bone too on a fence, in a gesture at once Christ-like and punitive. This gesture gives him no relief, however, for he can neither take the world’s pain into himself nor assuage his need for judgment. The descent into madness and suicide is inevitable, as Fayne, who will accompany him to the end, can only wonder “when the strain [will] end” (). In “Cawdor” and “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” it is through moral rather than physical agony that the protagonists partake of the “strain” of natural process; indeed, physical pain is figured in both poems as a mode of release from that agony, though neither Cawdor’s self-blinding nor Fraser’s self-crucifixion provides actual relief. Yet physical pain is a nearer analogue to what Jeffers imagines as the normative condition of all material reality, whose substratum is strain and whose common expression, both on the organic and inorganic level, is suffering. The question is whether such pain has value in itself; that is, in human terms, tragic import. This is not a question the Greeks would have asked. For them, tragedy resulted from transgression, witting or not, of the divine order. Physical pain might be an aspect of tragic expression, as in Oedipus’ self-blinding, or a punishment for transgression, as in the case of Prometheus. With Christianity, however, physical pain was instated at the heart of the moral order. Christ’s passion was perpetually renewed and perpetually suffered, like the wounds of 142



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Prometheus; but whereas the latter’s torment merely denoted exemplary punishment, the former’s was a redemptive act: the ultimate moral signification. The Romantics had revisited Prometheus as an example of existential defiance in a post-Christian world, but, in doing so, they had reduced his physical suffering to a kind of symbolic beau geste, “Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.”25 Jeffers, characteristically, wanted to explore pain as such, not as a negation of value but as a vehicle of it. If, as in Jeffers’ figuration of “strain,” the world itself was a kind of suffering, then human pain was necessarily an aspect of it. Jeffers explores this issue in “Thurso’s Landing,” the second narrative in the trilogy that, with “Cawdor” and “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” depicts the hero of endurance. As Cawdor is associated with his Rock, so Reave Thurso is connected to the rusted cable that spans his canyon, a work not of nature but the relic of his father’s failed quarry. Thurso Senior haunts the poem, a suicide whose shadow hangs both literally and figuratively over Reave and his lame and troubled brother, Mark. As Mark declines into the madness that will lead to his own suicide, Reave determines to exorcise the family taint of failure. When his restless and unsatisfied wife, Helen, runs off, he grimly tracks her down and brings her back. Deciding that a fresh start will change his luck, he attempts to cut down the old cable, only to be crippled when the strands, nicked but not parted, loose a rope that strikes him with full force. This Oedipal castration would seem to seal Reave’s own fate. Bedridden, incontinent, and racked by unremitting pain, he has, as he puts it, no “use” and no hope. Instead of submitting, however, he decides to make a project of his condition: Pain is the solidest thing in the world, it has hard edges, I think it has a shape and might be handled, Like a rock worn with flat sides and edges, harder than rock, but Like love it can hardly last more than fifty years. (CP : )

If pain can be “handled,” in both senses of the word, it can be shaped, and, in being shaped, mastered. Reave proposes to sculpt his pain as an act of will, wearing it down to submission like an eroded rock. This is an image, of course, for pain is “harder than rock,” and will not yield. Nor will Reave dull it with opiates, for that would be to cheat the contest: indeed, were the pain ever to fail, he admits, he would have to “burn [his] fingers with matches” to rekindle it (). It is the sole reality left him, and his sole honor is to bear it. Mere idleness—painless incapacity—would be the truly intolerable thing. Nor is suicide 143

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an option, for that would represent the final victory of the father, the reenactment of old Thurso’s cowardly exit. He will await his natural end, which in the course of things can hardly be “more than fifty years” (). As Reave rejects all physical relief, so he denies all hope. The universe is without meaning, since any God in it would necessarily be a “torturer.” This, too, is the conviction of Cawdor and Fraser, who do not accept punishment— from what source could it come?—but impose it on themselves as self-judgment. Reave, in contrast, accepts his suffering as the only form of affirmation left him: I’ll tell you What the world’s like: like a stone for no reason falling in the night from a cliff in the hills, that makes a lonely Noise and a spark in the hollow darkness, and nobody sees and nobody cares. There’s nothing good in it Except the courage in us not to be beaten. It can’t make us Cringe or say please. (–)

Reave’s stance is that of a defiant child who refuses to acknowledge the justice of his punishment. In his own case, the filial crime is that of striking at his father’s “root” by severing the cable that symbolizes his continuing dominion, and the punishment, instant with the act itself, is castration. This retribution from the absent father might seem godlike in its condign swiftness, and thus compel recognition if not acceptance. But old Thurso’s suicide has negated his authority. There is no higher power to be recognized, paternal or otherwise, and Reave consequently rejects any notion of moral significance in his mishap. On the contrary, his own refusal of suicide offers him precisely the means of asserting his final superiority to his father. Jeffers himself suggests a hubris in Reave that has placed him under “the frown of fortune,” for, as he observes, “It is certain that too violent / Self-control is unlucky, it attracts hard events / As height does lightning” (). This casual allusion to Nemesis—not too casual, however, for it is placed at the head of a verse chapter—prefigures Reave’s fall, and reminds us of similar suggestions elsewhere, such as the remark in “Apology for Bad Dreams” that “to forget evils calls down / Sudden reminders from the cloud” (CP : ). What Reave has ‘forgotten’—or rather, defied—is filial piety, and, beyond that, the deference that is due to natural forces and the power that resides in them. When Helen observes that the cable has survived earthquake and fire and storm, she suggests that it has itself become a part of nature, an acceptable burnt offering; 144



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and when Jeffers himself describes Reave on his fatal way up the ridge toward the landing as “a little laughably godlike” (CP : , ), we know that he has exceeded a limit it is prudent to respect. Jeffers resists any suggestion of overt reprisal; Reave’s fate remains an impersonal event in the weather of natural process. Nonetheless, a hint of design remains: No life Ought to be thought important in the weave of the world, whatever it may show of courage or endured pain; It owns no other manner of shining, in the broad gray eye of the ocean, at the foot of the beauty of the mountains And skies, but to bear pain; for pleasure is too little, our inhuman God is too great, thought is too lost. ()

The hero of endurance exhibits tragic value not because he fulfills a divine purpose—Jeffers’ God is too “inhuman” and too “great,” that is, too far beyond ken or conception for us to ascribe any attribute or intention to him—but rather because the hero’s suffering exhibits an unwitting aspiration toward the sublime, a self-enkindlement that manifests itself in moral terms as “shining.” The drama plays out to its inevitable resolution. Helen kills Reave by slitting his throat on the landing, and then takes her own life. Jeffers’ summative comment is a reaffirmation of his earlier statement: The platform is like a rough plank theatre-stage Built on the brow of the promontory: as if our blood had labored all around the earth from Asia To play its mystery before strict judges at last, the final ocean and sky, to prove our nature More shining than that of the other animals. It is rather ignoble in its quiet times, mean in its pleasures, Slavish in the mass; but at stricken moments it can shine terribly against the dark magnificence of things. ()

Tucked in among the trilogy of poems that collectively depict the hero of endurance is the short narrative, “Margrave,” which precedes “Thurso’s Landing” and functions as a negative exemplum or antitragedy within the group. Young Walter Margrave is a medical student who kills the young girl he has kidnapped in hopes of paying for his education. Caught, tried, and convicted, Margrave awaits execution. There is no dramatic development as such. Margrave is defiant, arguing that he has sacrificed a single life in the interest of 145

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saving many. When his own life is forfeit, he takes on Christ-like airs, imagining himself the victim not merely of a single jury but of a nation of intellectual inferiors (“a hundred and twenty-three million peas,” SP : ). His arrogance fails to sustain him, however, and as the months of waiting tell, his mind, “lashing like a burnt snake” at the prospect of extinction, gives way, and death appears to him “so dreadful that to speak of his thoughts and the abject / Horror, would be to insult humanity more than it deserves” (, ). Clearly, Margrave does not share the moral agony of Cawdor and Fraser, for although he has moments of “shame and anguish,” he does not repent his act but only its consequences for him. Nor does he experience bodily pain, as Reave does; indeed, his death throes are described in terms of both physical and psychological release (“Peace was the end of the play,” ). Rather, he is a study in mental anguish; that is, of exacerbated consciousness as such. Neither steadfast in transgression like Tamar nor determined to endure like Cawdor, Fraser, or Thurso, he is merely, in Jeffers’ description, “abject.” If, then, the consciousness displayed in Jeffers’ other protagonists, whether turned transgressively outward or punitively inward, is a means of invoking the sublime, the case of Margrave is different. Reave Thurso’s ordeal, although terrible, is nonetheless redemptive, a “shining,” while Margrave’s suffering, though no less intense, is finally a matter for aversion, what Jeffers would mean when he wrote in “Orca” that “The earth is a star, its human element / Is what darkens it” (: ). Such remarks would be taken by some for misanthropy, but Jeffers’ point—salutary among the peaks of his tragedies—was that pain seldom ennobles, but far more often debases. Man’s heroism, his capacity to engage the sublime, is thus dearly bought, and his most distinctive feature is also his particular curse: To slaver for contemptible pleasures And scream with pain, are hardly an advantage. Consciousness? The learned astronomer Analyzing the light of the most remote star-swirls Has found them—or a trick of distance deludes his prism— All at incredible speeds fleeing outwards from ours. I thought, no doubt they are fleeing the contagion Of consciousness that infects this corner of space. (“Margrave,” : –)

Jeffers uses the recently discovered recession of stars into ever-deeper regions of space revealed by spectrographic analysis to pursue his conceit of a 146



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universal revulsion from the “corner” of it infected by human consciousness (although, since the discovery is itself a product of that consciousness, he wryly suggests the possibility that this, too, may be an illusion). Yet, as has already been noted, consciousness is for Jeffers a general attribute of matter, varying only in the degree of its development and exacerbation (see above, p. 131). In “Margrave,” Jeffers appears to stand the classical Great Chain of Being on its head, suggesting that it descends rather than ascends to man. Ultimately, however, he conceives of it as a circuit. To be conscious is to be caught in the universal dialectic of change and endurance, the condition of “strain” that is at once the aspiration to peace and the yearning for transfiguration. There is no escape from this dialectic on any level of being, and from the agency and hence culpability it implies. As the poet writes of himself: I also am not innocent Of contagion, but have spread my spirit on the deep world. I have gotten sons and sent the fire wider. I have planted trees, they also feel while they live. I have humanized the ancient sea-sculptured cliff And the ocean’s wreckage of rock Into a house and a tower, Hastening the sure decay of granite with my hammer, Its hard dust will make soft flesh; And I have widened in my idleness The disastrous personality of life with poems, That are pleasant enough in the breeding but go bitterly at last To envy oblivion and the early deaths of nobler Verse, and much nobler flesh; And I have projected my spirit Behind the superb sufficient forehead of nature To gift the inhuman God with this rankling consciousness. (“Margrave,” CP : –)

Once again, consciousness and its products are seen as degenerative, a “falling scale” () in which the inorganic is notionally superior to the organic. On the other hand, consciousness assumes power—the poet’s own ability to “spread” his spirit “on the deep world” and even, in projecting it “Behind the superb sufficient forehead of nature,” to add a kind of competence, albeit a not necessarily welcome one, to divinity itself. The poet makes a kind of burnt offering of his private consciousness in the form of his poems (an image made 147

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explicit in “Apology for Bad Dreams”; see below, pp. 193–194). At the same time, by making a verb of “gift,” he implies, however ironically, that he has not merely laid tribute before God, but imposed it. This raises the question of divine self-awareness as such. God partakes in natural process, not merely as its source but as directly and continually manifest throughout it: “one life, one God,” as Jeffers puts it in “The Inhumanist” (CP : ). In the same poem, he asks: A conscious God?—The question has no importance. But I am conscious: where else Did this consciousness come from? Nobody that I ever know of poured grain from an empty sack. (Ibid.)

What Jeffers suggests, then, is a circuit in which all energies “flow . . . together” and interpenetrate, and all, as aspects of a universal consciousness, are sentiently aware of one another in the infinite web of particulars that constitutes natural process: as his Inhumanist declares, “there is not an atom in all the universes, / But feels every other atom” (). God is simultaneously and eternally the source, the journey, and the destination of all that is, although it is impossible to speak meaningfully either of origin or arrival. Humanity is an unstable Prometheus, its particular form of consciousness at once the apex of creaturely power and imagination and the abysm of desolation and woe. This peculiar volatility—“Huge pits of darkness, high peaks of light,” as Jeffers expressed it in a late poem (“The Beginning and the End,” BE –; CP : –)—though dwarfed by the scope of natural process and seemingly devalued by its integrity, was nonetheless a critical signifier: But who is our judge? It is likely the enormous Beauty of the world requires for completion our ghostly increment, It has to dream, and dream badly, a moment of its night. (“Margrave,” CP : )

Jeffers took the conspectus of a post-Darwinian cosmos both as the epistemological starting-point of his verse and as its principal challenge. That cosmos, as we have seen, was one in which all phenomena, mechanical and biological, were inscribed within a praxis of material necessity that seemed to render all questions of purpose and intention otiose, and left human morality ungrounded. Existence was at once an iron compulsion ruled by the imperative of survival, and a superfluity without explanation or goal. To interrogate it further was to come up against the prohibition succinctly expressed by Jeffers’ contemporary, Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”26 148



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Jeffers’ response was to accept the postulates of the Darwinian cosmos as fully descriptive, while denying them as normative. To the presumption of a universe without meaning, he opposed the assertion of one whose existence as such was manifest value. Against a universe of molecules agitated by impersonal, mechanical force, he set a world fully alive, animated by an immanent although inscrutable divinity. This vitalist conception obviated the distinction between living and inert matter by conceiving the world as a graded continuum of life in which all matter participated, according to kind, in divine substance and consciousness, and in which man, instead of being the isolated cynosure of an indifferent cosmos, gained pertinence through tragedy both to the divine agon and to its material manifestation as “strain.” In so doing, Jeffers attempted to reconstitute the sublime as a mediatory relationship between man and the divine. Kantian epistemology had posed this relation in terms of the ineffability of the latter; Darwinian and mechanist conceptions of the cosmos had deepened the sense of estrangement by interposing a world of material force between human aspiration and divine recognition; modern cosmology had destabilized the most fundamental coordinates of understanding. The Kantian dilemma remained, further complicated by a phenomenal world that seemed scarcely less accessible to reasoned inquiry than the noumenal one. More than ever, then, the natural world appeared not as the transparent site of encounter between the human and the divine, but as a tertium quid to be negotiated.

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I The elements of landscape, Jeffers commented in a late poem—“Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees”—were the real protagonists of his narratives, and the human agents only “symbolic interpreters” (“Old Age Hath Clawed Me,” CP : ). Like any strong apothegm this remark begs qualification, for the passionate humanity of Jeffers’ best poems has a manifestly tragic sweep, and the complex process of mediation they enact within what is ultimately perceived as a divine manifold precludes a reductive account of any of their elements. If, moreover, one employs the dramatic schema so often suggested by Jeffers himself—human actors performing on a natural stage before a divine audience—it might well be argued that the middle term is actually the exiguous one. In “Evening Ebb” (CP : ), Jeffers glimpses Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams and the evening Star suddenly glid[ing] like a flying torch. As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind The screen of the world for another audience.

Here the natural world, or at least our local view of it, appears as a mere transparency that discloses yet another stage, larger perhaps but no more definitive. It is—Jeffers says it twice—a screen, a backdrop. Yet if from this perspective the phenomenal world is only the anteroom of reality, it is from another our full and sufficient surround, not merely the setting but the instigation of human passion: This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places, (The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite cliff the gaunt cypresses crown Demands what victim? The dykes of red lava and black what Titan? The hills like pointed flames

150



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We are closer here to Jeffers’ suggestion of landscape as the protagonist, or at least the source of tragic action, both “demanding” and “crying out” for human completion. The natural energies represented by the polarities of rock and fire (“granite” and “lava” in the poem) flow through both the greatest and smallest units of terrestrial matter, both imbued with and aspiring toward divine presence. What is implied here is a dialectical relation in which divine praxis is fulfilled through natural process; as the Reverend Barclay puts it in “The Women at Point Sur,” “God thinks through action” (CP : ). In turn, this activity binds both the animate and the inanimate worlds in the unity of process. What is posited then in the mature Jeffers is a continuum of being which partakes of divinity at every level, however differentiated it may be from a purely phenomenal perspective. This continuum includes what is called “nature” and what is called “humanity,” both of which, insofar as they are separable, exhibit characteristic and specific value, and both of which, insofar as they are dynamic, participate in the divine agon. From this it can be seen that any radical division—between animate and inanimate, person and place—represents a second-order manifestation of being only. Thus it is that Jeffers can speak of the landscape as a protagonist and of its human agents as mere “interpreters” without paradox; in the theater of being, mass and duration take precedence over articulation, concentrated striving over febrile sensation. What counts is the drama of the whole, which no single element can adequately represent; and so, as Jeffers urges the protagonists of “The Women at Point Sur,” “stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels.” If what is ontologically primary in our experience is the continuum, the manifold, we are nonetheless incapable of grasping it except in moments of mystical rapture (which, as the case of Barclay reminds us, are often suspect and dangerous), or of expressing it except by suggestion and nuance. Accordingly, we must break up experience into units of perception, which alone can make it accessible to thought and action. The very conditions of our existence, therefore, require us to segment reality; that is, to reduce, rationalize, and represent it. The result, however, is to alienate ourselves from the divine ground, 151

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to become, as Jeffers suggests in “The Answer,” “a thing apart.” As we will recall, Jeffers likens humanity in such condition to “a severed hand” in this poem, an image that suggests the very mechanism of our evolutionary adaptability and success as the symbol of our final incapacity and dispossession. What is required, then, is a means of reconnecting us to divine “integrity” and “wholeness” that is not subject to fleeting and possibly deceptive moments of felt unity; a philosophical ground not dependent on dogma but mediated through intense and disciplined perception. This question had been at the heart of Western aesthetics for three centuries, where it posed itself as the problem of the sublime. Jeffers made it his own when, in discovering the Big Sur coastal region, his innate religious sensibility and his as-yet immature sense of poetic vocation came into contact with a place of great natural splendor. It was a chance but determining encounter. The remainder of Jeffers’ life was to be devoted to constructing a California sublime, and to working out its wider implications for human experience.

II The sublime appeared as a problem in Baroque painting and philosophy long before Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful posited it, for the first time since Longinus, as a discrete subject of analysis. Burke defined the sublime as that which compelled our admiration and wonder, whereas the beautiful was merely that which pleased us, in short that which we condescended to notice. He thereby identified aesthetic response crucially with power. As Frances Ferguson neatly epitomizes the case: “The sublime is the realm of estrangement, of power seen as greater than our own; the beautiful, the realm of familiarity, of power seen as lesser than our own.”1 On such a view, aesthetic response is a wholly subjective affair, and the sublime perpetually tends toward the beautiful as familiarity lessens awe and breeds complacency. Kant’s far more probing account of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment, however, distanced it from the merely subjective in two ways. He restricted it to the perception of natural scenes, forces, and objects alone, and he accounted for it in terms of our apprehension of the noumenal frontier that we could intuit but not cross—that is, our sense of a reality beyond our ken, let alone our control. As Kant remarks, “Nature is . . . sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the idea of infinity,” which forces us beyond segmentation and differentiation and compels us to recognize 152



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the unknowable one within the knowable many. This redounds back on the sequential construction of reality that orders phenomenal experience; thus, “the comprehension of the manifold in the unity . . . is a regress which annihilates the condition of time,” and forces upon us the notion of an eternal, that is a perpetually co-present reality.2 Let us compare this formulation with the description by Orestes, the protagonist of Jeffers’ verse drama “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” of the transfiguring vision he experiences near the end of the poem: . . . they have not made words for it, to go beyond things, beyond hours and ages, And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the motionless and timeless centre, In the white of the fire . . . how can I express the excellence I have found, that has no color but clearness . . . no time but spheral eternity . . . (CP : )

Jeffers’ debt to the Kantian sublime is particularly evident in this passage, but it pervades his mature work as a whole. In this he is both typical and singular; typical as a representative (though belated) Romantic poet, singular as an American one. Emerson apart, sublimity scarcely figures in nineteenth-century American verse, and when it does it is propounded in Burkean terms as an exercise in domestication and self-empowerment: sentimentalizing the wild or weight-lifting for manifest destiny. When William Cullen Bryant describes himself as “Almost annihilated” beside “a mighty oak,” we feel certain he will recover his sangfroid soon enough, just as from an opposed perspective we are equally confident that our poet of the egotistical sublime, Walt Whitman, will never meet a cosmos he is unequal to. Sublimity is more apparent a theme in nineteenth-century American painting, though on very much the same terms. Thomas Cole’s gargantuan landscapes—already celebrated by Bryant in the s—depict the sublime being assimilated to the picturesque. The painting process itself, its stroke-by-stroke accretion foreshadowing the appropriation of the land by an army of settlers, enacts a conquest that, squared off by the frame of the canvas, confines the wilderness within borders. And, as we have noted, Frederick Church’s The Heart of the Andes, perhaps the most self-conscious artistic gesture of manifest destiny, did not merely appropriate but reconfigured the Andes, superimposing several different geological and climatic zones to create a composite landscape that “improved” on the original. 153

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By the end of the century the American frontier had closed, and the pockets of wilderness that remained had been enclosed in a national park system. Again in Burkean terms, the sublime had become the beautiful, the threatening vastness of an unclaimed continent the preserve of backpackers and daytrippers. The sublime could exist now only as nostalgia. Exploring the Sierra, the future director of the U. S. Geological Survey admonished himself in his journal, “You Clarence King never dare to look or speak of nature without respect and the admiration you are capable of.”3 The willed experience of sublimity, as Burke would have noted, was an exercise in contradiction, but the new custodians of the land presumably found self-exhortation not amiss in fending off the fatigue of grandeur no was no less a threat than the onslaught of developers. The second-order literature of sublimity produced by the conservation movement is best sampled in the writings of John Muir. Muir’s description of a day in Yosemite epitomizes the genre: The rose light of the dawn, creeping higher among the stars, changes to daffodil yellow; then come the level enthusiastic sunbeams pouring across the feathery ridges, touching pine after pine, spruce and fir, libocedrus and lordly sequoia, searching every recess, until all are awakened and warmed. In the white noon they shine in silvery splendor, every needle and cell in bole and branch thrilling and tingling with ardent life; and the whole landscape glows with consciousness, like the face of a god. The hours go by uncounted. The evening flames with purple and gold. The breeze that has been blowing from the lowlands dies away, and far and near the mighty host of trees baptized in the purple flood stand hushed and thoughtful, awaiting the sun’s blessing and farewell,—as impressive a ceremony as if it were never to rise again. When the daylight fades, the night breeze from the snowy summits begins to blow, and the trees, waving and rustling beneath the stars, breathe free again.4

Much of this sort of thing, recast in meter, appears in Jeffers’ early collection, Californians: . . . with cloud The hill’s vast head was often bowed As by a weight too great to bear; The sun was gone, the sky was black; It seemed the heights must groan, must break . . . (“Dorothy Atwell,” CP : )

We need not belabor the point. Half anthropomorphized, half divinized, the landscape is a natural cathedral, an organism that thrills and tingles, a sen154



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sibility that suffers and exults. There seems nothing left either of Burke or Kant in this decadent sublime. It speaks of nature’s majesty but is covertly imperial, annexing landscape not to economic utility but Romantic afflatus, subjecting it not to axe and plow but pathetic fallacy. Jeffers carries this process to its culmination in a brief narrative, “At Lindsay’s Cabin,” which concludes: This man, as others love a woman, he His chosen valley. Look! For I believe His love hath made it the more beautiful. (CP : )

In this inversion of the sublime, human emotion is not merely reflected in landscape but materially alters it, enhancing its aesthetic value as development might enhance its value as real estate. No matter that overt commercialization would be blasphemous to Muir or Jeffers; the process of appropriation, or making what Jeffers would later call “subjected earth” (CP : –), is essentially the same. The poems in Californians were the fruit of Jeffers’ first two years in Carmel, where he settled as a young man of twenty-seven in , founded a family, and remained for the rest of his life. He looked back on this moment as seminal nearly a quarter of a century later in the Foreword to his Selected Poems: A . . . piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could see people living—amid magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it; capable of expressing its spirit but unencumbered by the mass of poetically irrelevant details and complexities that make a civilization. (SP xv–xvi; CP : )

This passage, written from Jeffers’ mature perspective, is highly suggestive. Jeffers does not describe the California coast as virgin or desolate, but pastoral. He screens it through literary references, but although the references are heroic, the images are idyllic. Instead of appropriating the coast to the Romantic or transcendental sublime, he annexes it to history, or more properly saga—contemporary life that is also “permanent” life. This move not only elides a real piece of history, the dispossession of the indigenous coastal tribes by white settlers, but connives at a successor myth that views the conquerors as aboriginal 155

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and expunges the victims even from memory. Jeffers had in fact acknowledged the settler conquest in “Tamar,” and his sympathies showed clearly in the judgment he passed on the conquerors in “A Redeemer” (“Oh as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, so you came west and raped / The continent and brushed its people to death,” CP : ). Similarly, the cozy picture of a pastoral Eden exempt from change “for thousands of years to come” is belied by Jeffers’ contemplation of the coast’s “obscene [i.e., civilized] future” (“The Broken Balance,” CP : ). This seeming contradiction is resolved, I believe, by considering the prose passage as not merely a reinstatement of Jeffers’ first impression of the central California coast but also as a strategic idealization, a means of suggesting the proper human relation to landscape. In any case, the pastoral image remained important to him, not merely as an antidote to civilized excess but also as a ballast to the sublime. In “The Wind-Struck Music,” a poem contemporary with the prose passage, he eulogized the countryman’s life as “narrow, but vastly better than most / Men’s lives, and beyond comparison more beautiful” (CP : ). He returned to the same point in a late poem, “The Silent Shepherds”: What’s the best life for a man? To ride in the wind. To ride horses and herd cattle In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain, and come home hungry in the evening And eat and sleep. He will live in the wild wind and quick rain, he will not ruin his eyes with reading, Nor think too much.

Thus far the poem merely recapitulates the theme of “The Wind-Struck Music.” But Jeffers proceeds to expand his cast of characters: However, we must have philosophers. I will have shepherds for my philosophers, Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night Watching the stars, let the dogs watch their sheep. And I’ll have lunatics For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting The country news into supernaturalism— For all men to such minds are devils or gods—and that increases Man’s dignity, man’s importance, necessary lies Best told by fools. (BE –; CP : )

To this company we must add another prototypical character, from “A Little Scraping”: 156



Configuring the California Sublime . . . a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hands, [who] Goes through cold rain over gray grass. (CP : ).

Together, these figures embody the tragic economy of Jeffers’ narratives. The herdsman represents the norm of human life, desirable in itself but without spiritual dimension, a complacency that in the nature of things (formed for tragic action) cannot endure unchallenged. The shepherd is the silent visionary who sees “truth” but cannot make it intelligible. The prophetess Cassandra in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” the itinerant herdsman Onorio Vasquez in the middle period narratives, and the old man in “The Double Axe” exemplify this type. The “wild liars” deform the truth in speaking it; their prototype is the Reverend Barclay, but the great religious founders too, as Jeffers suggests in “Theory of Truth,” embody this paradox at a higher level. The woman with the knife is the tragic protagonist whose bloody act purges and clarifies—one recalls Barclay’s dictum that God thinks through action. Each of these figures, then, has a specific function, and each performs that function against a landscape in which divine purpose is starkly imminent. Jeffers suggests this praxis in the poem from which we have quoted, “A Little Scraping”: This mountain sea-coast is real, For it reaches out far into past and future; It is part of the great and timeless excellence of things. A few Lean cows drift high up the bronze hill; The heavy-necked plow-team furrows the foreland, gulls tread the furrow; Time ebbs and flows but the rock remains. Two riders of tired horses canter on the cloudy ridge; Topaz-eyed hawks have the white air; Or a woman with jade-pale eyes, hiding a knife in her hand, Goes through cold rain over gray grass. God is here too, secretly smiling, the beautiful power That piles up cities for the poem of their fall And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes.

The action in this passage is incipient, the characters ambivalent or interchangeable: the two riders who may be herdsmen but also witnesses; the hawks and the woman, each figuring the other, who move with silent purpose against the “drift” of the cows. It is a splendid example of Jeffers’ poetic economy, and of his ability to bring opposites into dialectical relation: act and essence, transience and permanence, the foreboding that precedes tragic irruption and the 157

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great calm that harmonizes and enfolds it. And God is here “too,” as Jeffers says strategically, meaning fully present but never localized; here, but no less present in the cities that are being prepared for their own tragic action, the “poem of their fall.” Again let us recall Jeffers’ prose description of his coast: “Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it.” It is this relation—the tragic relation—that Jeffers evokes in the last three lines of “A Little Scraping.” The conjuncture of tragic imminence and divine immanence thus constitutes Jeffers’ mature enactment of the sublime. The landscape is built up out of sharply observed particulars, each drawing its predecessor into a net of dynamic relation: the gulls foraging where the oxen have plowed, the hawks quartering the air above the stalking woman. The paired colors and muted palette—white and gray, jade and topaz—perform a similar function; one remembers Jeffers’ oft-expressed preference for clouded skies and his aversion to direct sunlight.5 The scenic depiction validates the declarative passages that precede and punctuate it; the conclusion extends the implication of the scene. The strategy, in short, is Kantian. The lyric diction instates a phenomenal world that evokes and manifests the sublime without ever collapsing into it—the pathetic fallacy of the decadent sublime and of Jeffers’ own apprentice work. He is thus able to insist on the integrity of this world, the actual, durable reality of the rock that “remains.” The declarative diction that alternates with it makes statements about a primary order of value that inheres in the phenomenal realm but is not directly accessible through it. That is the point of the screen imagery in “Evening Ebb,” as well as the description of the rockface in the campfire in “Oh Lovely Rock,” in which the poet’s imaginative penetration sees “through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily / And living rock” (CP : ; see above, pp. 78, 127). The sudden illumination, the deeper penetration of substance that loses nothing of its phenomenal character while disclosing more of its unsuspected essence—strange and not-strange, a something-more without being anything less—is in “Oh Lovely Rock” a paradigmatic evocation of the sublime, which is rooted in the phenomenal world but permeable to that which lies beyond direct perception. The experience it enacts is grounded in phenomenal perception; that is to say, it results in description. The ineffable experience of Orestes in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” in contrast, issues only in paradox—it has no color but clearness, no time but eternity, etc. Orestes says finally that “they have not made words for it,” and no words will make no poems. The ineffable, in short, cannot be depicted, and the sublime, though capable of being articu158



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lated, does not bear much insistence in lyric verse, and is unsuited for narrative as such. Jeffers’ solution to representing the sublime, in both lyric and narrative, is divided diction. We have already observed this in “A Little Scraping”; “The Place for No Story,” a contemporary poem that deploys similar imagery, makes the point even more concisely: The coast hills at Sovranes creek; No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin Over rock shaped like flame; The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence; A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; And the gray air haunted with hawks: This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable Human presence here could do anything But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP : )

The grazing cattle, the gray sea and white foam, the hawks “haunting” rather than taking the gray air—the scene is similar to (though also subtly different from) that of “A Little Scraping”; the diction, until the last lines, purely lyric. The poem concludes with two declarative statements, the first of which summarizes and baldly restates the preceding verses as value while the second addresses both what is constitutive of the scene and what is deliberately omitted from it. The omission is the human presence that plays such a crucial role in “A Little Scraping”; what is stipulated is “the lonely self-watchful passion,” the fullness of divinity that, as both subject and predicate of the poem, rests from “story,” needing no tragic extension of itself. The second statement thus revises the apparent pathetic fallacy of the first one, explaining the perceived “nobility” of the landscape as the sense of a constitutive divine presence—that is, the intimation of the sublime—to which it gives rise. “The Place for No Story” enacts what would seem to be nearly impossible, an evocation of the sublime without a human subject. But—apart from the fact that the pastoral setting itself bespeaks a human presence, albeit one temporarily offstage—there is of course an experiencing agent in the poem, namely the speaker who emerges abruptly in the ninth line and end-stops the long verse sentence with: “This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.” The speaker no sooner appears than he attempts to efface himself: “No imaginable / Human 159

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presence here could do anything / But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.” The logic of this statement is that the speaker must withdraw from the scene, but instead he makes a further and far more defining comment on it. This comment, with its predecessor, is in fact the speaker’s construction of the sublime, the posited “self-watchful passion.” What do the poem’s declarative statements add to it as a whole? Let us imagine a poem composed of the first eight lines alone: The coast hills at Sovranes creek; No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin Over rock shaped like flame; The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence; A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; And the gray air haunted with hawks.

This could stand as a poem, and not a bad one. But when these lines are captured and revealed as the interjected speaker’s own, what has been at most an intimation of the sublime (note the semi-spectral but procreative presence of the bull) becomes a direct assertion of it. The assertion works because the description backs it up, is so to speak the empirical evidence on which it rests. But it redounds upon the description as well, making it denser and more valueladen. It is possible to prefer the truncated lyric passage as a “poem” to the one constituted by the declarative pendant, but it would not be (though all the lines are still Jeffers’) a Jeffers poem. Jeffers himself suggests the inadequacy of purely lyric diction in “On an Anthology of Chinese Poems”: Beautiful the hanging cliff and the wind-thrown cedars, but they have no weight. Beautiful the fantastically Small farmhouse and the ribbon of rice-fields a mile below; and billows of mist Blow through the gorge. These men were better Artists than any of ours, and far better observers. They loved landscape And put man in his place. But why Do their rocks have no weight? They loved rice-wine and peace and friendship, Above all they loved landscape and solitude. —Like Wordsworth. But Wordsworth’s mountains have weight and mass, dull though the song be. Is it a moral difference perhaps? (CP : )

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For “Wordsworth” we may not implausibly read “Jeffers,” and for “moral difference” the absence of the sublime. The Chinese poets are good ecologists, and they win Jeffers’ highest praise: “They loved landscape / And put man in his place.” But they go no further than the picturesque, that is to say the decorative and fantastic; their mountains are beautiful but lack severity. They are good companions, too, because they love “rice-wine and peace and friendship,” but their stories, though wise and rueful, fall short of tragic consciousness. The declarative speaker in Jeffers’ shorter poems—sometimes a subject, sometimes an observer, sometimes not personified at all—is paralleled in the narratives by the device of apostrophe: passages which suspend or comment on the progress of the action, or extend it in a different dimension. These passages have been likened to the choral interludes in Greek tragedy, but the differences are more evident than the similarities. The Greek chorus proclaims the normative law, the nomos to which the tragic actors are exhorted to adhere; in Jeffers, a solitary voice muses on the action from outside the frame of events. As in the shorter poems, this voice disclaims agency even as it predicates meaning. Its final word suggests the creative silence—or void—beyond it. We may call this exoteric speaker “the authorial voice,” understanding it not as the voice of the author but as a persona within the poem whose function is mediational rather than editorial.6 The most striking interjection of this voice is the twelfth chapter of “The Women at Point Sur,” from which we have already quoted and which, in a single long stanza, forms a caesura in the narrative: Here were new idols again to praise him; I made them alive; but when they looked up at the face before they had seen it they were drunken and fell down. I have seen and not fallen, I am stronger than the idols, But my tongue is stone how could I speak him? My blood in my veins is sea-water how could it catch fire? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  I sometime Shall fashion images great enough to face him And speak a moment while they die. These here have gone mad: but stammer the tragedy you crackled vessels. (CP : –)

The authorial voice speaks here as a priestly artificer who invokes a tragic agon in praise of divine force. The speaker is situated at the threshold of the sublime; he beholds the “face” of majesty but cannot describe it except through the second-order utterance of his “idols,” who are consumed in the act of praise. 161

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A radical disjunction is thus posited between the speaker’s perception of divine form and his ability to articulate it. Perception is struck dumb in the face of the mysterium tremendum,7 and articulation is only possible in phenomenal terms, as lyric evocation or tragic enactment. But the ordinary world of sense perception is defamiliarized and alienated in the presence of the sublime, so that phenomenal representation becomes itself problematic. As Thomas Weiskel observes, “When the significance of things is no longer ‘natural’ or immediate, when making sense requires the mediating intervention—as opposed to the assumed immanence—of a transcendent idea, the world is being understood rhetorically, at a second remove.”8 The authorial voice in Jeffers is the voice of this process, the voice that tell us that what is being described is not only real but strange. Jeffers makes this point in one of his earliest mature lyrics, “Point Joe”: . . . we wandered Through a weird country where the light beat up from earthward, and was golden. One moved there, an old Chinaman gathering seaweed from the sea-rocks, He brought it in his basket and spread it flat to dry on the edge of the meadow. Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present. Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past and future; Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of. Man gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and ocean, On shores where better men had shipwrecked, under fog and among flowers, Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the earth was only A trick of nature’s, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful subtleties. (CP : –)

The powerful assertion about “permanent things,” uttered in Jeffers’ most commandingly authorial voice, is bracketed by the apparition of light rising from the ground, a “trick” that seems to reverse the order of things but turns out to be only one of “nature’s thousand graceful subtleties.” One might read the poem as contrasting the permanent elements in nature such as grass and stone with transient and illusory effects; one might even assimilate the latter to the “Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.” But Jeffers does see and speak of the refracted light, and in his final comment seems at once to subvert the notion of “permanence” and to enlarge it to contain its apparent opposite. On this, I believe the more persuasive reading, what Jef162



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fers alerts us to are the glimpses of process that nature affords, in this case the processes of temporal renewal by which “permanence” is sustained. We cannot see the grass grow, much less the mountains erode; we can observe (as in “Evening Ebb,” where another sunset effect reveals process behind the screen of appearance) the optical “tricks” that serve as a metaphor for the more hidden and substantive processes of change. We may also note not only the dialectical nature of Jeffers’ construction of the sublime, in which permanence and change are formulations of the same underlying reality, but the dialogic temper of his authorial voice, in which earnest assertion (“Permanent things are what is needful”) is qualified by ironic aside (“one must forgive nature a thousand graceful subtleties”). Yet the very inability to express the sublime except through paradox validates the experience of it as such. Unlike delusional or dream states, it occupies the full continuum of consciousness—we cannot, in its presence, imagine ourselves as dreaming—and, unlike the projects of the will, it occurs outside our intention, however vividly it stamps itself on our imagination. It imposes itself on us (whatever phenomenal shapes it assumes) as the perdurably real. Jeffers’ most sustained effort to pierce the Kantian barrier of the sublime and to disclose the transcendental unity beyond it is the great apostrophe in “Cawdor” which he titled “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” when reprinting it a decade later in The Selected Poetry. It begins with a matter-of-fact description of Cawdor’s son George dispatching a helplessly wounded eagle with a revolver, itself a minor episode in Cawdor’s unfolding tragedy.9 The passage soon shifts to an impersonal authorial voice which describes the synoptic vision of the eagle at the moment of its death. At a strategic point, the voice enters the first person to enter a disclaimer similar not only in tone but imagery to the speaker of Chapter XII of “The Women at Point Sur”: Oh cage-hoarded desire, Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame rising from fire, or cloud-coiled lightning Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven: I that am stationed, and cold at heart, incapable of burning, My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire to the rock, how can I speak of you? Mine will go down to the deep rock. (CP : –)

The oppositional image of the bird’s spirit rising toward the empyrean while the speaker’s remains with the elements of water and rock is itself a met163

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aphorical representation of Kant’s mathematical sublime, with its intimations of infinity in the gradient of ascending intuition. The bird’s imagined flight beyond earth’s boundaries begins from the most secluded mode of human entrapment in the phenomenal; indeed, the speaker’s own “desire” is not for an empyreal consummation but for immurement in rock. We shall consider the ramifications of this oppositional movement in due course; for the present it will suffice to note the rhetorical thrust it gives to the eagle’s ascent. The contrast between the earthbound speaker and his soaring fantasy would seem, in classic Romantic style, to valorize the poetic imagination, but the speaker disclaims both kinship with the eagle (“The unsocial birds are a greater race”) and imaginative power: the eagle’s “blood burns” while the speaker is “incapable of burning.” The result is a foredoomed project: “how can I speak of you?” This strategy has the obvious effect of whetting the reader’s anticipation, but we would be much amiss in regarding the contrast Jeffers draws between the speaker and the eagle as merely disingenuous, one of the author’s own “tricks.” We have noted the resemblance between the speaker’s self-presentation in “Cawdor” and “The Women at Point Sur,” but there is a significant distinction to be drawn as well. In “Point Sur,” the speaker’s incapacity is not toward the “idols” of his imagination but toward the deity (“him”) they are fashioned to praise; in “Cawdor” the eagle is valorized as a phenomenal reality apart from and radically superior to any imaginative representation. By insisting on the eagle not as a figure of the imagination but as an independent entity that by imaginative extension embraces all of life, Jeffers empowers it for its flight across the sublime and its ultimate, self-annihilating union with transcendent being: It saw, according to the sight of its kind, the archetype Body of a beaked carnivorous desire Self-upheld on storm-broad wings: but the eyes Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood Ran from the ruinous eye-pits to the hook of the beak And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven . . . Pouring itself on fulfilment the eagle’s passion Left life behind and flew at the sun, its father. The great unreal talons took peace for prey Exultantly, their death beyond death; stooped upward, and struck Peace like a white fawn in a dell of fire. ( CP : –)

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The eagle’s flight is, of course, an imaginative one, but its aptness for the journey is its very distance from human consciousness. Even in its last, apotheotic gesture, it falls on peace as a prey, and is consumed in the splendid posture of assaulting divinity. There is nothing of Miltonic rebellion in this gesture, however; the eagle merely fulfills the dictate of instinct to the end, paralleling rather than opposing divine will. In contrast, ordinary human consciousness, with its conflicting and evanescent desires, is incapable of transcendence. Jeffers emphasizes this in “Cawdor” by juxtaposing the eagle’s heroic flight with the post-mortem extinction of consciousness in Fera Martial’s father, a passage published side by side with “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” in The Selected Poetry as “The Old Man’s Dream When He Died,” and together the only material from “Cawdor” reprinted in it.10 The eagle’s death is an immediate release into the sublime (“What leaped up to death, / The extension of one storm-dark wing filling its world / Was more than the soft garment that fell”); the old man’s occasions only decay, a terminal act of self-consummation: Gently with delicate mindless fingers Decomposition began to pick and caress the unstable chemistry Of the cells of the brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So gently the dead man’s brain Glowing by itself made and enjoyed its dream (CP : , )

The eagle’s dream raises it above the earth and gives it a synoptic view not only of space but of time, as, “abstracted from being,” it sees the succession of generations and aeons, “Growth and decay alternat[ing] forever and the tides returning.”11 Old Martial’s brain rests “in the starless / darkness under the dead bone sky” of the skull, and it sees no future but instead ecstatically consumes its past: Whatever he had wanted To do or become was now accomplished, each bud that had been nipped and fallen grew out to a branch, Sparks of fire forty years quenched flamed up fulfilment. Out of time, undistracted by the nudging pulse-beat, perfectly real to itself being insulated From all touch of reality the dream triumphed, building from past experience present paradise

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“The unconditional delight” beyond the “simple” eating of flesh to which Martial tends would seem to imply cannibalism, but it is a self-cannibalism in which the mind in devouring its phantoms consumes itself until “the altered cells bec[o]me unfit to express / Any human or at all describable form of consciousness” (). The contrast with the eagle, which retains its integrity as a raptor and in its final gesture swoops on an exteriorized prey, could not be more complete. Both Old Martial and the eagle are “dreaming,” to be sure, and both dreams end in annihilation. But the eagle’s fusion with “peace” after its visionary journey through the sublime suggests a loss of self into higher being, perhaps even godhood, while Martial’s remains, spent on orgy, merely dissolve into the slime of matter. Old Martial and the eagle are aligned only once in the actual text of “Cawdor,” but the moment is a telling one. Martial is deserted at his burial by his daughter Fera, leaving him to be interred by strangers: “All was done awkwardly,/ By shamefaced people, and the [wounded] eagle watched from the cage.” The setting sun is reflected from the sea-rim, as in “Point Joe” seeming to shine from below: The shadows of the still people Lay like a bundle of rods, over the shallow grave, up the red mound of earth, and upward The mass of the oak; beyond them another shadow Broad, startling and rectilinear, was laid from the eagle’s cage; nine slender human shadows and one Of another nature. (CP : )

As the eagle’s shadow lays athwart the burial party, its alien presence emphasizing the shabbiness and insufficiency of the rite, so the splendor of the dusk provides a final commentary on the scene: The sun was gone under the wine-colored ocean, then the deep west fountained Unanticipated magnificences of soaring rose and heavy purple, atmospheres of flame-shot

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Unlike the eagle’s invasive shadow (itself now swallowed up), the evening light that envelops the burial party does not isolate it but integrates it with the landscape, dissolving its transient purpose in a “glory / Without significance.” The phrase strikes us by its apparent contradiction, for glory would seem by definition to entail significant display. This moment, quasi-epiphanal as so many others in Jeffers, engages a dialectic of the sublime that both suggests and retracts meaning at the same time. “Significance” itself is an ambiguous term in the context of the scene. The burial party is conscious of its inability to endow its poor shift with dignity, while for the reader, who has already been made privy to Martial’s death-dream, edification is clearly out of the question. If significance (at least on any level other than a symbolic one) be imputed to any particular life, the result can only be bathetic. In this sense the unindividuated glory of the sunset (“one glory”) represents a triumph over significance; that is, over human perspective. Transcendent meaning is ineffable, and only from a perspective that refuses to privilege any phenomenal manifestation can it be discerned. From this point of view, “the “glory / Without significance” that pervades the sensible world is sublimity itself. Such a conception poses obvious problems for the construction of narrative. If human action is not to be privileged in the cosmic scheme of things, if the sublime precludes the significant, then how is tragedy to be recovered? The problem, as Jeffers notes concisely in “The World’s Wonders” (CP : ), is to make Lear “as tall as the storm he crawls in”; but, as the image implies, such an effect can never be more than an illusion, and the issue of significance remains: if the tragic protagonist is sufficiently foregrounded to assume stature, he risks seeming a caricature or impostor when weighed in the cosmic balance, while if the proper scale is kept, human agents are likely to seem the mere “emotional mechanisms” and “twitching plexi” of Yvor Winters’ famously negative description of Jeffers’ protagonists.12 Jeffers himself likened tragic action to “build[ing] up a strain for the sake of the explosion of its release—like winding up a ballista” (SL ), a formulation certainly susceptible to the charge of reductive mechanism. The problem of tragic action—of human signification—thus lies at the heart of Jeffers’ project, for narrative was the chief vehicle of his poetry and forms the 167

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bulk of his oeuvre. If we are to understand the Jeffersian sublime, therefore, we must understand the tragic scene of narrative in which it is principally set. This requires us to bear in mind the integration of figure and ground, character and place, that is the primary act by which Jeffers’ sublime is constituted. Both narrative and the narrational or enfigured sublime provided Jeffers with a means of ego-projection beyond the limits of lyric or meditative form. We have seen how the authorial voice which grounds his lyric verse represents not a fixed point of reference and identity but a shifting ground, a migration of perspective that implies, ultimately, a plurality of selves. The tension in Jeffers between the solitary speaking voice and its ventriloquized personae points toward a dramatic resolution. As Weiskel points out à propos Jeffers’ Romantic precursors, “It would seem that only an ironic or dramatic form can take us beyond [singular] identity. . . . The ‘I’ must become a character viewed ironically, or in relation; the meaning of the poem a tacit construction not available to the protagonist.”13 In Romantic forms the ‘I’ persona, often a representation of the imaginative faculty itself, is too hegemonic to permit true dramatic differentiation; the phantom selves or interlocutors it projects are, as in narcissistic fantasy, reabsorbed in a totalizing subjectivity. Jeffers’ lyric poetry programmatically rejects the Romantic primacy of imagination (“Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch / One color, one glinting flash of the splendor of things” [“Love the Wild Swan,” CP : ]), and valorizes external reality with blunt, not to say combative assertion (“Here is reality” [“Hooded Night,” CP : ]). What the authorial voice proclaims most emphatically and insistently in these poems is its own inadequate powers of representation. Jeffers thereby reinstates the Kantian sublime against its Romantic revisions. Like Kant, he locates sublimity in subjective consciousness, but like him, too, he conceives it as a response to an intuited reality beyond the threshold of sense. For the philosopher this is the noumena, deduced by rational intelligence; for the poet it is “glory,” the ineffable and perdurable value perceived (not created) by the aesthetic faculty in a state of religious exaltation. To give the passage in full of the phrase previously quoted from”De Rerum Virtute” (above, p. 75): The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. (CP : )

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Jeffers thus reverses the Romantic order, which gives creative primacy to the imagination even when (as so often under its burden) it falters or despairs. In Jeffers, the imagination cannot dower the world but at best feelingly apprehends it. It is not, however, to be trusted far, and it is never a source of value. The entire passage from “De Rerum Virtute” is as clear a rejection of Romantic subjectivity as Jeffers ever made: One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men; The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful? These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore, With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind, And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream— But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful? Nor the great skies over the earth? The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it.

Jeffers valorizes a world without humanity, seeing the “virtue of things” not merely as independent of humankind but even as ontologically preferable without it. It is only as a grudging afterthought that he readmits it, not as the world’s master but as its “microbe.” If there is any hint of a positive function for humanity in the poem it is as the “beholder” of the world’s glory, which it is implicitly suited to admire as its least admirable element. The contrast with Romantic afflatus could not be greater. For the Romantics, the world is a terrifying abstraction, a noumenal void, until inspirited by the imagination whose rapture is sublimity and whose product (most lastingly its poetic product) is beauty. For Jeffers, beauty is not a product but a “translation” of objective value, and sublimity not a state of rapture (the creative trance) but of awe (religious attention). 169

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The mature Jeffers is insistent that human experience cannot add value to the world, let alone constitute value for it. But his rigorous monism will not permit him to segregate man from the cosmos, the tendency he decries in “The Answer” and the temptation he renounces in “Meditation on Saviors.” If humanity cannot create value it nonetheless participates in it, and its mode of participation, necessitated by the very qualities of “imagination” and “desire” that characterize it, is tragic action. Jeffers is thus led by the effort to resituate humanity in the ontological field of value vacated by Romanticism to adopt dramatic forms. Weiskel is again helpful in pointing up the basic conceptual difference between Jeffers and the Romantics, and in suggesting why Romantic dramaturgy remained relatively undeveloped. As he notes, with reference to Wordsworth: Nature hovers in the background [of The Prelude] as the sum or ground of the intermediary personifications (“Powers,” “genii,” “Presences,” “Visions,” “Souls”) who are supposed as actual agents of articulation. Nature is thus the guarantor of the dialogue, at once the principle assumed to cover and redeem its discontinuities and a kind of screen on which the multiplicity of representation is projected. When “forms” begin to assume the shape and function of “characters,” Nature’s significant absence (or “negative presence”) is already presupposed, for characters are symbols standing in for something no longer immediately there. Behind every symbol is an essence, the death of the thing (form or image) whose place the symbol takes.14

In Wordsworth (but no less for Shelley and Keats), character is the crystallization of those shadowy powers and presences that are the most immediate projection of the imagination on a plastic Nature which simultaneously takes shape as the ground or “screen” against which they are enfigured. On such a presupposition the only genuinely Romantic protagonist is the poet himself, who, whether retained as an ambient I-persona, cast as a character, or figured as a hero, is at once the subject and the animating intelligence of the poem. All other representations in Romantic epic remain essentially projections of the poet-protagonist and his quest, and are thus unable to develop the contrapuntal relationships characteristic of drama. In Jeffers, nature is divine enfigurement, natural process subsumes human purpose, and human imagination, far from sovereign, can at best faintly reflect a reality that transcends it at every point. The world thus appears as valueladen, which is the sign of divine immanence in it, and is experienced as pure potentiation, unconstrained efficacy—in aesthetic terms, as beauty. In short, nature exhibits for Jeffers the same creative power and intelligence that imagi170

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nation does for the Romantic poets. With this in mind we can better understand Jeffers’ claim that the natural world is his true protagonist, and with it both the strengths and the self-imposed limitations of his art. If Romantic art could never escape the bounds of imagination, Jeffers posed for himself the opposite problem: how to give dramatic significance to characters who in the final analysis were “symbolic interpreters” of a divine agon that utterly contained and absorbed them.

III Jeffers’ earliest efforts at narrative and verse drama wrestle vainly with the problem of personal autonomy. The male protagonists of “An Alpine Christ” and “The Coast-Range Christ,” both of whom play out Jeffers’ deeply conflicted response to his father’s death in December , face ego-annihilating relationships with the sublime. The “Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father” in “The Alpine Christ” wanders “three days . . . foodless”15 among the Swiss Alps, the scene of Jeffers’ own early schooling,16 a pilgrimage which, like that of the Christ, ends in assumption and a transformative reincarnation.17 The Young Man discovers himself a “spirit” and holds converse with Manuel Ruegg, the young Swiss peasant in whose figure Christ has returned: THE YOUNG MAN’S SPIRIT:  . . . I am dead? I am free now, and may follow and seek and find him? Was it you that did this thing? O wanderer, Whether or no you did this thing, you brought The rosy tidings, and a dead man’s voice Blesses you. MANUEL: They are not many who cry joy As you, at the one sure and general gift. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE YOUNG MAN’S SPIRIT:

O beautiful free happy birds, I also Am happy and free. I will fly up with you, And find though in the furthermost of heaven His spirit whom I love. (AC )

We are here at the primal scene of Jeffers’ tragic vision, as the spirit of The Young man ascends toward ecstatic, i.e., annihilative union with the father, only to meet an Oedipally chastened double on his way toward an equally fatal 171

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consummation on earth. Jeffers’ inability to posit an autonomous hero is painfully evident as The Young Man atones for his guilty survival of the father by renouncing his right to individuation while the Christ figure of Manuel, who bears a message not of redemption but supersession, is incarnated only to offer a second, existentially hopeless sacrifice. It was scarce wonder that Jeffers was unable to complete the poem, or to regard it subsequently as other than an embarrassment.18 A similar scene is played out in “The Coast-Range Christ” as David Carrow, its hero, is engulfed in a mountaintop epiphany. Jeffers rehearses the scene twice, deliberately underlining its Oedipal significance: David Carrow stood on the height and there were six came up the hill. Three were men and two were women, the sixth was neither man nor woman, He was higher and lovelier than the pine-tops, and human and not human. He was a shining out of the east before the star that kills the night, Like a walking tower on the ridge between the hilltops, a tower of light. Peace O’Farrell believed he was the dawn, and by the light of him saw David kneel on the lonely hilltop, waving his arms with wonder and awe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There were five on the hill-slope crying for death or love, and one on the height. Terrible radiations of intense desire streamed up the night. While the fierce old anger David’s father cut through the swell and flow Of the waves of vision deaf and blind. “You coward, I’d have let you go. Couldn’t leave the women alone, you dirty coward?” He fired, and the breath Dove-shaped burned at David’s mouth to nest in the bosom of the splendor of death. “Father, it doesn’t hurt. Love, love, we are mixed in the fire, the fire of the world Ending, heaven beginning, spirits set free, the seas burned, the stars hurled. All the promises have come true. I love you, I love you, Lord.” He saw The great vision leaning to kiss his eyes, and cried with delight and awe.19

In this apocalyptic sublime, what waits at the end of experience is the terrible father to whose edict of annihilation one must make loving submission.20 As I have argued elsewhere, it was only with the creation of the unrepentantly transgressive character of Tamar, who perishes not in a paternal holocaust but in one of her own making, that Jeffers was able to fully realize and integrate his powers both of dramatic and scenic description, and so to establish his mature conception of the sublime.21 Tamar is a Romantic rebel, or more properly a Miltonic one, in an anti172



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Romantic world. Like Satan, she is obsessed with the problem of origin, and determined to reconstitute herself through transgression. The act she proposes, however—the symbolic reversal of the temporal order through incest—is devalued when she discovers that she herself is the product of an incestuous union. Here rebellion has been mere re-enactment, “My darling sin a shadow and me a doll on wires” (CP : ). In terms of our discussion, Tamar’s defeat is the failure of Romantic imagination to impose its will on the world, to constitute nature as value under the auspices of the sublime. We contest the natural order, we see it as chaotic or inert, formless or passive, awaiting the signification that gives it meaning or the appropriation that turns it to use, because it affronts our sensibility at its most vulnerable point: it is that which is given, that which precedes us, that which we have not made but from which we ourselves have been made. When nature had been identified with paternal divinity, and in the satisfying myth of Genesis made manifest in the instant of our own creation, the problem of origin was bracketed: “origin” was “God,” “God” was “love,” and, by infusing us, God’s love had annulled the temporal order and united us with the divine ground. There was thus no (rational) reason for rebellion, and though rebellion had nonetheless ensued, paternal forgiveness was still available. Milton had retold this myth, anxiously, for the last time; in Gothic sensibility, it is visibly in retreat; with Shelley, particularly the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound, it is gone. The early Jeffers recapitulates this process. The loving and threatening father who lurks behind the face of nature in “The Alpine Christ” and “The Coast-Range Christ” gives way to the anxiety of supersession (Jeffers himself, through Una, described “The Alpine Christ” as written under the aegis of Prometheus Unbound).22 “Tamar” propounds a world devoid of divine judgment, but not thereby made amenable to human reconstruction; in this, his most crucial poem, Jeffers rejects the Romantic gambit, and with it the Modernist aesthetic that rewrites the hypostatized imagination of the Romantic hero as the collective worldmaking of the social whole. Divinity has, for Jeffers, ceased to be paternal; but the world has not ceased to be divine. The transgressive protagonists of Jeffers’ first mature phase follow the model of Tamar, challenging natural limits and questing for origin. Clytemnestra in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” seeks a new “foundation” for the world through patricide and filicide; the eponymous California of “Roan Stallion,” ecstatic union with natural power; and Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur” the usurpation of Godhead itself. All conduct raids on the sublime, forcing the barriers that separate them from divine potency and authority. Aegisthus in “The Tower 173

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Beyond Tragedy”depicts the dangers of this in conventional colors: O strongest spirit in the world. We have dared enough, there is an end to it. We may pass nature a little, an arrow flight, But two shots over the wall you come in a cloud upon the feasting Gods, lightning and madness. (CP : )

It is not Clytemnestra however but her foe Cassandra who has actually experienced the “lightning and madness” of epiphany. In a passage which foreshadows the passionate climax of “Roan Stallion,” she describes her seduction by Apollo: . . . he hates me, the God, he will never Take home the gift of the bridleless horse, The stallion, the unbitted stallion: the bed Naked to the sky on Mount Ida . . . where the God Come golden from the sun Gave me a bride-gift prophecy and I took it for a treasure: I a fool, I a maiden, I would not let him touch me though love of him maddened me Till he fed me that poison, till he planted that fire in me, The girdle flew loose then. (CP : )

The poisoned gift of prophecy is knowledge without power, knowledge that is forced on Cassandra by unmediated power in an image of bestial rape and possession. What is left is only a ravaged consciousness, “permitted to live because [it is] crying to die.” Jeffers revises the scene in “Roan Stallion,” revising as well the annihilative assumption scene in “The Coast-Range Christ.” California mounts her stallion, daring a wild ride since she can satisfy her desire for possession by him in no other way: He had been ridden before; he did not Fight the weight but ran like a stone falling; Broke down the slope into the moon-glass of the stream, and flattened to his neck She felt the branches of a buck-eye tree fly over her, saw the wall of the oak-scrub End her world: but he turned there, the matted branches Scraped her right knee, the great slant shoulders Laboring the hill-slope, up, up, the clear hill. Desire had died in her At the first rush, the falling like death, but now it revived,

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Configuring the California Sublime She feeling between her thighs the labor of the great engine, the running muscles, the hard swiftness, She riding the savage and exultant strength of the world. Having topped the thicket he turned eastward Running less wildly; and now at length he felt the halter when she drew on it; she guided him upward; He stopped and grazed on the great arch and pride of the hill, the silent calvary. A dwarfish oakwood Climbed the other slope out of the dark of the unknown canyon beyond; the last wind-beaten bush of it Crawled up to the height, and California slipping from her mount tethered him to it. She stood then, Shaking. Enormous films of moonlight Trailed down from the height. Space, anxious whiteness, vastness. Distant beyond conception the shining ocean Lay light like a haze along the ledge and doubtful world’s end. Little vapors gleaming, and little Darknesses on the far chart underfoot symbolized wood and valley; but the air was the element, the moonSaturate arcs and spires of the air. (CP : –)

California’s ride brings her as close to natural power, “the savage and exultant strength of the world,” as she can endure, even if it is less than she desires. At the same time the landscape takes on a sublime perspective, cannily anchored in such details as the buckeye branch that scratches California and the oakwood to which she tethers the stallion but stretching out to the phenomenal limit of the “doubtful world,” in which the ocean becomes haze and the moonlit sky gives out on “Space, anxious whiteness, vastness.” No god will appear, no retributive (or salvific) hand be raised, but the sacramental character of the scene, stipulated by “the silent calvary” of the hill and further suggested by the adjectives “doubtful” and “anxious,” is evident. Jeffers reinforces the sense of a charged but at the same time purposively withheld divine presence in the lines which follow: Here is solitude, here on the calvary, nothing conscious But the possible God and the cropped grass, no witness, no eye but that misformed one, the moon’s past fullness. (CP : )

The reference to Calvary is repeated, but despite this and other Christian references in the poem God remains merely “possible,” not specifiable; immanent rather than incarnate. If California identifies him with the stallion, Jeffers 175

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reminds us that he is no less “conscious” in “the cropped grass.” The sublime is thus for the mature Jeffers a field charged with divine presence, but a presence that indicates itself as amplitude (“vastness,” “solitude”) rather than plenitude, a winnowing away of the attributes that define incarnation (“no witness,” “no eye”). Jeffers’ reductions are significant; his earliest attempt at the sublime in “The Alpine Christ” was part of the projected poem to have been called “Witnesses,” and the Emersonian eye, as we have seen, figures prominently in his postwar sonnet cycle, “The Truce and the Peace.”23 The witty displacement of this Transcendentalist cliché into the image of the “misformed” moon, besides adding to the slightly sinister cast of the scene, makes the point that neither idealist nor materialist personifications can capture the essence of deity, which is manifest in nature without being defined by it. It is not, however, the atmosphere of the scene but the silent drama between the horse and the woman that signifies the divine agon. California kneels before the tethered animal, “brokenly adoring,” and finally lays her head within reach of his hooves. She is Mary, willing the divine visitation, and Jesus too, suffering “the unendurable violation” to be united with the Godhead. This intolerable longing is the human essence, the Oedipal figuration raised to a sublimity of vision that “fools” man “out of his limits” in the poem’s famous apostrophe of humanity as “the coal to break into fire / The atom to be split” (CP : ). The vision which yields finally the prospect of an unattainable divinity is the product of desire, the unwitting desire for transcendence that must express itself as transgression, the breaking of natural bounds and the forcing of limits. What leads us into the space of sublimity is thus the inarticulable need to know God, not the Romantic urge to thrust the creative panic of the self into the void. That need dashes itself against the impossibility of sustaining a divine encounter or comprehending the divine presence; as in the Kantian sublime, it leaves us cognizant only of the threshold we cannot cross. Jeffers is not content however with merely reinstating the Kantian sublime, which rests ultimately on a philosophical acceptance of the mind’s limits and posits nothing of what lies beyond them. Kant’s radical agnosticism was an attempt to save epistemology from skepticism or pure subjectivity; by asserting a space beyond the known or knowable—the space beyond sublimity—he suggested a relationship between the mind’s construction of reality and the “real” itself. About that relationship nothing could be stipulated except that it existed, but the corollary this entailed was crucial: that the mind’s construction of reality was not an act of creation but of interpretation, for which the 176



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constructedness of the mind itself (and therefore its necessary constraints) was the most evident proof. Were we truly gods, Kant argued, we would each dream a separate universe; that we all inhabited the same consensual one indicated that our “dream” had a common origin. One could call this origin divine if one wished, though always with the understanding that the language of theology, like all other languages, was figurative. Kant’s argument was a powerful response to the skeptical temper of eighteenth-century thought, but it conceded much. Denied access to the transphenomenal world, the Romantics widened and valorized the space of sublimity. The consensual world constructed by the ordinary operations of the mind became a mere baseline against which to measure the creative flights of the imagination, whose transformative powers became not only the criterion of value but value itself. In place of the conception of a noumenal void of which nothing could be predicated (and which was therefore ultimately insipid), the Romantics put the teeming world of fancy; in place of God, the poet. God himself was, of course, still one of the poet’s possible fancies, and so resulted the sentimental fiction of nineteenth-century theology with its false towers and Gothic facades, until Freud appeared to replace the figurative language of theology with that of psychology, and the twentieth century resumed the hard labor of skepticism. It was at this crossroads that Jeffers stood. Deeply imbued with both the Romantic and Freudian revolutions, he rejected the consequences of both; cast back on the premises of the Freudian sublime, he undertook, with the most sharpened skills of Romantic imagination and Modernist sophistication, to make pervious the boundary between human conception and transhuman reality. Theology had lost the capacity for doing this, and philosophy (pace Heidegger) had thrown up its hands at the task; it remained for poetry, a poetry purged of Romantic pretension while retaining the Romantic power of intuition, to make the attempt. As Jeffers’ Orestes had indicated in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” the phenomenal veil could be pierced by rapture, but the experience was incommunicable. To show the substance of both worlds the integrity of each had to be maintained; to show how they interpenetrated, their boundaries had to be affirmed. This is what occurs in the scene on the hill in “Roan Stallion,” which must now be quoted in full. Here is solitude, here on the calvary, nothing conscious But the possible God and the cropped grass, no witness, no eye but the misformed one, the moon’s past fullness.

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Configuring the California Sublime Two figures on the shining hill, woman and stallion, she kneeling to him, brokenly adoring. He cropping the grass, shifting his hooves, or lifting the long head to gaze over the world, Tranquil and powerful. She prayed aloud “O God I am not good enough, O fear, O strength, I am draggled. Johnny and other men have had me, and O clean power! Here am I,” she said, falling before him, And crawled to his hooves. She lay a long while, as if asleep, in reach of the forehooves, weeping. He avoided Her head and the prone body. He backed at first, but later plucked the grass that grew by her shoulder. The small dark head under his nostrils: a small round stone, that smelt human, black hair growing from it: The skull shut the light in: it was not possible for any eyes To know what throbbed and shone under the sutures of the skull, or a shell full of lightning Had scared the roan strength, and he’d have broken tether, screaming, and run for the valley. (CP : –)

California lays her head deliberately within reach of the stallion’s hooves, as if not only physical but mortal proximity must be dared to enter the ambit of divinity. The stallion draws away, reasserting the species barrier but also, symbolically, the phenomenal border between the human and the divine. For Jeffers, of course, the phenomenal world as such is a manifestation of divinity—“things are the God”—and California herself is no less an aspect of divinity than the stallion. It is, however, because no aspect of divinity is complete in itself that each particular entity seeks complement in its like, which is what Jeffers means by “desire.” On the material level this produces the phenomenal world, whose harmony is perceived as beauty; on the creaturely one, it is the process of life. In human consciousness, however, desire becomes heroic; it exceeds the requirements of natural process; it hazards sublimity in quest of a more unmediated experience of the divine. To achieve this, power and desire must be brought into the closest proximity, made “perchmates” as Jeffers puts it in “The Excesses of God,” but fulfillment is suspended—a courting of epiphany whose consummation is impossible. This occurs where love is blocked: forbidden, as in the case of Tamar’s incest, or physically inhibited, as with California. “Power,” in the form of the stallion, is lured toward the shamming Califor178



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nia. The stallion sees only a dark “stone” that smells human, a curiosity that at first mildly repels and then mildly attracts. What shines within, however, is the “shell full of lightning” which, if glimpsed, would cause the stallion to break tether and run “screaming” down the valley. Jeffers’ misnomer is deliberate. The stallion would “scream” if he could apprehend the passion contained “under the sutures of the skull”; that is, he would cross the barrier of desire and be partly humanized. This cannot occur, of course. The sutures hold, and at the poem’s end California, moved not by concern for the vindictive husband who has been crushed under the stallion’s hooves but by “some obscure human fidelity,” shoots the horse. California’s act seems to be a final reassertion of limits, but—apart from the role reversal implied by the shooting and the sexual connotation of the rifle she fires—it is deeply transgressive too, for when she turns afterward to face her small daughter it is with “the mask of a woman / Who has killed God” (CP : ). The stallion remains a divine proxy, and his death a sacrificial act that destroys the equilibrium between power and desire that is briefly but unsustainably established in the scene on the hill. California thus joins Tamar and Clytemnestra as a transgressive hero who seeks to force the boundaries between the phenomenal and the divine through an enactment of the sublime. This enactment is not an Oedipally guilty submission to annihilative assumption as in Jeffers’ earlier versions of the sublime, but a defiance of limits and a challenge to divine prerogative. Tamar and Clytemnestra both seek to “burn the standing world / . . . and begin anew” (CP : ), thus revoking the temporal order and usurping authority. California, refashioning divinity in the image of her own desire, creates an idol which can ultimately be sacrificed to it. The Reverend Barclay is the logical culmination of this series. Half-inspired, half-demented, Barclay neither contests nor simulates the Godhead; he engrosses it, claiming divine powers and attributes for his own (“I am inexhaustible”) as he leads a band of followers to disaster. In Barclay, Jeffers approaches the Romantic impasse, creating a character who wholly substitutes his will and imagination for the transhuman reality. Not coincidentally, he is also a Saturn figure who devours his young: a dead son, Edward, who appears as a feeble revenant, and a daughter, April, whom he rapes. Jeffers does not deny Barclay tragic stature and even partial illumination; but, like the Lear he ponders in “The World’s Wonders,” his vision is twisted by madness and purchased by ruin.24 179

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III With “The Women at Point Sur” Jeffers had come to a turning-point in his career, and a crisis in his art. Reflecting on his work in the letter to Rorty, he observed that “Tamar” had “seemed to my later thought to romanticize unmoral freedom,” while he characterized “Point Sur” as, at least in part, “a satire on human self-importance” (CL , ). Though all revelation, in Jeffers’ view, rested on violation, the transgressive hero’s quest ultimately produced a severely distorted and one-sided perspective. Jeffers pondered this problem in “Meditation on Saviors,” a poem written shortly after “Point Sur.” In this poem, he presents the savior as a type of the transgressive hero whose aggrandizing ego conflates power and desire, the latter sublimated as a love that masks its origins in the lust for dominion. The savior can be a sacred figure or a secular one (“Caesar” is Jeffers’ generic name for the latter), depending on whether it is love or power his public primarily responds to. In either case, however, the relationship between savior and people is “incestuous” because the savior becomes an inappropriate object of adoration. The result is that he is ultimately cast as a scapegoat as well: Out of incestuous love power and then ruin. A man forcing the imaginations of men, Possessing with love and power the people: a man defiling his own household with impious desire. King Oedipus reeling blinded from the palace doorway, red tears pouring from the torn pits Under the forehead; and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill in the earthquake, against the eclipse Frightfully uplifted for having turned inward to love the people—that root was so sweet O dreadful agonist?— I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to its expiation; I heard the same cry. (CP : –)

The “people” in Jeffers often seem an inert, doughy mass, waiting to be stirred and molded by a leader. But Jeffers is no aristocrat; his social ideal, as we have seen in the pastoral lyrics, is a free Jeffersonian community. Men and women become “people” when they forsake their free natures and enter civilized dependency; it is then that they become receptive to the savior, who is both the symptom and the product of their condition. In galvanizing them as 180



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followers and binding them to himself, the savior completes the transformation of free individuals into subject people: Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the open farms, and the people are fed. They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in the desert made them their thoughts. (CP : )

The savior is the Hobbesian “hawk,” the only free individual among those who have renounced freedom for themselves. But his freedom too is illusory, for he is bound to the multitude, and will reap in the end their “daggers of gratitude.” The religious savior promises transcendence, but in monopolizing access to the sublime he mars it for himself. The love turned “inward” to catch the people—that is, concentrated as will—is partially trapped as narcissism, and distorts his vision. This, as Jeffers says, is “the mote in the eye that makes its object / Shine the sun black,” the flaw that reveals not “the inhuman God” but the beholder’s own image (CP : ). The savior who undergoes sparagmos—sacrificial rending—on behalf of his followers, is, for Jeffers, an “ape of that God” who brings the world into being by an act of self-mutilation. This is the ultimate consequence of afflatus, in which the presumption of embodying deific consciousness results in a “participation” in the divine agon that is at once parody and punishment. Transgression and retribution are here combined in a single event, a tragic economy as parsimonious as one could wish. The Oedipal implications of this conception need hardly be emphasized. The problem for the mature Jeffers, however, was to maintain sublimity as a charged field of vision in which the power of divinity might be contemplated, aesthetically as “glory” and ontologically as value, without crossing the line into hubris (the classic vehicle of divine wrath) through encroachment and presumption. If Jeffers’ heroes of transgression had vitalized the space of the sublime through quest and violation, they also contradicted it in their falls. Ultimately, they could sustain neither an integrative nor a tragic vision; after “The Women at Point Sur,” they risked outright melodrama. At this juncture Jeffers began to develop a new kind of tragic hero, based, as we have seen, not on transgression but on suffering and endurance. This hero, invariably male, was typically exposed to punishment through an act triggered by sexual jealousy and sustained by self-punishment. The exemplars of this hero, as we have noted, are Cawdor (“Cawdor,” ), Reave Thurso (“Thurso’s Land181

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ing,” ), and Lance Fraser (“Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” ), although the series is properly completed by the verse drama “At the Birth of an Age” ().25 Superficially, these figures bear little resemblance to the heroes of transgression. Stolid and unimaginative, their minds and wills absorbed in daily affairs, they seek no wider domain than a ranch or a farm, no rule beyond a domestic hearth. Far from defying conventional morality, they embody its dictates; unchallenged in their authority, they equate justice with their own sense of rectitude. Cawdor, having pushed his son to his death from a cliff in the belief that he had committed adultery with his wife, reflects grimly, “He needed killing” (CP : ); Lance Fraser, who kills his brother in similar fashion, decides to bear the weight of his crime “unhelped” (CP : ). Reave Thurso’s act of violence is symbolic, but his punishment is instant with his act as the cable he has severed snaps back to cripple him. Although this punishment is unmerited by any rational standard, Reave internalizes it too, as if to make it his own deed. The acts which bring tragic retribution on these heroes of endurance—two crimes of passion and a gesture of Oedipal defiance—assert no moral autonomy and make no claim to transcendent value. Cawdor and Fraser act essentially without premeditation, in a trance of the will, while Thurso mistakes his true intention and misjudges his peril. Jeffers, in the authorial voice that plays a subtler but no less strategic role in these mid-period narratives, questions whether the filicide in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” and by inference any act, is sufficient cause for “anguish”: To be drunk is a folly, to kill may call judgment down, But these are not enormous evils, And as for your brother, he has not been hurt. For all the delights he has lost, pain has been saved him; And the balance is strangely perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Surely it is nothing worse to be slain in the overflowing Than to fall in the emptiness . . . (CP : )

The ambivalent phrase, “may call judgment down,” suggests a possible if inexplicit moral order. This notional order is scarcely comprehensible in human terms, however; it neither commands nor forbids, and seems all but indifferent to what occurs. Indeed, the heroes of endurance assume a God-abandoned or more simply a godless world in which there is nothing beyond themselves. “We know nothing of God,” Cawdor says as he stands at old Martial’s gravesite (CP : ). 182



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Reave Thurso rejects the unattainable divinity more explicitly when he declares that the world is nothing but a stone falling from a cliff without witness or sense, and that honor lies only in refusing to be broken by it (CP : –; above, p. 144). Lance Fraser, in assuming the guilt of his filicide, mocks the very idea of a transcendent order that could call him to judgment (–). Reduced by his Oedipally-tinged ‘accident’ to helpless dependency and ravaged by unremitting pain, Reave is finally liberated by an act of existential defiance: he has taken the full force of the castrating blow and refused to acknowledge paternal authority, the existence of a power that can make him “Cringe or say please.” He chooses to remain in deadlock, rejecting both the opiates that might dull his pain or the suicide his father had chosen. With nothing to hope for and nothing to lose, he rules a kingdom of agony in which he is simultaneously torturer and victim: “I have no power and no use / And no comfort left and I cannot sleep. I have my own law / That I will keep, and not die despising myself ” (CP : ). Thurso is professedly agnostic, but his revolt against the absent father has theistic as well as Oedipal overtones. Old Thurso’s suicide represents a failure of meaning just as his rusted cable signifies the failure of authority, and Reave’s attempt to cut it down suggests an unwitting encounter with the sublime: He had work to do; and now the sea-wind began, the wool-white fog on the ocean detached clouds Flying up the gorge of the gulf underfoot, so Thurso felt for a moment a little laughably godlike, Above the cloud-stream, hewing an old failure from the face of nature. (–)

Standing above the white fogline that makes the Sur hills resemble mountains breaching above high cloud (a not uncommon metereological event at Bixby Canyon, the actual site of the poem), “a little laughably godlike” as he prepares to cut at the root of temporal priority, Reave exhibits the hubris of the overreaching hero at the moment of his fall. Unlike the heroes of transgression, however, he is only confirmed in his agnostic antagonism to the father by his maiming. When his wife Helen tempts him with suicide, he answers that “The old dog / Stinks in that alley.” Thereafter he refers to his father almost solely by this taunt: “the dead dog” (CP : , ); “the black dog” (); “the dog’s ditch” (). Asked about God, he replies scoffingly, “Another dead dog to bite us” (). The dog image is developed climactically in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” 183

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where Lance Fraser relentlessly pursues his father, a Scots fundamentalist whose faith has wavered under “the godless hills” of America: Once, dad, you whipped Mikey For spelling the name of God backward Until the red crucifixion ran down his legs. Do you remember the brave little brown legs All smeared and welted? (CP : )

The childhood blasphemy of Lance’s slain brother connects with Reave Thurso’s dismissive comment (“Another dead dog to bite us”), thus fully extending the metaphor of dog / father / god. “God” in fact replaces the father as the central adversary in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” despised not because he exists but because he does not (or perhaps, like Old Thurso, because he exists no longer). If there were a God, he would mete out punishment where it was deserved (on Lance himself); instead, there is mere pain, senselessly and randomly suffered. Old Fraser warns Lance to beware of the God people “have backed into a snarling corner, / And laugh off like a dirty story.” Lance responds, picking up the image, “That’s it. . . . Dogs. We all are” (CP : ). The simile that arises in Reave Thurso’s hatred of the father who visits punishment on him even in death comes full circle in the appositely named Lance, whose self-lacerating torment springs from his inability to find the judgment he requires. Where all men act with impunity and find no judgment, as Lance has, all are gods; and where all are gods, none is other than a dog. The agnostic sublime evoked by Lance’s earlier description of the spike-buck caught on barbed wire (see above, p. 142) opens on a vast space (it hangs in a “place . . . very naked and open, and the sea glittering below”), in which God can no longer be conceived, and no human value enters the void. The agnostic sublime of the mid-period narratives represents the trial of Jeffers’ theism, the challenge to his testimony of presence. The heroes of transgression had tried to usurp or supplant deity (Tamar, Clytemnestra) or to incorporate its powers (California, Barclay), but Cawdor, Thurso, and Fraser invoke a void which no god claims and no ego can fill, except by agony. Lance’s wife Fayne points to the possibility of signifying oneself in a vacuum in which, like the spike-buck, nothing can refer to anything but itself: “We’ve sailed I think away past the narrows of common faithfulness. Then care for this:

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Configuring the California Sublime To be able to live, in spite of pain and that horror and the dear blood on your hands, and your father’s God, To be able to go on in pure silence In your own power, not panting for people’s judgment, nor the pitiful consolation of punishing yourself Because an old man filled you with dreams of sin When you were little: you are not one of the sparrows, you are not a flock-bird: but alone in your nature, Separate as a gray hawk.” (CP : –)

Fayne, like Cawdor’s wife Fera and, to a lesser extent, Helen Thurso, echoes the heroes of transgression; indeed, one might say they represent the earlier prototype cast in a supporting role, as agents rather than actors of tragedy. Their function is to lead the hero of endurance to the transgressive act for which they have the passion but not the strength: thus, Fera provokes Cawdor into killing his son by claiming to have been raped by him, while Helen’s sexual taunting goads Reave Thurso toward the act of symbolic castration that actually unmans him. In Fayne’s case the provocation is more reckless than deliberate, but the embrace of transgression is also more explicit: “I am holding the made world by the throat / Until I can make it change,” she declares (CP : ). The role that Fayne offers Lance, “to go on in pure silence / In your own power,” is Promethean: to bear the agony of transgression proudly and live in defiance of sin. Lance embraces the punishment but not the act. He thus affirms a moral judgment whose authority must lie outside himself but whose source he cannot stipulate. It is not, as Fayne points out, “your father’s God”; nor is it human justice, for where all are “dogs,” as Lance would have it, none can give judgment. Lance’s guilt would thus seem to be unmotivated, his suffering absurd. Fayne’s argument too seems flawed, for if, as she asserts, Lance is morally independent, “alone” in his nature, no valid reason exists for self-condemnation. The logic of her position would rather suggest Romanticism’s last gambit, the Nietzschean reconstruction of the sublime as humanly created value. The Nietzschean Prometheus appropriates power without guilt, guilt being the mark of decadent theism and the herd mentality. If anything torments him, it is the consciousness of his own self-constituting (and therefore self-isolating) freedom; but that consciousness is also his identity and pride. Granted that Lance has performed an act he must permanently regret: yet the Nietzschean hero must pardon himself, for pardon can come from nowhere else, and the alter185

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native is a state of wilful unforgivingness that is tantamount to madness and must lead to self-destruction. From Fayne’s perspective, therefore, Lance’s persistence in degrading self-condemnation must ultimately be proof not of the hero alone in his power but of the weakling unable to take responsibility for his own conduct. On her own terms, she should not encourage him to bear guilt or sustain unnatural grief, but despise him for doing so. In short, Lance’s behavior cannot stem from a unitary conception of the self in either an agnostic or a Nietzschean sublime, for neither provides a purchase for guilt. What occurs instead is a deliberate division of consciousness, an act of self-bifurcation in which Lance is both the source and object of judgment, simultaneously the tribunal and the condemned. Judgment, that is, is created, and created, like every feature of the agnostic sublime, as a response to contingency. In Lance’s case, the exposure to contingency arises not only from the act of filicide but its circumstances. Lance kills his brother in a moment of spontaneous passion, of velleity; what makes his world intolerable is that he has changed it irrevocably without intention. He cannot claim his act as Fayne wishes him to because it is not, volitionally, his own; yet it is no one else’s. He can make it his own only by a continual striving for it, a willing toward that which has already occurred. Since this requires him to perpetually will what he most agonizingly regrets, it leaves him in an unassuageable condition of pain; yet the still more intolerable alternative to assuming responsibility for his deed is to acknowledge unmediated contingency—the world of the spike-buck impaled by the happenstance of the barbed-wire fence. It is Lance himself who is now caught on that fence, and who cannot twist in any direction without torment;26 judgment thus becomes the mere catchment of his pain. Lance Fraser is not alone in stumbling unawares into his moment of transgression. Cawdor, in the act of killing his son, strikes blindly: “There had been no choice, / Nor from the first any form of intention” (CP : ). Reave Thurso too experiences an instant of distraction that diverts his mind from the cable as it swings back toward him (“Must ’a’ been holes in my mind” [CP : ]). The contrast between these “accidental” moments of tragic crisis and the wilful transgression of Jeffers’ earlier protagonists is patent. The hero of endurance encounters the agnostic sublime only through an unguarded moment of action; he is duped into tragic vision. What that vision discloses, as to the eagle in “Cawdor,” is a world in which “All that lives [is] maimed and bleeding, caged or in blindness, / Lopped at the ends with death and conception, and shrewd / Cautery of pain” (CP : ). Whereas the eagle sees that world as it soars beyond 186



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it, however, the hero of endurance is immersed in it; its agony has become his own. This agony is not merely the condition but the content of natural process, element and aliment in one: “the passionate spirit of humanity,” Jeffers notes in the passage we have quoted from “Apology for Bad Dreams,” demands “Pain for its bread,” and Cawdor, echoing this, says, “People take pain like bread / When their life needs it” (CP : , ). Similarly, Reave Thurso discovers that Pain is the solidest thing in the world, it has hard edges, I think it has a shape and might be handled, Like a rock worn with flat sides and edges, harder than rock . . . (CP : )

Reave’s objectification of his pain is not only an attempt to master it but to make it an agent of value. Paralyzed and dependent, with neither “power” nor “use,” he finds in pain the final project of the will. Though his torment is unceasing even in sleep, he insists that he “can bear twice as much” and “much more than anything yet” (CP : , ). Pain is the sole challenge and therefore the sole content of his world; it is the only thing he can master, and the engagement it requires is complete. Helen, left to watch Reave’s agony, pleads with him that real “Strength would refuse to suffer for nothing” and “perfect courage might call death like a servant at the proper time” (CP : , ), but, though his struggle can end only in madness, he rejects suicide. Reave has narratively cogent reasons for this; Helen’s plea is self-interested, and to embrace his father’s hated act would, in his eyes, give him the final victory (“the old dog stinks in that alley”). Nonetheless, the final significance of his gesture is not dramatic but transpersonal, for, to recall Jeffers’ apostrophe, “No life / Ought to be thought important in the weave of the world, whatever it may show of courage or endured pain / . . . / our inhuman God is too great” (above, p. 145). The prospect opened here is one denied Reave, reduced, as he says with Oedipal succinctness, to fighting on his “last inch”; it is, however, the one to which his suffering finally testifies. At the poem’s end, moved by obscure impulse, he asks to be brought back to the scene of his maiming. Here, under a “racing sky,” Helen slays him and kills herself as the authorial sublime enfolds them both on the figural “theatre-stage” on which they play their drama out “before strict judges at last.” Pain, in this sense, becomes the highest and most exacerbated form of that principle of strain that is built into all matter. In the higher animals, it is strain become sentient; among humans, it reaches its apex as conscious suffering. In 187

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physical terms it is, put simply, the condition of natural process itself, the resistance of being to becoming; in consciousness, it may be felt as a metaphysical privation as well—the condition Jeffers explores, under the pressure of extreme moral or bodily pain, in the agnostic sublime. Pain, as such, is mere negation, but it gives access to a cardinal value, endurance; it is endured pain, as Jeffers says, that gives importance to life, which, to quote a critical passage again, “owns no other manner of shining” (CP : ).27 Endured pain, to be morally significant, must be both involuntary and assumed. This, in Jeffers’ reading, is the tragic process itself. In effect, Jeffers’ mid-period narratives begin where Greek tragedy climaxes, with the moment of anagnorisis or tragic recognition that precedes retribution. It is at this moment—when the hero of endurance perceives unabsolvable guilt in his action, or, as in the case of Reave Thurso, suffers unmerited injury that calls the moral order into doubt—that pain arises as a question. In each case the hero experiences pain, even when induced by his own act, as a Heideggerian thrownness— the immersion in an alien totality that usurps all former being and allows no honorable escape. In this sense it is involuntary, overwhelming, a condition which could not have been willed or foreseen. Yet for this very reason it must be embraced, for it can be borne in no other way.28 This condition is clearest in the case of Reave, who attempts to master pain by giving it a “shape,” but it is no less true for Cawdor and Lance Fraser. For both these latter, pain precedes moral recognition; they begin to suffer before they recognize their guilt, which alone can make it intelligible. Self-judgment gives shape to their pain as self-discipline does to Reave’s, functioning as both consolation and goad. Pain is thereby made an end, and it is at last impossible to distinguish in its experience justified punishment from brute suffering, cause from effect. Guilt is the raison d’être of a pain that engulfs the world, and is existentially intolerable without it. The cycle of guilt and punishment thus becomes self-perpetuating, a condition in which remorse is craven and expiation absurd. As dire and immitigable as the pain may be, it can never be commensurate with the crime; agony must be stoked ever higher, for justice can never be done. Cawdor and Lance conceal their acts not to avoid the law’s penalties but its insipidities; no prison can rival the immurement of conscience, no pillory the castigation of self-contempt. There is nothing to be done, as Cawdor says, but to “Strain the iron forever,” and when, at last betrayed, he puts his eyes out in an attempt to preempt civil punishment, this too seems, as he says, “mere indulgence” (CP : ). 188



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IV Whether as a hypostatized field of divinity or a (seemingly) agnostic void, landscape is vitalized as a scene for tragic action in Jeffers’ construction of the sublime. The tragic actor, either as hero of transgression or of endurance, carries the burden of transhuman signification. For Jeffers, of course, the universe as such would be an expression of divine value, as it was also a living organism. Neither value nor life could be added to it, but merely manifested in different ways and displayed under different aspects. The tragic agon was one such way, and its formal aspect, for the modern poet, was sublimity. The tragic hero enacted his passion in and through landscape, itself a construction indicative of divine presence even when concealed from the hero himself. Sublimity was therefore a mode of relationship between the human and the divine, and landscape its mediating agent. The fluxions among these three elements, despite their ontological disparity—“humanity” and “landscape” being included figures of the divine, with no independent value or existence in themselves—constituted the dynamic of the sublime. When Jeffers describes Tamar’s passion as making “a third part / . . . in the consistence / And dignity of the world” (CP : ), or when Lance Fraser appears “taller than human” on the rock where he kills his brother (: ), their tragic action is for a brief moment foregrounded before being reabsorbed in the divine matrix. It is real, but evanescent. The totality—the divine permanence—alone abides, but its meaning is inscrutable, and may be read only in the “stained fragments” of tragic aspiration (: ) and the sublime field of tragic action. Jeffers’ ars poetica of the sublime is “Apology for Bad Dreams” (CP : – ), first published in New Masses in , and it is with a more careful consideration of this poem that we may conclude our discussion. The poem can be read as a structured enactment of the sublime, with each of its four numbered sections progressively unfolding the sublime field and the poet’s dialectical relation to it as simultaneously its observer and its “creator.” The first section presents a characteristic Jeffers narrative fragment or scene, set within a sweeping natural frame whose brooding, dynamic aspect and abrupt shifts of perspective typify the Romantic sublime. The first lines describe a coastal declivity at dusk, plunging “headlong”—that is, as if on purpose, or propulsively, like a breaking wave—toward an ocean figured, contrariwise, as a “great stone” cut to an edge and “polished to shining.” It is not merely that Jeffers inverts the elements here, characterizing stone as fluid and the great 189

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waves as petrified; the ocean is, he says, “Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished to shining” (emphasis added). But there is a third element as well, described both as immanent in and processive to the whole. The first words of the poem, “In the purple light,” lead to the description of “the fountain / And furnace” of light that lies beyond the waters. Beginning with light, then, the scene leads to the element of rock—Jeffers never privileges mere earth—and from there to ocean, wrapping them around each other metaphorically before returning to light, or more properly to the image of its source. Embedded in this description is the casual notice of “A lonely clearing” on the sea-cliff with a field of corn, a stream, and the jut of a roof “under spared trees.” This is human habitation and cultivation, barely a detail in the sweep of the landscape. We pause, however, over the brief, wincing phrase “spared trees,” with its suggestion of suspended agency, a small rent in nature that is potentially a very wide and catastrophic one: for what is it, after all, but storms or blight that ever fells great trees in their prime? Having completed the first, establishing arc of the poem, Jeffers returns to the clearing, where “a woman / Is punishing a horse.” There is no context for this action, and Jeffers offers none, although a similar scene forms the climax of “Roan Stallion” (CP : –). Toward the end of the section, Jeffers abruptly enlarges his focus, returning to the panoramic perspective from which the participants are “shrunk to insect size” and “Out of all human relation,” a phrase which suggests even as it dismisses the untold story of the action. If there is any narrative implication to the scene, however, it disappears into an almost aestheticized abstraction, the woman’s flailing arm reduced to a “gesture” and the reaction of the tethered horse appearing as a ritual response. This move only intensifies the horror of the moment, for Jeffers describes minutely what we can no longer “see”: “The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened, / The beast shuddering . . .” We are left only with the image of innocence being tortured, but for what reason or to what purpose we cannot know. The section sweeps on to a final evocation of dusk in which the sequence of description is reversed, the dying light in the west darkening first the ocean and then the coastal hills. As the woman and the horse seem to be enfolded in a rhythm that yokes them together in a timeless frieze, so the blurring of the natural elements by the transfiguring light makes the prone earth itself appear almost as its source, the matrix from which, as Jeffers says with shrewd evasion, it grows “apparent.” We are left, then, with two scenes, two mysteries, one animate and the other 190



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inanimate, one compelling awe and the other horror—the two poles of the sublime. What larger vision unifies them? Jeffers leaves us only with a riddling quotation from Isaiah at the end of the section: “What said the prophet? ‘I create good: / And I create evil: I am the Lord.’” Whatever we are to make of this—and it is, as Jeffers emphasizes, a prophet speaking; that is, in his usage, a man with only a partial and distorted access to the truth—it is not that the beauty of the sundown is “good” and the apparent cruelty of the woman is “evil,” so that one is opposed to the other and one ultimately overcomes or extinguishes the other. We feel no such triumph, no such resolution, but only the unreconciled contrast of the scenes and the unsettling sense of an undisclosed force beyond both. Jeffers’ use of intensifiers in this section is of particular interest in his construction of the sublime. He does not describe the sun merely as a fountain and furnace of light, but of “incredible” light. Similarly, he refers to the light as “enormous” as he moves away from the scene of the woman and the horse, and of the beauty it effects as “unbridled and unbelievable.” Such modifiers are not uncommon in Jeffers, and some critics have criticized them as merely grandiose. Since one might think they could well have been dispensed with— the casual reader may wonder what incredible adds to “fountain / And furnace of incredible light,” or enormous to “The enormous light beats up out of the west”—let us see what work they actually do in the poem. “Enormous” means exceedingly or unboundedly large, with a secondary connotation of monstrous and astonishing, a quality more directly expressed in the noun form “enormity.” The “light” it modifies is not merely abundant and spectacular, but overwhelming. We can readily enough recognize this as an aspect of the sublime. The sunset into which Jeffers wishes to draw us is not placid and picturesque but engulfing, and the darkness it presages holds no comfort. What, though, of the primary significance of “enormous,” namely, great size? Here, we must attend not only to the meaning of the word but to its exact placement in the poem. It occurs in the line that pulls us abruptly out of the “clearing,” twice described as “little” within three lines, in which the scene between the woman and the horse transpires. “Little” is not precisely the opposite of “enormous”; we would rather say “tiny.” But, as we recall, Jeffers has already shrunk the figures in the clearing to “insect size.” They are not only minuscule against the surrounding landscape, but, further belittled by the sudden widening of perspective that deprives them of identity (“You cannot see the face of 191

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the woman”) and reduces their actions to mere gestures, they appear almost as automatons. They are indeed rendered tiny, and in the most radical sense; they no longer signify. “Unbridled” poses perhaps fewer difficulties. Here the contrast is with the halter and the chain-tie rope that bind the punished horse in the clearing. As the human actors are reduced in scale, the “unbridled” beauty of the sunset suggests, albeit indirectly and inferentially, the suffering horse’s transcendence of its incarnational fate and its subsumption in universal value. This may seem to stretch the text, and Jeffers wisely refrains from making the horse an overt symbol. If we glance backward however at “Roan Stallion,” the poem he had only recently completed, we see a horse depicted precisely in terms of an image of divine power and sacrificial incarnation; and if we look ahead to the poem he was shortly to write, “Cawdor,” we see similarly in the death-dream of the caged eagle a form of divine assumption. The leisure that enables Jeffers to develop this conceit in the narratives is obviously lacking in the compressed and elliptical space of “Apology of Bad Dreams,” but I think the descriptor “unbridled” serves as a kind of placeholder for what is more fully expressed in the longer poems. It is certainly far from a casual or unconsidered locution. That leaves us the adjectives “incredible” and “unbelievable,” both of which are applied to the dying sunlight. We run these terms together in common speech when we wish to express our skepticism or wonder at something. What is there not to believe about the setting sun, though? The question may seem facetiously posed, but we can give it a nonfrivolous answer if we remember that we are at a scene of the sublime, and that the poem as a whole takes place under its aspect. The sublime is that which is apparent but exceeds comprehension; it is precisely that which is offered but not believed. The world presents itself in Jeffers as immanent divinity, a vision beyond verification or credal assertion but grasped only by intuition and experienced as rapture. The sunset is eminently believable as a phenomenon of physics and sense perception, but its deeper meaning is veiled to our sight. At every scene of the sublime we thus stand at a threshold that simultaneously challenges and confounds belief. What Jeffers calls “the wild God of the world,” to note again the phrase in which he suggests a divinity both immanent in the world and unconstrained by it, manifests itself as a condition of doubt, for it can never be affirmed as a matter of direct perception or rational deduction. Very properly, then, the universal process that embodies such a God is, in this sense, “incredible,” “unbelievable.” The second section of the poem begins with a descriptive statement that 192



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sounds like a declaration, but is only the beginning of an enormous verse paragraph—“enormous” in both of the senses we have canvassed—that issues in a principal verb only half-way down the page, and, after repeating itself, partly for emphasis, partly for balance, and partly for grammatical recuperation after the extended parenthetical excursus, comes to a full stop only in the poet’s rumination on what he has pronounced with such seeming confidence. Jeffers’ unique way with poetic syntax has never been more challengingly on display, and it may be useful to quote the lines now in full: This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places, (The quiet ones ask for quieter suffering: but here the granite cliff the gaunt cypresses crown Demands what victim? The dykes of red lava and black what Titan? The hills like pointed flames Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the sun, what immolation?) This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and like the passionate spirit of humanity Pain for its bread: God’s, many victims’, the painful deaths, the horrible transfigurements: I said in my heart, “Better invent than suffer: imagine victims Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.”

This is an extraordinary feat of poetic architecture. It is not “This coast cries out for tragedy like all beautiful places” or “This coast is crying out for tragedy,” but the participial phrase “This coast crying out . . .” which serves to usher in the whole paragraph and segues into the parenthetic queries that modify it. “This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places” is thus not a statement but a proposition whose source and authority, as the paragraph discloses, lies not in any inherent quality of the granite cliffs and the terrible peaks but in the poet’s private musing. The poet’s need to subdue his own demons is projected grandly onto the landscape, which is deformed (or, if you will, exalted) by his vision. This, then, serves as the “apology” for the stories he feels compelled to tell. These stories do not merely relieve psychic pressure, however, but themselves embody a fearful energy and violence in the same way that the locked strains of rock, cloud, and atom that Jeffers evokes in the Prelude to “The Women at Point Sur” do, strains that pointedly include “The strain in the skull” in their inventory. Nor do they discharge this energy inconsequentially 193

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but actually transform the landscape, giving it the aspect of “pointed flames” through which we imaginatively perceive what has come to be called ‘Jeffers country’ even now. Were the poet not to do so, worse still would redound on him or on some innocent victim whom he might be compelled to “martyr.” Jeffers sees himself, that is, in the place of the woman in the clearing (who is, after all, his own creation), exempting neither himself nor us from whatever passion might have driven her to an act of such cruelty and spite: “for what are we, / ” he continues, “The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips / And little hair, to think we should always be fed, / Sheltered, intact, and self-controlled?” Indeed we are capable of far worse, and when Jeffers admonishes himself to “Burn sacrifices once a year to magic / Horror away from the house” later in the section, it is not merely external malevolence that is signified but the darkness within. The scene in the clearing is thus both clarified and complicated by the observations in Section II. The woman with the whip is, plausibly, a Jeffers protagonist, or at least the prototype of one; a part of the poet’s own psychic economy as well as the divine scheme. What remains is to establish the relations between the two, and here the key term, twice invoked in the section, is “beauty.” The opening gambit—“This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places”—is reflected again in Jeffers’ self-admonition to “invent” lest he “Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.” The implication is that extremes of beauty beget extremes of violence, and that he who would not act upon such compulsion must represent it (not a lesser form of response, of course, but an ethically and aesthetically mediated one). Tragedy, in its most basic form, is violence as art. The other reference to beauty in Section II is to “the spirit / Of the beauty of humanity” that occurs near the end. The copula of “beauty” and “humanity” is rare enough in Jeffers to compel attention, but we should be alert by now to the fact that beauty, for him, is correlated with the intensity or violence of divine manifestation in natural process; in short, with sublimity. It is simplest and most direct in inorganic matter; more complex in the instinctual drives of creatures; most complex, and also most problematic, in humans. When Jeffers says in “De Rerum Virtute” that “it is hard to see beauty / In any of the acts of man” (CP : ), he does not mean that there is no beauty in them, but only that it is of a mixed and compound nature that requires a distinctive mode of action, tragedy, to realize itself. We might, indeed, most briefly define tragedy in Jeffers as the human response to sublimity, and beauty as the category that encompasses both. If, then, the coast cries out for tragedy, what it calls for are 194



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human actors. Those actors, to play their roles, must be unconscious of them— “agonists,” as Jeffers calls them. They suffer their actions, and the passions that provoke them, almost as “lesser” creatures suffer their instincts; the tragic poet alone can hold them in a vision of terror and awe. Jeffers first uses the term tragedy to describe “The Women at Point Sur,” the narrative contemporary with “Apology for Bad Dreams,” and it is no accident that this is the last of his narratives whose protagonist is a Romantic overreacher who grasps at divine power and authority. “Apology for Bad Dreams” is in this sense a working-out of Jeffers’ own sense of tragedy and therefore of the implications of his poetic project. When he apostrophizes the characters in “The Women at Point Sur” to “stammer the tragedy” (CP : ), he suggests clearly what the subsequent narratives will bear out, that the most exemplary tragic actor is not one who storms heaven in the manner of Faust or his own Reverend Barclay, but one who comes up instead against the limits of his own nature. The third section of “Apology for Bad Dreams” opens up yet another aspect of tragic economy, that of history. The coast remains populated by its ghosts, the native tribes which, as Jeffers says in “A Redeemer,” have been “brushed . . . to death” by its present occupants (CP : ). Invisible to ordinary sight, they “Crouch in the nights” beside their spectral fires, denied the sky except in their wistful imaginings. They make no demands and they are past amends, but they nonetheless represent an obligation, for, as Jeffers remarks, they “have paid something for the future / Luck of the country, while we living keep old griefs in memory.” The elision of tense suggests the unstable relationship between the two halves of the statement, for what has been paid for future “luck” is paid only if the price—in a word, extinction—is remembered in atonement. The tribes of course can no longer exact that price, and divine consciousness is too remote (“God’s / Envy,” Jeffers says, “is not a likely fountain of ruin”), but the accounts are kept somewhere, for “to forget evils calls down / Sudden reminders from the cloud.” The phrase recalls (without denoting) Old Testament interventions, but suggests also a landscape charged with divine presence, and therefore a power that needs propitiation. Almost as if casting a spell, Jeffers urges that “remembered deaths be our redeemers; / Imagined victims our salvation,” thereby invoking the apparition of Tamar Cauldwell, who passes him “flamelike” and “white as the half moon at midnight.” This vision in turn recalls his own self-counsel in Section II to burn sacrifices to “magic / Horror away from the house.” The horror, as we saw in considering that part of the poem, was in the poet himself; but, as we now un195

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derstand, it is not in him alone but is also part of the burden the “lucky” successors of the coast must bear. The “magic” has worked for him, but without equal vigilance (and contrition) it may not for others. The prophet can warn, but the redeemer alone can save, and Jeffers, although suggesting that his poems are partly redemptive, distances himself from the salvific role in “A Redeemer” and explicitly rejects it in “Meditation on Saviors.” Nonetheless, the speaker of the “Apology” sounds a good deal like the self-immolating protagonist of “A Redeemer,” who says: “I am here on the mountain making / Antititoxin for all the happy towns and farms, the lovely blameless children, the terrible / Arrogant cities. I used to think them terrible: their gray prosperity, their pride: from up here / Specks of mildew” (). The “Specks of mildew” recall the “insect size” of the protagonists in Section I of the “Apology” as witnessed from a height, and the “happy,” “blameless,” and “arrogant” populations the Redeemer beholds have evidently forgotten the tainted and perilous “luck” they have appropriated from the Indian dead. From this perspective, the woman and the horse of “Apology” seem not only a reenactment of the region’s genocidal past, but a grim omen of its future. Fire imagery links this progression into a single, unfolding vision. The hills “are scarred with ancient fire,” while the revenant tribes crouch beside “the ghost of a fire.” Tamar’s passage is “flamelike,” fittingly enough for the author of a holocaust, and the section ends with an invocation of the seasonal fires that purge and restore the landscape, but presage a final apocalypse as well: . . . Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the Sur Rivers Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel waters.

Section III ends as it and its predecessors had begun, with an evocation of the coast. This framing device reminds us of the natural surround in which human action is embedded, and of which it is part. Section IV begins with a radically different move, however: a shockingly violent image, again derived from Scripture, that is immediately linked to the poet’s own function: He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God.

What the poet does indirectly, imaginatively, and almost unconsciously (he is having “bad dreams”), God—that God, Jeffers says—does wilfully and purposively, not to literary inventions or particular scapegoats (the victims the 196



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community itself puts forward to forestall collective disaster), but to humanity itself. This is almost a vision of the demonic, of Goya’s Saturn devouring his children. It is worse, even, because it proceeds not from bestial appetite and cannibalistic amnesia, but experimentally, and, as it seems, merely to bring a connoisseur’s pleasure in the “savor.” The final suggestion of castration in “the bruised root” completes an image of torture at once appallingly brutal and perversely refined. Instead of distancing himself from this vision, however, the poet declares himself to be the willing disciple, “the ape” of this torturer-God. This would seem to be the cul-de-sac of the Calvinist imagination: absolute submission to conscienceless power. Jeffers elaborates this vision, likening it to the geological process that had scarred the hills in Section II, and redefining the “savor” as a “spirit” that is simultaneously realized and consumed in a “naked ecstasy” before finally resuming the aspect of the “broken atom” that is invoked in “Roan Stallion” as the “atom to be split” (CP : ). The authorial voice that makes this declaration in “Roan Stallion” is not identified, but it seems linked to the one that breaks out at this point in the “Apology” and is described as “the power that massed” the atom; that is, the immanent God of natural process who appears as a subordinate manifestation of divine purpose. We will meet this God again in the epiphanic deity of Jeffers’ dramatic poem, “At the Birth of an Age,” the selfhanged God who tortures himself to discover himself. In the “Apology,” he is manifested circuitously, and through several several ambiguous shifts of syntax and personation. Here is the full passage: He brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God. He washes it out with tears and many waters, calcines it with fire in the red crucible, Deforms it, makes it horrible to itself: the spirit flies out and stands naked, he sees the spirit, He takes it in the naked ecstasy; it breaks in his hand, the atom is broken, the power that massed it Cries to the power that moves the stars, “I have come home to myself, behold me. I bruised myself in the flint mortar and burnt me In the red shell, I tortured myself, I flew forth, Stood naked of myself and broke me in fragments, And here I am moving the stars that are me.”

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The “He” of the third line presents us with our first difficulty: are we to understand it as referring to “that God,” or to the man having bad dreams who is his “ape”? The subject has “tears,” a human attribute, but also “many waters,” a natural one. “Humanity,” too, having contracted to the “victims” invented by the poet, becomes again a single suffering entity, the “it” which, have becoming “horrible” to itself (as a torture victim might well to himself), yields its “spirit” (gives up the ghost?). This “spirit,” however, represents a further transformation; it stands naked, is seized in a “naked ecstasy” (whose?), and is “broken” once again. It suffers then yet another seeming and ultimate reduction as the “atom” to be broken of “Roan Stallion” and “The Women at Point Sur,” while suggesting at the same time a transition back toward the original metaphor, for as the “atom” returns us to the material world, it stands figuratively not only for its smallest unit but also for humanity at large, and, indeed, for the entirety of natural process. This process, together with the “power” that massed it, then assumes the victimhood described in the very first line of the passage as the self-torture necessary for overcoming its own alienation (“I have come home to myself ”). The testimony in this phrase is apparently addressed to a still more encompassing entity, “the power that moves the stars.” The last line of the passage suggests, however, not an appeal to a higher, independent agent, but another stage in the self-recuperation of an ultimate, unspecifiable divine essence: “And here am I moving the stars that are me.” In the lines that follow, Jeffers returns to a voice that again seems to represent the poet, only to break abruptly into one that implies the answering deity: I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings. He being sufficient might be still. I think they admit no reason; they are the ways of my love. [emphasis added]

It is not entirely clear in the last sentence at which point the voice breaks; “I think they admit no reason” might still be the poet’s musing, but “they are the ways of my love,” with its sharp syntactical interruption, is surely a distinct, answering voice, or, if one prefers, an antiphonal response. The last lines of the poem, which offer a rapid survey of divine praxis and a suggestion of its concealed evidences in the human “brain-vault,” recapitulate the problematic of the sublime, which ends in a last prospect: “The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn.” We are, in a sense, where we began, with an intensely active visual field in which the natural 198



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recurrences of the phenomenal world, including the recurrent human agon, provide the sole but insufficient clue to its meaning. If there is a master trope to “Apology for Bad Dreams,” it is surely landscape itself, which, as a dynamic continuum embracing everything from flora to star-swirls, is both the site and ultimate subject of Jeffers’ art. In the “Apology,” Jeffers figures it successively as a theater of human action and divine manifestation; as the source and agency of the tragic action of his narratives and as a force to be appeased by “sacrifice”; as a locus of historic conquest and spoliation; and, finally, as a signifier of the constant divine presence that exhibits itself within natural process and transcends all more proximate levels of intention and value. If Jeffers’ verse embodies this many-faceted vision within a final crystal of divine unity, “Apology for Bad Dreams” may perhaps be most fruitfully read as an epitome of his construction of landscape and the divine agon inherent in it. Jeffers’ revaluation of the Kantian sublime was heavily influenced by Romantic models, mediated through a Darwinian revolution that had swept away the lingering pieties of Transcendentalism, and finally based on his long immersion in the topography and weathers of the central California coast. His first response to Big Sur was tinged with the bathos of Muir and his acolytes, and his retrospective account of it as a ground of idyl or saga in the Foreword to the Selected Poetry showed, similarly, the retreat from history that was so large a part of the nineteenth-century construction of the American west as an unspoiled Eden. Only gradually did he cast off these spectacles and see his landscape not as a passive ground for heroic action, but as a charged, dynamic field that subsumed its human actors in the wider span of natural and divine value. “Sublimity” was thus the description of a praxis in which human action was enfolded in divine purpose. That the actors themselves could know little if anything of their sacrificial role was of small consequence; the purpose of their performance was not the realization of the part but of the whole. Jeffers had rejected dogma and creed precisely on this ground, that any attempt to reduce the divine agon to human formula could produce only grotesque and ultimately catastrophic parody. If civilization was in some sense a sequence of such parodies, it was all the more the task of the poet to renew vision by reopening the heavens. That process was inseparable from reinstating the sublime. On his rocky coast, Jeffers, alone of his contemporaries, took this as his task.

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I We have considered Jeffers’ dramatic protagonists under the aspects of transgression and endurance, and seen in each a distinctive reaction to the sublime. The hero of transgression, descendant of the Romantic overreacher, responded to it by challenging the conditions of experience, whether through a reversal of temporal succession (Tamar), violation of the natural order of kind (California), or the assertion of divine powers (Barclay). The hero of endurance, whose chief antecedent for Jeffers was in Greek tragedy and in the work of Hardy,1 was, contrariwise, seemingly marked for suffering, even though his fall was in each case precipitated by violence or Oedipal rebellion: in Cawdor’s case, by the murder of a son; in Fraser’s, by that of a brother; in Thurso’s, by the rejection of a paternal legacy. The common denominator of the hero of transgression and the hero of endurance was pride. The transgressive hero affirmed him/herself as a source of existential value; the suffering one, as capable of bearing any portion of pain, and with it the agony of creation itself. If the former wished to remake the world according to his or her desire, the latter attempted to incorporate it within his own person; that is, as the emblem and embodiment of what we have called its “strain.” It is only superficially, therefore, that the transgressive hero appears to be the active agent of his own destiny, and the hero of endurance the passive sufferer of it. If the transgressive hero wilfully defies the terms of existence, the hero of endurance does so no less. Though natural process is, in Jeffers’ figuration, a condition of pain as such, in no particular instance is it borne immitigably and without release; rather, it is a shifting balance in which strain is redistributed when its limits are reached. Only as a moral condition—that is, as merited guilt or the assumption of suffering as an exemplary choice—can pain be imposed without the presupposition of relief. Cawdor and Fraser both pronounce judgment on themselves, and, by refusing the justice of their fel200



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low men, they foreclose the possibility of mercy, or at least measure, that such justice implies. Thurso, though his pain is inflicted from without, makes it his own through voluntary acceptance, and even as his body rebels,2 his will to endure it is constant and inflexible. Such men, however we may judge them, are hardly passive receptors of their fate. On the contrary, they demand no less of the circumstances that constrain them than do Jeffers’ heroes of transgression; arguably, they demand more. There is, however, a tertium quid in our taxonomy of Jeffers’ protagonists, a category that partly overlaps and partly unifies the ones we have considered. This is the sacrificial hero. Because he is invariably male, and because his defining condition is (in the broadest sense) Oedipal, I will call such a hero the sacrificial son. Jeffers’ earliest heroes—the nameless Young Man of “The Alpine Christ”; his alter ego, the incarnated Christ-figure Manuel Ruegg; and David Carrow, the protagonist of “A Coast-Range Christ”—all visibly, not to say programmatically, embody this figure. They are all, just as obviously, evocations of or allusions to the historical Jesus. It is only with the mature Jeffers of the s and s, however, that these avatars are discarded, and the archetype of the sacrificial son is directly represented in the person of Jesus himself. The treatment of Jesus, in the pivotal but generally overlooked “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” and in the verse dramas “Dear Judas” and “At the Birth of the Age,” is in many respects the climax of Jeffers’ attempt to depict the modern tragic hero, and to relate that hero to divine intentionality. At the same time, however, trace elements and occasional revivals of the earlier Christological models continued to appear in the mature poetry, either in Hellenic or modern dress, and Jeffers was to return to this motif in his penultimate narrative, “The Love and the Hate.” Its persistence through virtually the whole of his career suggests both the critical significance of the sacrificial son in Jeffers’ thought, and the unresolved Oedipal tensions the notion embodied.

II “The Alpine Christ,” written in response to the First World War and dated  by William Everson,3 stands in stark contrast to the book of bucolic narratives and “descriptive songs” in Jeffers’ commercially published volume of that year, Californians. Only in the long poems that conclude the book, “The Year of Mourning” and “Ode on Human Destinies,” did Jeffers sound the themes of death, grief, and blighted renewal that dominate “The Alpine Christ,” and, 201

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through the propitiatory trope of the sacrificial son, relate them to his own Oedipal insecurities. The grief-stricken figure of the poet in “The Year of Mourning,” whose conflicted response to his father’s death we have already noted (see above, pp. 61–62), enacts a ritual prostration that is at the same time an anxious affirmation of personal survival: We stand no more: I stand, though shattered: but that elder strength Is fallen, is bruised on dust, is gone far down, Far out of reach of sunlight: there nor length Of vision, neither power Of voices can behold him nor recall. ()

The “We” who stand no more is unspecified: it may refer to the poet’s own person, or to the poet and his deceased sire, whether standing together or envisioned as a unity (i.e., one in which the poet’s identity is subsumed in or radically inseparable from paternal being). What occurs in the caesura between the first and second lines is, accordingly, either a revision of the preceding statement (the poet does in fact still stand), or the record of a cataclysm in which the unity of Son in Father is shattered in the latter’s death, and the son, though a survivor, is thereby “shattered” as well. The son’s description of this condition is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, he emphasizes his bereft condition, and the fact that the father, although no longer either potent (“that elder strength / Is fallen”) or accessible to sense or intellection, is still encompassingly present. On the other, this revenant sire is at the same time thrust away as far as possible, with assurance piled on assurance that he is truly “fallen,” “gone far down,” “out of . . . sunlight.” In the guilt (and fear) of survivorship, the poet vows to consecrate his own life to restoring the father’s: I will upon the dead world’s vacant frame Retrace his sacred footsteps reverently, And dream his life back to the power it was. ()

Though it is the father who is dead, it is rather the world that is described as barren without him, as if he alone could animate it. The son will take no step of his own, but merely “Retrace” the “sacred” ones of this quasi-divinized entity, and spend both his own will and imagination in recreating its former power. This project is, of course, doomed to failure in advance and its filial pilgrim with it, since the son can neither restore what has “gone down” nor proceed on 202

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his own in a world blasted by ‘divine’ absence. What remains is only a lament that, itself inadequate, offers itself at last as no more than “a mere broken sobbing” (). The origin of the sacrificial son, then, lies in guilty, and therefore menaced, survivorship. The withdrawal of the threatening paternal hand in death means not freedom (a freedom the later Jeffers will specifically identify as Oedipal), but rather a more generalized sense of terror. The absent father is nowhere and everywhere it once—we may recall the mature Jeffers’ invocation of “Sudden reminders from the cloud” in “Apology for Bad Dreams”—and the son’s only security lies in internalizing (and thus confining) him as an ego ideal, which is represented externally as a quest to revive and restore him. Such a restoration cannot be literally expected of one who has ‘gone down,’ but the double maneuver of idealization and quest effectively subsumes the son’s identity within the father’s. Filial piety so absorbs him that he symbolically replaces himself with the father, ‘becoming’ him not to assume his prerogatives but rather to deny those of an heir. To forestall paternal wrath, the son makes a sacrifice of himself. The grieving son whose quest for the absent father is largely rhetorical in “The Year of Mourning” is gradually transformed into the quest-figure who will be called, simply, the Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father in “The Alpine Christ.” In Section VII of “The Year of Mourning,” the poet recalls a highly idealized version of his early years in Switzerland, only wishing to return to them: “Bring back to me, O Alpine mountains bleak, / Those happy years forever, when yet whole / I walked with him, and wept not for his sake” (). These renunciatory lines feed directly into the Young Man’s monologue in “The Alpine Christ”: Tall Alps that in my curious childhood years Knew me, when he for whom I am unhappy Still walked beside me and still spoke to me: I have come to learn whether your slopes have power To make a little comfort in a life Left maimed by some great loss. (AC )

As with the poet in “The Year of Mourning,” the Young Man retreats into prepubescent innocence to be made “whole” again, having been “maimed by some great loss.” This is the seeming object of a quest that has taken him across “ensanguined waves” in the midst of war, on whose “brawls” he looks down with indifference. Here, wandering “foodless on the heights” for a penitential 203

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three days, he looks for a sign, if not from the absent father then at least from the sacralized landscape: “He will not answer, though the mountain should” (). The Young Man’s return to the Swiss Alps is associated with idealized childhood memories of the father, but the Alps themselves are, of course, the primal scene of the Romantic sublime. The Young Man’s pilgrimage appears as a migration from a ‘younger’ to an ‘elder’ site of the sublime; as he notes, “I am come from the most western shore, / And forest-grown steep selvage of the world, / Where the world ends, and the sun-swallowing waves / Beat on that beautiful peninsula” (). This is the California sublime, the sanctuary where the Young Man has made his own home, and where, indeed, “the [Western] world ends.” Could the spirit of his father not as well be sought there? But the Alps, though not lovelier than the Big Sur range, are holier; that is, more associated with the rites of filial piety: you, white Alps, that carelessly Stand in your sacred proud Helvetian peace, As my home hills in their American That is less holy, stand serene and huge . . .

The second “stand” in this passage, as the succeeding lines make clear, refers, again, to the Alps. They are not only higher than their coast range counterparts, but loftier: “sacred,” “proud,” and “serene.” The reference is a complex one: to prior literary tradition (the Wordsworthian sublime), to historical and genealogical association (the Calvinist Reformation, the source of Jeffers’ own family heritage), and, through both of these, to the Reverend Jeffers, the unnamed absent father. As we have seen, the Alpine mount is so clearly a surrogate for that father that it is metaphorically tasked with speaking for him (“He will not answer, though the mountain should”). It is thus abundantly clear why the Young Man must leave his California refuge and the personal identity it defines for him—the unsatisfactory site of “The Year of Mourning”—and, in expiating his survivor guilt on the father’s ground, suffer whatever of punishment or assumption awaits him.4 The moment of Oedipal transfiguration takes place, as it were, offstage, for when we next encounter the Young Man he seems to lie in a zone between life and death, his condition discussed by “Certain spirits of dead men” who consider invading and feeding on him as carrion (ff.). He is rescued from this by Manuel Ruegg, the Christ figure of the poem, who declares that the Young 204

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Man “is not dead” but has merely “fainted,” and, in addressing him (“Healing is come, dear spirit”), revives him and rouses him to speech. The Young Man at first wakes to his former pain—i.e., the knowledge that the living cannot restore the dead—but, upon realizing that he is truly now a spirit, finds renewed hope: I had not looked—I am dead? I am free now, and may follow and seek and find him? Was it you that did this thing? O wanderer, Whether or no you did this thing, you brought The rosy tidings, and a dead man’s voice Blesses you. ()

The Young Man’s transfiguration as a blessed (and blessing) spirit, presumably freed from his carnal condition and thus safe from ghostly scavengers, frees him as well from material necessity and, with it, both identity (i.e., separated existence) and desire. He is thus “free” to pursue the father, and left with no other aim than to be reunited with and absorbed in him. As Manuel’s own journey is a descent into the material world and thereby a parting with the father, the Young Man’s will now be a joyous ascent toward him. It is as if, in Jeffers’ redaction of the Christian story, the Son is simultaneously incarnated and disincarnated at once, and the meeting between the two personas who represent him an exchange of spirit for flesh, and flesh for spirit. If we construe this in Freudian terms, which perhaps illuminate the case, the “liberation” that has taken place is one between ego and superego. The Young Man, as pure (i.e., disembodied) superego, is free to seek the union with the father that marks the final annihilation of the ego, and of the guilt of personality and desire it bears in the mere fact of its being. At the same time, however, Manuel represents not a wilful but a purified and exalted ego, whose incarnation, as the temporary commission of the father, is likewise absolved of guilt. His condition is, in fact, precisely the reverse of the Young Man’s. Having come directly from his father’s side (“But I have come down from my Father who is in heaven” []), he has no need to seek him; at the same time, safely distant from the paternal source, he enjoys solitude and identity, which appear as one: “I am come / Into these heights, to be alone” (). But this, too, is an Oedipal transit, for the divinized Manuel enters the body of the ‘Manuel’ who has been living at home with his mother in a state of mute and addled docility since birth (i.e., as impotent), declaring through the latter’s mouth that “I have come down 205

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from the mountains, Mother” (). Manuel’s empowerment, indeed, appears complete only at this moment. He gains full possession of material existence only as the Young Man finally relinquishes it. Manuel learns, however, that his advent has been foretold, and his salvific will is therefore already known. His rule on earth is thus reduced to the mere fulfillment of a prophecy, and consequently robbed of the force of command. It is true that he is his father’s emissary, but not in that his inferior, for his will is coeval: “But yesterday,” he says, he had “made the choice in heaven” of human salvation. If knowledge of his will preceded the actual formation of his intention, however, then a prior will has usurped both his and the father’s. This thought staggers him, for if such is the case: We are driven, both God and man, Dreaming of choice: but it was made already, O very long before!—and have our fates To accomplish the more certainly. ()

Manuel is both “God and man,” Father and Son, in the usurpation of Oedipal authority; yet the Son’s authority remains derivative, and depends in a final sense on being an errand. In his paternal aspect, God remains enthroned as pure Will. A greater shock awaits Manuel, then, when “tidings” proceed from heaven that the Father himself is moribund. His grief at this resembles the Young Man’s, and, like him, he is reduced to the role of a mourner: See, you have to bear with me: a son’s grief Is sometimes very grievous. Though he shudders With lonesomeness—looks deathlike too—what then? Endurance is the thing; we plod on With working minds. ()

Manuel’s condition is actually the more inconsolable, for, unlike the Young Man who hopes for posthumous reunion with his father, the death of God is absolute, and leaves only an eternal vacancy. This leads Manuel to his final revelation, that of Fate, “the force impersonal,” “the unwearied, the universal,” which knows nothing of good or evil, love or hate, but is simple dynamism, “the purposeless eternity of power” (AC ; see above, p. 68). Manuel faces here the heedless, soulless cosmos of Darwinian thought, lightly cloaked in the Hardyesque apparition of Fate. “Fate” is, in this conception, the unmediated experience of natural process, equally appalling in both its creative and destructive aspect, a “to-and-fro” without end or aim that 206



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knows nothing of human aspiration—indeed, that ‘knows’ nothing at all, but merely grinds on as eternal process. It is this terrifying reality that the presence of the Father has concealed, and that his supersession forces upon the Son’s consciousness. In claiming his will and consequently his being to be coeval with that of the Father, Manuel demands ontological parity in both the act and fact of creation. The Father’s withdrawal in effect calls his bluff, for what Manuel must now face is his radical impotence. The world simply is, and any effort to endow it with authorship or intention is otiose. But that which has no intelligible beginning can have no destined end; all that remains is the gap of an interval, the Heideggerian “while” of existence. The eternity of repose in the heavenly Father, the summum bonum of Scholastic thought that the Young Man’s quest replicates in Oedipal terms, becomes, mockingly and terribly, the ceaseless, crushing action of an infernal machine that has no off switch. Manuel’s speech marks an important moment in Jeffers’ own development, the point at which he faces fully the implications of a materialist ontology. Yet, even as Manuel acknowledges a “universe of force,” in Ronald E. Martin’s phrase, he searches for an accommodation that permits human value some role. If natural process knows nothing of “good / Nor evil,” “love nor will,” it nonetheless entertains these categories by virtue of containing the human as such. This affords humanity a purchase: “We are part of this,” Manuel declares, “Nor yet a lowliest part, nor the least needful” (ibid.). The cosmos may be heedless of man, yet it is incomplete without him. The indifference of Fate (or, more simply, process) to human aspiration is more daunting than any overt hostility could be. It is a condition that cannot be overcome, as Satan’s empire can, or refused, as in the Gnostic rejection of matter. The world is, irreducibly, present. On the other hand, “Fate” can be opposed by virtue of the fact that it contains, in human will, in the sheer desire for resistance, the principle of its own negation. Manuel construes this opposition in a literal sense of the word, as a setting apart or aside from. It makes a space within the iron strictures of necessity; a space, moreover, that is in some sense itself, as he puts it, “needful.” This resistance within but not to Nature, is the gospel of love. It is the revelation that Fate itself makes to Manuel, and that is unveiled only with the supersession of the Father. Under the old dispensation, love is owed to the Father, and flows upward toward him as tribute and obedience; that is, as praise. The inadequacy of this conception is implied in the covert rebellion of the Son, who in construing his own will and being as coeval with the Father, annuls the 207

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latter’s primacy by sharing it. The Father’s withdrawal is the necessary consequence of this, but in imputing it to the designs of Fate and in making, like the Young Man, an elaborate and very public show of grief, Manuel casts away any suggestion of Oedipal blame. Instead, he is now free to proclaim love among men as the highest good: This is the need that beggars Fate, and crowns With glory and deathless calling the weak hearts And mortal, of mankind. This is the light, Which lacking, all were darkness; this the beauty, Touch of whose starry and flowery wand transforms The lump of its own likeness:—so divine And so required is love. ()

This is the quality, unique to humanity, that we met earlier in Jeffers’ notion of “moral beauty” (above, p. 74). It is “glory,” but not happiness, for “with pain / [Love] is oftenest apparelled, and with grief / Garbed, and with agony she is glorified” (). In short, it is the very apogee of the “strain” that Jeffers will later identify as the condition of the material universe itself. Whereas strain is merely the by-product of necessity, however, love, as voluntary sacrifice, is an assumption of suffering. This suffering is the flower that crowns creation, and alone endows it with meaning. It animates what would otherwise be the soulless “corpse of Fate” (). Mere patrimonial inheritance has hitherto obscured this ultimate value. It is only with the supersession of the Father that the revelation of the Son becomes possible, “the infinite script / Of the supreme apocalypse” () that is suffering love. This love, moreover, comes without Oedipal taint, for although Fate compels him, the Father, in stoically accepting his fall (), implicitly absolves the Son of any guilt and yields to him an exalted destiny: the moral governance of the world. Manuel takes up his destiny by renouncing filial obligation even as he acknowledges the empire of Fate: “This we can not adore; this we must bend to, / But neither praise nor worship” (). Where Fate must be acknowledged, in the domain of necessity, the Son ‘bends’ to it; but there is no connotation of “worship” in the act, let alone of the “adoration” or “praise” due a paternal deity. These latter are categories of moral recognition, and, in the definitive absence of the Father, they pertain alone to the Son. That is his inheritance, and it is secure. If we take the speaker of “The Year of Mourning” to be Jeffers himself, as I think we confidently may given the poem’s dedication “to W. H. J. and M. J.” 208

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(William Hamilton Jeffers, and Maeve Jeffers, the poet’s father and stillborn daughter, respectively), and The Young Man in Search of His Father in “The Alpine Christ” as the fictionalized persona of this speaker, then Manuel Ruegg can be seen as the allegorical figure who resolves, at least provisionally, Jeffers’ guilty survival of his own father. Thwarted inheritance is the burden of “The Alpine Christ” from the beginning, for, when God the Father permits mankind to become embroiled in the Great War in a wager with Satan, it is, as we have seen, with the decree that the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria “shall not inherit” (AC ). In this way, the entirety of the poem is situated in an Oedipal context, and the Young Man’s sacrificial death paves the way for the spiritual succession of Christ-Manuel, who is both bound ontologically to the Father’s essence and whose survival is the only means by which the highest and most hidden truth that lies behind the Father’s majesty may be revealed. We may pause, at that, to consider the burden of prophetic (not to say salvific) purpose the poet himself assumes by this elaborate stratagem. Manuel has his all too-earthly kingdom. The worship formerly given to the Father is now his. What benefit, however, can he confer, and what can he receive himself? There is no longer any question of redemption through the Father, and resumption in his bosom. Manuel’s gospel of love is a doctrine of suffering without consolation; that is, the existential condition of those without hope. The only release from it is death, and the soul-sleeping the dead may know. Addressing these spirits, he bids them: Fare onward gladly to the infallible goal, Inheritors of repose. Your sleep shall be Most deep and sweet and dreamless; and no morning Can ever stir you up to waken again. ()

In short, Manuel’s promise is not salvation, but oblivion. The spirits are not very pleased with this, but, “wound . . . close in a quieting snare,” they perceive themselves at last as dead, and wander off to a final dissolution of consciousness, “winnowed” and “drifted” (ibid.). If they cannot be finally quit of being, they will at least no longer be sensible of it. As for Manuel, his inheritance is a perpetual crucifixion, the cross of a suffering from which he can neither ascend to the Father nor descend to the common pit of human oblivion. Only Fate can pardon him, if it will. Even the extinction of the species cannot release him, for his immortality is independent of it, and when the last man has gone to the final rest, his task will remain, purified 209

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and eternal: he will remember the Father. The sacrificial son is thus condemned to everlasting life in perfect solitude. This is the kingdom he inherits. Jeffers’ other major poem of the Great War years, “The Coast-Range Christ” (CP : –), returns to the naturalistic style of Californians. He retained this work in the  Modern Library edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, after having abjured “The Alpine Christ” and effectively dismissed the narratives of Californians as juvenilia, although he was to omit it from The Selected Poetry three years later.5 If the Manuel of “The Alpine Christ” is a figure of allegory who, although drawn realistically, is not only convinced of his divine identity but is so addressed by angelic messengers, David Carrow, the protagonist of “The Coast-Range Christ,” is a country mystic who sees his “Dear Lord” in visions but prays as well to “Christ [to be] his guide” (). Carrow thus has no errand of his own among men, let alone a salvific mission to perform. Like Jesus, however, he is ensnared by the world’s violence. An instinctive pacifist, he takes flight to avoid the wartime draft, and is pursued by the local sheriff, Sherman Hicks. Jeffers makes clear at once that David is only obeying his own nature: David prayed, his own soul crying to him to escape to the hills and hide. Secretly enthroned his own soul answered the prayer, that God his guide. (ibid.)

The self-reflexivity of David’s response suggests the delusion that awaits the religious prophet in Jeffers’ later work. But David is no more prophet than savior; rather, he embodies a kind of radical innocence that is almost blind in its aversion to the ruder facts of life. This includes the blandishments of a Magdalene figure, ironically named Peace O’Farrell, who dreams of a phallic Jesus in the form of a serpent but is offered only a “chill” satisfaction by David: Peace dreamed marvelously all night and Carmel Mission the desolate church Grown much larger and more lovely and belted with a shining porch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There a serpent for Christ was hanging, the whole crowd worshiped and did not falter. Wild choirs of boys’ voices pealed, in unison all the roof-tiles rang, All the rafters gave a silver noise and all the columns sang. Sepulchered saints beneath the altar began to sing for Peace and to call. She—her vestment silks were torn and she would be ashamed before them all. Her the crowd awaited, now it was crying her name, it howled like a wolf, Horrible fears ran blind through her body, a luxury of shame, what hiding, what gulf?

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The Sacrificial Son Suddenly out of a smell of ferns and streams, out of the quiet hill-mist, David came and clasped her shoulder, “Come with me Peace, we will see Christ.” Though her body was naked he did not see nor mind, her mouth was chill With sweet water and canyon streams, and death it seemed, in the sleep of the hill. (–)

Peace awaits ravishment in a church, naked before a multitude, but David offers only a spiritual love, a dream beyond desire that, although deeply attractive, is ultimately “death.” Later, on the Calvary-like hill where David has taken refuge, the dream realizes itself as David tries to enfold Peace in his beatifically asexual vision: “your love and Christ’s are one” (). Peace responds by trying to reinstate difference: “Where is Christ? but love grows here on the hill, wild, wild, God’s grape to crush” (). She begs to be ‘killed,’ first in the ecstasy of pleasure and then in shame at David’s rejection of her, but when he strikes her in an effort to free himself, she fires the three shots that will betray them to the sheriff. One of these strikes David, who, partially lamed, makes a brief escape, lamenting his own temptation by Peace and seeking redemptive annihilation in the now-twinned figure of Father and Son: Let my body that sinned be punished, kill me and clean me, bleed me all white, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Draw my spirit from hiding, lift it up in the air, God: O draw it forth. To be least and lowest in heaven, and a servant of the happy and sweet Faithful in some little thing that sees no higher than to your feet. For I held your promise, O God the son of God to see you whole . . . ()

David collapses from his wound, only to wake as a “child again” on the “torrent hillside” where heavy rains conceal him. The significant personages of the poem—David himself; his aged mother; Peace; her elderly husband Jamie; the centurion-like sheriff—labor up the hill toward apocalypse: . . . there were six came up the hill. Three were men and two were women, the sixth was neither man nor woman, He was higher and lovelier than the pine-tops, and human and not human. He was a shining out of the east before the star that kills the night, Like a walking tower on the ridge between the hill-tops, a tower of light. (–)

Peace believes she sees the dawn, that is, the purely material wonder of natural process; but what appears to David’s eye it is the spiritual rapture that annuls it: 211

The Sacrificial Son David wept, his weakness and tears and pain were the servants of delight, In the sudden apocalypse of love, the splitting asunder of night. Darkness was torn both ways like a cloth and cast on the earth like a sheet; David dared not look at the face for the fiery lightnings of the feet. ()6

David is vouchsafed the vision he sought, to enter the presence of Godhood though he can look no higher than its “feet.” When Sheriff Hicks’ bullet finds him, he gives up the ghost in a “Dove-shaped” exhalation () that suggests the presence of the Holy Ghost, and his final words (“I love you, I love you, Lord”) evoke a liminal threshold on which perception and beatitude are confounded in a final act of deliverance that is simultaneously the kiss of peace and death (“He saw / The great vision leaning to kiss his eyes, and cried with delight and awe” []). David’s ‘sins’—chief among which appears to be his temptation by the Oedipal surrogate Peace—are given a fiery absolution in which he is simultaneously returned to innocence by being infantilized (the Father’s goodnight kiss on the child’s brow), and joined to the already incorporated Son in the Father’s seamless essence. David is thus twice annihilated, first in his identification with the blameless Son, and secondly in his immolation in the paternal fire that purges both son and Son of the primal sin of differentiation from the Father. What David cannot bear is the ontological scandal that he exists, even if at the Father’s will and sufferance. Life itself, in the Heideggerian sense, is the great mistake, and “love,” for those condemned to temporality, is the longing to set it right. The sexual love Peace offers leads only to further differentiation, further distance from the Father, and hence further self-condemnation and disgust. The spirtualized love that David offers her in return is annihilative absolution—the love that is the Father’s reply to the aspiration of the son for redemptive union with the divine essence. Peace rejects this, and her own reply is to marry the sheriff. David on his hilltop reminds us of the Young Man on his Alp in “The Alpine Christ,” but whereas the Young Man owns a kind of posthumous survival as a disembodied ‘spirit,’ David’s sublime transfiguration appears to preclude any remnant consciousness; his ecstasy is a momentary vision before extinction. In this sense, “The Coast-Range Christ” seems retrograde, certainly so by comparison with Manuel’s tragic acceptance of difference in the earlier poem. But Jeffers’ transparent self-identification with the Young Man is quite absent in his treatment of David, and whatever personal resonances the latter figure may have held for him, he remains a fiction in a controlled narrative field whose perspective is only one among the several that contribute to its action; 212



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in short, a character. What David sees as a towering epiphany on the hilltop is, for Peace, a sunrise faintly tinged with supernatural awe; and, if Jeffers seems to privilege David’s vision (for divinity is always present, even if not apparent), his interpretation of it remains a limited one. In what he will perceive as his own assumption by the heavenly Father, Jeffers shows rather the subjective satisfaction of intense personal need: No cold Godhead’s gaze made answer from heaven but a young man’s passionate yearning Stooped to us, beautiful over the storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There the vision broke, for David’s spirit had made it and the spirit went out. ()

The “storm” of process is poetically illuminated by the “young man’s” vision, but, although it may represent all that imagination may grasp of divine reality, it distorts it as well, for what is perceived as “lightnings” and “fire” is only, as we are finally given to understand, the gaze of an impersonal Godhood indifferent to human need and desire. The mature Jeffers steps forth here, perhaps for the first time, in the adumbration of the vision he will develop in the death-flight of the eagle in “Cawdor” and the “Insolent” feasting of the eagle in “Fire on the Hills.” Repose in the Father is not to be had, whether in guilt or ecstasy, and the “unsocial” birds, with their “disinterested” vision and their real capacity to soar, come closer to the divine nature than the fever-dreams of humanity.7

III The theme of the sacrificial son threads through the work of the decade following “The Coast-Range Christ,” but, with the exception of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” it finds no open expression until “Cawdor,” while the figure of Jesus, so critical to Jeffers’ response to the World War, makes no dramatic return until “Dear Judas” (). As I have argued in The Cliffs of Solitude, I believe the reason for this—and for the substitution of female protagonists in “Tamar,” “Roan Stallion,” and even in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”—is the strategy of indirection by which Jeffers sought to finesse the problem of filial succession and Oedipal guilt. Submerged in unpublished fragments or appearing as a figure on the margins of narrative action, the sacrificial son rests, as it were, in his own, Christ-like tomb, awaiting the hour of resurrection. A glimpse of this figure can be seen in the character of Lee Cauldwell, the 213

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brother of Tamar in the poem that bears her name. We are introduced to him in the poem’s vivid opening scene as he drunkenly canters over a seacliff and narrowly escapes death, though he is clearly marked for it: With a gush of liquid noises The wave covered him head and all, his body Crawled without consciousness and like a creature with no bones, a seaworm, lifted its face Above the sea-wrack of a stone; then a white twilight grew about the moon, and above The ancient water, the everlasting repetition of the dawn. (CP : –)

Lee’s corrupting near-death in the sea-slime fashions him for a tragic rebirth that simultaneously suggests phylogenetic regression (a creature with no bones, crawling up from the sea) and reduction to a phallic tool, a tool that will be used by someone else. The presence of “grave Orion” in the night sky reinforces the tragic foreshadowing, for Orion is a sacrificial figure too in Greek mythology, and his presence, like that of Jesus, hangs over other filial figures of the s: like Hood Cawdor, he is a hunter, and, like Orestes in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” he will die of a serpent’s bite.8 Indeed, the complex and powerfully-wrought scene of Lee’s fall and immersion suggests that he may have been the poem’s original protagonist, an apprehension reinforced by the scene of lapsed consciousness and phantasmal rape that Tamar herself undergoes at the ocean’s edge, which springs the catch of her destiny (–). Lee emerges from his ordeal sobered, and, abjuring his youthful recklessness, determined to assume adult, that is, conventional responsibilities. No essential change takes place in him; he is marked not as a tragic actor but as a victim. Tamar, on the other hand, is transformed by her experience, standing as we have already seen her in tragic amplitude against a backdrop of ocean and stars (). Her transformation is partly sexual, too, for in the instant of it: She was white stone, Passion and despair and grief had stripped away Whatever is rounded and approachable In the body of a woman, hers looked hard, long lines Narrowing down from the shoulder-bones, no appeal, A weapon and no sheath, fire without fuel . . . (ibid.)

Tamar is not literally manned here, but assumes rather the form of the male archetype. She has deliberately chosen the place where Lee had fallen, a site of 214



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which she had earlier dreamed, to enact her own transformation (–). In the dream, Lee tells her that he had not fallen but been pushed from the cliff by a “bad girl” from Monterey, at which point he himself vanishes. The evident suggestion of a displaced wish fulfillment will not be lost on the reader. Tamar completes the appropriation of her brother’s place when, convalescent in her turn, she lies “Where Lee her brother had lain, nine months earlier, after his fall, in the big westward bedroom” (). The nine months’ gestation of tragedy has brought forth not a genuinely male protagonist, but a surrogate in his guise. Tamar abjures her own innocence by seducing Lee in the poem’s third section (–), an act which both prefigures her tragic assumption (“her face / Grew lean and whitened like a mask”) and presages the revelation of her own incestuous origin. This in turn leads to her determination to get to “the muddy root of things” and, by reversing temporal process itself, to claim an original authority that, embracing past as well as future, constitutes the only destiny she is willing to acknowledge and accept. Tamar’s seduction of Lee, which precedes her discovery of fatal ‘knowledge’—i.e., the facts of her parentage—is, as Robert Brophy points out, an Edenic scene in which her as yet-unconscious desire for temporal priority is adumbrated (Brophy, ). For Tamar, the discovery that the sin that proclaims her freedom is in fact a mere repetition of the family history of which she is the product compels her to ‘revoke [all] relationship’ (CP : ) in an attempt to authorize herself. Lee is from the first the fated victim of this quest, although it will lead finally to the destruction of the entire household. His near-death at the poem’s beginning prefigures its fatal action, as Tamar’s final embrace of him in the fire that consumes them both furnishes the climactic image with which it ends. Everything marks him for his sacrificial destiny. When he enters a room at twilight he bears “the day’s-death flush upon his face” (), and his dreams too are death-haunted, plunging him “through the soft and deadly surface / Of the deep sea” after imagined aerial combat (–). The dream of combat is linked to Lee’s restless, half-formed desire to take part in the Great War, a desire that ties him both to the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ” and to David Carrow, whose fate is also defined by the war. For Lee, the war signifies adventure and escape, and Tamar mockingly tells him, “Lee, if you truly / Lust for the taste of a French woman I’ll let you go / . . . / You shan’t go, Lee” (). In fact, he gets no farther than Monterey and the hills where he hunts, and the very horizon of his dream reveals only death. The poem’s final action is precipitated when Lee, vainly attempting to es215

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cape Tamar, turns his whip on her. She uses this to provoke a confrontation with a new lover, Will Andrews, whom Lee, driven to further violence, stabs fatally. Brophy argues persuasively that Andrews represents a mirror-image of Lee, and that his act is one of self-mutilation no less than aggression against a perceived rival. In any case, the struggle turns fatal for all concerned when an overturned lamp ignites a fire in which the principals are consumed. Lee’s own death is commingled with the rest, although Jeffers singles it out to complete the cycle of destruction implicit in his first embrace of Tamar, and the “fall” described in the poem’s opening scene: And Tamar with her back to the window embraced Her brother, who struggled toward it, but the floor Turned like a wheel. ()

Like David Carrow, Lee Cauldwell flees an implacable destiny that has doomed him; like Carrow, he meets his end in fire. Oedipal temptation appears again in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Jeffers’ reworking of the Oresteia. Once again, as in “The Alpine Christ” and “A CoastRange Christ,” an absent father determines his son’s fate. The Young Man abjures sexuality by following his father into death; David Carrow rejects it in spurning Peace O’Farrell, and finds similar safety in union with the hypostatized Father. Orestes’ situation is altogether different: here, it is vengeance that is required, not renunciation, although a vengeance that compels the most nearly unforgiveable of sins and exacts the most terrifying form of renunciation: matricide. That a son must avenge his father’s death was an unquestionable premise in ancient Greek society; that he must do it even in the face of the mosting daunting prohibition is the focus of Aeschylus’ trilogy. Agamemnon is not an admirable hero and Orestes is a rejected son, but the defense of paternal honor is no less an absolute duty. Orestes’ coming is carefully prepared in the Oresteia; he is enjoined by Apollo to avenge his father’s death, which involves the double duty of dealing with Clytemnestra, the actual murderess, and Aegisthus, the usurper who has seized Agamemnon’s throne and thereby deprived Orestes of his patrimony. The former, involving the breach of ancient taboo, requires the command of a god; the latter is merely the exercise of a legal claim, for which no divine sanction is necessary. The two acts are separate but inextricably linked, for the enforcement of Orestes’ right against Aegisthus involves at a minimum the deposition of his queen. Matricide is thus framed within the context of law from 216

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the beginning, and the Athenian jury that acquits Orestes at the end of the trilogy—with Zeus offering evidence in his behalf and Athena serving as defense counsel—completes a process that affirms the indissoluble unity of heritable right and divine justice. The Chorus, as well, has prayed that Orestes deliver Argos from its tyrants and deal equal violence both to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra: “Oh, does Orestes live? Kind Fortune, bring him home, / To set against these two his sword invincible!”9 Orestes, it is clear, would be derelict in his duty to men and gods alike were he not to act as he does. Jeffers’ hero, in contrast, bursts in suddenly, with no more preparation than Cassandra’s prediction of his return: ORESTES (a sword in his hand, with spearmen following, comes from the door)

Where is that woman The Gods utterly hate? (CP : )

There is no dramatic preparation here, no long choral prefaces, no recognition scene with Electra, and none of the monologue in which Orestes, on the verge of action, rehearses its reasons and the condign punishment that awaits him should he shirk or fail.10 Instead, confronted by Clytemnestra, he repeats his single mantra: “This, a God in his temple / Openly commanded” (CP : ). The colloquy between Orestes and Clytemnestra in The Choephori, with its stychomachic compression, brings the action of the play to its climax while underscoring the terror of the deed Orestes must perform.11 Despite the preceding nine hundred lines of verse, which constitute an immense ritual preparation for his act, Orestes falters briefly at the moment of execution (“To kill a mother is terrible”), and leans on his friend Pylades for support. As he parries Clytemnestra’s verbal thrusts, he simultaneously disavows responsibility (“It will be your own hand that strikes you dead, not mine”) and pleads his own case (“How shall I escape my father’s curse if I relent?”). The actual slaying takes place offstage, as the chorus covers it with pieties: “The exile prayed; the god instructed well; / The avenger sped unflinching to his goal.”12 Jeffers draws out the scene between Orestes and Clytemnestra at length. In place of the Aeschylean stychomachia, he gives elaborate speeches to the Queen, with Orestes making only feeble replies between dazed musings. Cleverly, Clytemnestra refuses to plead for her life, but—ever the loving mother—asks that if the deed be done, it be by someone else, for matricide is the one unheard-of act, the “one thing no man can do” (CP : ). With equal shrewdness, she 217

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draws Electra into the colloquy, suggesting that the daughter might more fittingly kill the mother than the son. Electra rises to the bait, and it is she who takes up the burden of argument that is Orestes’ in Aeschylus. This diversion achieves its purpose, for while the women contend, Orestes sinks into reverie: Dip in my sword Into my fountain? Did I truly, little and helpless, Lie in the arms, feed on the breast there? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dip my wand into my fountain? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The arm’s lame, dip in, dip in? (–, passim.)

Orestes’ first musing suggests the incommensurability of the instrument at his disposal with the task before it. A sword is made to pierce and cut, but it is useless before the “fountain” into which it can only “dip.” The term fountain suggests an inexhaustible source, and appears frequently in Jeffers as a metaphor for the prime locus of being and creation, as well as, at times, a fatal snare. The reader will recall “The fountains of the boiling stars” in the last line of “Apology for Bad Dreams,” and in the lyric poem “Continent’s End,” the ocean beds from which all life springs are only a metaphor for a more primeval source. Addressing the maternal Earth, the poet declares: Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain. (CP : )

With this full signification in mind, it becomes clear why what the “God” has commanded of Orestes is the “one thing no man can do,” and the one most fatal to undertake. As no one can return to his source without perishing, so no one can attempt violence against it without annihilating himself in the act. In the second quoted passage, Orestes’ sword has diminished to a “wand,” an implement more suited for ‘dipping’ but hardly adequate to a lethal (or sexual) errand. By the last passage all material extension has vanished, and Orestes is left only with the bodily tool of a “lamed” arm, now only a single displacement away from an impotent member. At the same time, Orestes displaces himself as he approaches the image of Oedipal desire. In the last of the ‘reverie’ passages, he both refers to himself in the third person—the shift that Clytemnestra herself has proposed in suggesting that a third party take responsibility for her 218

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death from him—and confesses himself impotent:

What, enter his fountain? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I will be passive, I’m blunted. She’s not this fellow’s mother. ()

The reference to “this fellow’s mother” is ambiguous; the most literal reading, in the context of the action, is that Orestes is in fact seeking another hand to perform the deed of which he is incapable. The earlier phrase “his fountain,” suggests, however, that he has already distanced himself from the act as such, and that, whoever performs it, he will be blameless because he is “passive” (without will) and “blunted” (without capacity). At this moment, Clytemnestra’s men appear, and, shedding all pretense, she cries out to them, “Up, up, kill.” It appears that this very word triggers Orestes, as if the command were meant for him. With the assenting phrase, “I will kill,” he strikes at Clytemnestra, who falls to her knees in final appeal, but too late. The last thing one may attribute to Orestes is will, however; he appears here, as since his first entrance, almost an automaton, responding without thought or consideration to the most immediate stimulus. Watching his own birth-blood flow again, he thinks numbly, “It was someone else did it but I told him to” (ibid.). This disavowal completes the reduction of his act to mere velleity, a dissociation in which he is not the source but the mere transmitter of an intention to an imagined other. In the confusion of the moment—Electra has actually commanded a soldier to strike in Orestes’ stead—it is plausible that he be unsure whether he has acted or not. But when Electra says, “You have done well,” urging him to “Man” himself to deal with Clytemnestra’s guard, he sinks into an infantile, not to say fetal posture: There’s a red and sticky sky that you can touch here. And though it’s unpleasant we are at peace. ()

When Orestes rises again—Electra meanwhile having mastered the situation and announced the Queen’s death—he remains in confusion, reaching for his sword as if his deed were yet unperformed and its object uncertain: “Must I dip my wand into my fountain, give it to me. / The male plaything. / . . . / Whom must I pierce . . .?” Here is a very different reversal of temporal sequence from that desired by Tamar, whose wish to return to the “muddy root of things,” with its suggestion of male appropriation as well as creative origin, contrasts with Orestes’ attempt to reject his own action. 219

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At this point, Orestes knows only that “There [is] someone to kill.” He turns on Electra, eagerly prompted by Cassandra, who has vengeance of her own to exact against the House of Atreus. Electra, grasping Orestes’ condition, deflects him by accusing Cassandra of Clytemnestra’s death. As if there were now mothers everywhere to slay, Orestes confuses the two, and stabs Cassandra: I have killed my mother and my mother—two mothers—see, there they lie—I have gone home twice. You put it in And the flesh yields to it . . . (He goes down the stair.) Now, to find her again All through the forest . . . ()

Orestes appears compelled to reenact his matricide, as if forever poised before the most horrific of all acts, unable either to consummate or repudiate it: a Sisyphean punishment truly worthy of myth. But he has in fact slain Clytemnestra, and, with dramatic economy, Jeffers uses the moment to dispose of Cassandra as well, whose desire for death has been even greater than her thirst for vengeance. This “double death” carries a double signification, too, for the matricide is of course a symbolic act of incest as well, as Orestes’ insistent use of the wand-fountain metaphor reminds us. Yet, far from releasing or even slaking him, the killings appear to lead only to a “forest” in which, presumably, he will encounter and slay (rape) the mother again and again. The fact that his deepest horror is also his deepest desire suggests that there is no ontological exit. As a citizen “leader” observes in giving him passage out of the city, for him there is no issue. We let him go on; and if he does not slay himself with the red sword he will die in the mountain. (Ibid.)

At this point, Orestes’ fate as yet another in the line of sacrificial sons seems fixed. It is here, however, that Jeffers parts final company with the Aeschylean text. There is no Apollo, promising redemption through ritual purgation, divine testimony, choral mediation, and ultimate human acquittal. Instead, Electra scrubs the stair of blood, and the stones of the palace, droning their eternal colloquy, prophesy the post-human future. Orestes returns, flung not into madness but (with no less violence) into the first true sanity he has known. His thoughts at first wander, but soon focus: . . . It would be childish to forget it; the woman has certainly been killed, and I think it was I Her son did it. Something not done before in the world. Here is the penalty: You gather up all your forces to the act, and afterward

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The Sacrificial Son Silence, no voice, no ghost, vacancy, but all’s not expended. Those powers want bitter action. No object. (–)

Orestes still wavers between the third and first person as he begins. His act is simple (“the woman has certainly been killed”), yet so novel that it is all but indescribable (“Something not done before in the world”). Indeed, that oblique comment is all the reflection he permits himself before proceeding to the consequence: “Here is the penalty.” This is the existential predicament avant la lettre, in which the doer of the deed, uniquely responsible for it by its very nature, must be judge, jury, and executioner in his own cause. Although Orestes has up till now seemed hardly an agent, but, in his own words, “the male plaything” of external forces—the ‘God’ in his temple, the father to be avenged, the sibling who presses him forward—he now affirms his deed as one requiring absolute commitment (“You gather up all your forces to the act”). The penalty is first defined as silence. As this is an act without precedent, so it is one without echo or reverberation. The space into which it casts Orestes is defined, similarly, as a “vacancy.” We have already seen this space prefigured in the daze that follows his matricide, as he wanders in a limbo in which the act he could not perform can now only be repeated. From the perspective of others—the anxious populace, the sister who attempts to recover the situation by conventionally proclaiming his succession (“My brother is your King” [])—he necessarily seems deranged (“The madness of the house / Perches on him” []). It is only when Orestes begins to speak for himself and describe his condition that we can perceive it as it is for him: “Silence, no voice, no ghost, vacancy.” The “voice” that is absent is that of those others who have framed for him his duty and whose commendation or censure is expected in terms of it. They have nothing to say because his act, as the citizen leader observes, has no “issue”; that is, no further effect within any comprehension but Orestes’ own.13 Similarly, there is no “ghost”: Agamemnon, whose spectral voice appears through Cassandra after his slaying to demand vengeance in the first part of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” is absent from its consummation (which is, of course, his Oedipal supersession as well); while Clytemnestra, whose ghost plays a critical role in the concluding play of Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Eumenides, has no further role to discharge in Jeffers’ poem. Although silence (no presence) and vacancy (no place) thus define Orestes’ condition, they do not exhaust it. All, as he states, has not been “expended,” for “Those bitter powers want action.” Far from being unmanned by his act, Orestes is strangely empowered, although this force—whether it is his own or 221

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something, like the Aeschylean Furies, that harries him—lacks object, since nothing is commensurate to it: Deeds are too easy. Our victims are too fragile, they ought to have thousands of lives, you strike out once only The sky breaks like a bubble . . . ()

On the far side of his act, Orestes finds it not to have been impossible, a thing never to be performed, but “too easy” since, as he continues, “The one soft fiber that went mad yesterday’s / Burnt out of me.” Nonetheless, as the repetition compulsion suggests (“they ought to have thousands of lives”), the freedom into which his act has projected him has also ‘lamed’ him for anything else: it is, that is to say, a radical recognition of the futility of all action, and hence only a freedom to renounce. This, as the rest of Jeffers’ drama makes clear, is Orestes’ new-coined wisdom; it is also his punishment and his atonement. Drawn out of the solitude of exile to perform his one ordained act, he is condemned henceforth to return to it. Orestes sets out his vision of renunciation in the long dialogue with Electra with which, except for its brief envoi, the poem concludes. For Electra, Orestes now stands in his father’s place: “You have conquered: possess: enter the house, / Take up the royalty. / . . . / You are Agamemnon” (). She herself is but Agamemnon’s daughter; only Orestes can “possess.” Yet she is Clytemnestra’s daughter too, for, shrewdly guessing the nature of Orestes’ temptation, she offers herself as queen and consort. Orestes himself obliquely confirms her perception, describing the matricide: “she caught at the sword / As the point entered: the palm of her right hand was slashed to the bone before the mercy of the point / Slept in her breast: the laid-open palm it was that undermined me” (). The sexual implication is clear, and Jeffers will use the image of the opened palm as a surrogate womb that invites penetration and stimulates desire again in “Cawdor” (CP 1: 425). Indeed, Orestes directly acknowledges the transfer of sexual interest in his Gethsemane-like night of wandering and temptation: “You were in my vision to-night in the forest, Electra, I thought I embraced you / More than brotherwise . . . possessed, you call it . . . entered the fountain” (). The desire remains unappeased even as he speaks: “It is sweet: I faint for it” (). Orestes is not inhibited by guilt, but by the knowledge that the cost of pleasure is the assumption of his father’s place, which includes the saga of the Atreides: “royalty and incest / Run both in the stream of the blood” (ibid.). His position here is similar to that of Tamar, whose discovery of the Cauldwells’ 222



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history of incest mocks her proud seduction of Lee and makes her “nothing,” “a doll on wires” (CP : ). Whereas Tamar attempts to expunge her belatedness through symbolic reenactment and temporal regression, however, Orestes refuses to project the family taint on the future; if Tamar wishes to return to the “root” of things,” Orestes means to sever it. Electra calls upon Orestes to embrace the act that has defined him, and that makes their union fitting and just: “We two of all the world, we alone / Are fit for each other” (). Orestes’ response is that no past act now binds him; that he has found a freedom beyond action: Here is the last labor To spend on humanity. I saw a vision of us move in the dark: all that we did or dreamed of Regarded each other, the man pursued the woman, the woman clung to the man, warriors and kings Strained at each other in the darkness, all loved or fought inward, each one of the lost people Sought the eyes of another that another should praise him; sought never his own but another’s; the net of desire Had every nerve drawn to the centre, so that they writhed like a full draught of fishes, all matted In the one mesh; when they look backward they see only a man standing at the beginning, Or forward, a man at the end; or if upward, men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting, Whom you call Gods . . . It is all turned inward, all your desires incestuous, the woman the serpent, the man the rose-red cavern, Both human, worship forever . . . ()

Action as such is incestuous because based on human self-regard, whether individual or collective. There is no escape from this dynamic, whose passage is called history and whose product is culture, but which merely perpetuates itself without satisfaction or end. For those caught in the net, there is no alternative; Mycenae must be ruled. Orestes, however, proclaims himself clear of it: To-night, lying on the hillside, sick with those visions, I remembered The knife in the stalk of my humanity; I drew and it broke; I entered the life of the brown forest And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the great changes in the veins

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The Sacrificial Son In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours; and I was the stream Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars, Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and I was the darkness Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind also, a moving lichen On the cheek of a round stone . . . they have not made words for it, to go beyond things, beyond hours and ages, And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the motionless and timeless centre, In the white of the fire . . . how can I express the excellence I have found, that has no color but clearness; No honey but ecstasy; nothing wrought nor remembered; no undertone nor silver second murmur That rings in love’s voice, I and my loved are one, no desire but fulfilled, no passion but peace; The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion, no time but spheral eternity. (–)

From our general perspective, Orestes’ response to his act offers a paradigmatic unfolding of the sublime. In its immediate aftermath, he feels himself enclosed by a “red and sticky sky” that is close enough to touch: no sky at all, but the dim recollection of the maternal membrane. This Oedipal regression represents the degré zéro of the sublime, in which the self, rendered wholly passive and dependent, surrenders all sense of horizon, all scope of action. In the second stage, Orestes envisions the apparently larger but no less constraining space of culture, in which all merely strive “inward,” desire remains “incestuous,” and the sublime is a painted canvas that bears, in all directions, only the human image. Only in the final stage is the veil pierced and genuine otherness glimpsed, in which time is understood as a limited function of being, “the timeless centre” is the source of universal value, and the human, set in cosmic perspective, appears in its proper, subordinate relation. Up to this point the sublime had been occluded, even for Jeffers himself, by the paternal image. Here, for the first time, it is fully disclosed. The central act in this last passage is one of withdrawal: “I remembered / The knife in the stalk of my humanity; I drew and it broke.” Few images in Jeffers are more complexly charged than that of this “knife.” Until this point, Orestes has been defined by his matricide of Clytemnestra, an act of penetration. He with224



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draws his bloodied sword, but, as we have seen, he is unable to withdraw from the act, which he appears condemned to re-experience compulsively (“Now, to find her again / All through the forest”). Symbolically, therefore, the sword (synedochically reduced to a “knife”) has been turned on himself and buried in his “stalk”—on this level, clearly an image of castration. But, as an image in itself, “stalk” is not merely generative but vegetative; it relates, as well, to the “fiber” that Orestes says has been burned out of him. As such, it implies a link to the “brown forest”—brown rather than green, a phallic forest of trunks rather than a feminine one of leaves. The recovery of potency, of true participation in life, is a withdrawal from fixated desire; instead of seeking Clytemnestra’s image in the forest (a mirage), Orestes discovers the forest itself in all its wealth and complexity, and, from there, the “life” that inheres in inorganic and ultimately stellar matter. This is only the beginning of Orestes’ journey, however, because, “Outside the stars,” beyond phenomena, he discovers the great cycles that govern things “in their returns and passages,” and, finally, in the motionless and timeless center, the “peace” that encompasses “spheral eternity.” In opening his own life to the totality of existence, Orestes finds an ultimate ravishment (“I and my loved are one”); his bride is being itself. The imagery in this passage is related to the mystical passages in “Continent’s End” that play on metaphors of ‘fountain’ and fire, and anticipates the exalted conclusion of the caged eagle’s death-dream in “Cawdor” (“Peace like a white fawn in a dell of fire”). There can be little doubt that Orestes speaks here with the poet’s own most heightened perception. Yet Orestes’ word is not the last one, nor is his perspective, however encompassing, the only one. When he has finished speaking, Electra replies, curtly: “You are lost. I here remember the honor of the house, and Agamemnon’s” (). What Orestes ‘remembers’ is the knife that must be broken (but not, by that token, fully removed); what Electra insists on, parrying his speech-act, is “honor”—the debt of obligation that must be paid by one of high birth. Someone must rule Mycenae. The poem concludes with a brief stanza: She turned and entered the ancient house. Orestes walked in the clear dawn; men say that a serpent Killed him in high Arcadia. But young or old, few years or many, signified less than nothing To him who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously, and cast humanity, entered the earlier fountain. ()

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Electra enters the “ancient” house (i.e., the one continuous in time). As she has told Orestes, he has left her no choice but suicide, since, without a proper successor to the throne, the slaying of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra makes her merely a party to regicide. Orestes disavows this responsibility, too, since Electra is also presumably free to enter “the life of the brown forest.” Jeffers seems to give the casting vote in this dialogue to Orestes, since he has “climbed the tower beyond time” and “entered the earlier fountain.” But he also observes that, as “men say,” Orestes is killed by a serpent, i.e., the phallic tool he has disdained to use. This aligns him with the fate of Lee Cauldwell, which is foreshadowed when Tamar conjures up a snake in the water to seduce him, and sealed when, “stung [as if] by a serpent” at her renewed attempt to bind him sexually, the whip with which he lashes her becomes instead “a living snake in his hand” that he fails to control (CP : , ; ). Both men are thereby associated with the myth of the limping fertility god with whom Brophy identifies Lee (Brophy, ), and whose sacrifice is required to renew life. Similarly, the serpent that bites Orestes is ourobouros, the snake that swallows its own tail and completes the circle of fatality (cf. ibid., ). Orestes’ indifference to that fate (“young or old, few years or many”) is his to choose; the fate itself is inescapable. Whatever he may glimpse of “spheral eternity,” the cycle of time still enfolds him.14 Orestes thus remains within the paradigm of the sacrificial son. If he does not, like David Carrow and the Young Man in Search of His Father, offer himself on the symbolic pyre of a mountain peak, he nonetheless forswears succession even at the moment of achieving it; and he, too, meets death on the mountain in “high Arcadia.” His splendid speeches notwithstanding, he can resolve the double bind that matricide and Oedipal violation presents for him—the act of simultaneously appropriating and destroying the desired maternal body— only by a transcendent renunciation of all desire, all participation in ordinary human life. Whatever we make of Orestes’ new-found credo in philosophical or ontological terms, in dramatic ones, the ‘withdrawal’ he makes is final and complete; he quits the stage. A final comment may be ventured on the poem’s title, which, uncharacteristically for Jeffers, poses questions in itself. Robert Brophy suggests that Jeffers’ intent in re-imagining the drama that stands at the origin of tragedy was not to reinstate the catharsis it evoked in an ancient audience, but rather to move beyond it. In this wise he writes, “If tragedy in Jeffers’ sense means moving away from pity and fear, the title ‘Tower Beyond Tragedy’ could be interpreted [as]: ‘Tower Beyond Time Achieved by Tragedy’” (Brophy, ). I see Jeffers’ mean226



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ing, however, as appositional rather than oppositional. If we take the ‘tower’ as a place of detached and secluded contemplation, as Jeffers’ own Hawk Tower was meant to be, then it must be remembered that what he chiefly produced as a result was tragedies, and that pity and fear, or perhaps more properly terror, were far from absent in them. The tower did not, as he insisted, replace the world of human action, but was a means of engaging it. Both the tower and the tragedy were needful, and if Orestes’ vision of “spheral eternity” is both grand and compelling, it also describes a very bare and lonely place. In the narrative and dramatic works we have considered to this point, the Oedipally commanding figure of the father has been absent in the flesh. For both the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ” and David Carrow, the father is posthumous, to be sought only in the sublime as an enrapturing, transcendent presence that will lift the son beyond temptation and guilt; that is, beyond difference. For Orestes, the father is present only as a command—the slaying of the mother that is the price of filial succession, but which also renders it Oedipally meaningless. When Electra declares that Orestes ‘is’ Agamemnon and offers herself as the surrogate for Clytemnestra, Orestes understands at last that succession is merely the formalized enactment of loss, since the truly prized object is never to be had. That object is symbolized as well as actualized in the maternal womb as the desire for temporal priority, the wish to be before the father both in creative potency and the enjoyment of its spoils. This, too, is what Tamar means when she declares that all time is “now” (CP : ), the perpetual present of an unsullied origin. But this is mere play-acting, for neither the father nor the unimaginable priority that lies behind him can be recaptured; all that offers itself is the diminished ‘now’ of a temporal present that is, as fated repetition, the illusion of an illusion. What Orestes discovers outside his father’s house is the “eternity” that takes him out of time, but at the cost of agency. This is the mystic’s stance, but without its presumed satisfactions, since Orestes remains restlessly in quest of what he has supposedly found: a sublime without subsumption in the father. Another way of looking at it is to imagine him as in flight—a flight from rather than toward the father, since Agamemnon’s palace is the one place he has forbidden himself, and to which, having chosen exile, he can never return. Manuel Ruegg finds himself in a similar case, with the difference that he has been sent from the Father’s house on an errand from which he literally cannot return, since neither God nor his heavenly mansions remain. Manuel embraces an exile he has not chosen; Orestes chooses an exile that will keep him as far as possible 227

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from the father. It is, from this perspective, a familiar enough role: that of the Prodigal Son. The father’s authority as an ego-ideal is unquestioned in “The Alpine Christ” and “The Coast-Range Christ.” Tamar, as the victim of incest, is the first of Jeffers’ protagonists to defy it. But Tamar has only reenacted the father’s sin, not escaped it, and David Cauldwell, guilt-ridden and enfeebled,15 is himself a kind of revenant. Orestes rejects the paternal will only when he has carried out its command, and, through matricide, deprived himself of the fruits of rebellion. He does not rebel but abjures, and if he construes this as a value, it is one that consists in renouncing all worldly desire. Such is the power exerted over Jeffers’ early protagonists by the internalized command of the archetypal father.

IV The father at last makes his direct appearance in the Oedipally rampant figure of the Reverend Arthur Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur,” the longest and most ambitious of Jeffers’ narrative poems. Jeffers worked on this poem for the better part of a decade, and it went through a succession of drafts, during which its original character was profoundly altered.16 The Barclay of the drafts is a querulous sixty-seven, haunted by doubt and shadowed by death. His resentful son Edward is drawn into a parricidal plot by his unfulfilled mother Audis, a woman “not forty,” who offers herself to him in a violent episode in which she goads him to flog Barclay’s Indian mistress Maruca. This has the appearance of a primal scene; Edward, who elsewhere declares that he will be Audis’ “son and sword,” is to be rewarded for punishing Barclay’s infidelity (and also renouncing his own sexual independence, for Maruca is much more nearly his age-mate). The flogging, which at once arouses and repels Edward, bears a close resemblance to Lee Cauldwell’s whipping of Tamar, and both the instrument, a bridle, and the setting, a stable, recall the beating of the horse at the beginning of “Apology for Bad Dreams.” Edward thus appears as an Orestes in reverse, urged toward killing the father by the mother, but ultimately incapable of any definitive act, and therefore of identity itself. Although Barclay dreams of his son’s assault, he wakes unscathed and, having prevailed imaginatively over his Oedipal challenger, with a refreshed sense of his own power (PAV –). As a figuration of the son, Edward stands midway between the wholly passive images of the Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father and David Carrow, 228



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and the more engaged ones of Lee Cauldwell and Orestes. Edward wishes to rebel against a father first depicted as weak and, in the later drafts, as strong; but, as in the case of Orestes, he can act against one parent only at the command of another, and he is finally capable only of wishing himself dead, or, more precisely, unborn. Even suicide is futile, because it cannot annul the taint of his having been. In this Edward is the reverse of Tamar, whose despair is that anything has preceded her. At last fully infantilized, he tries to cancel himself by holding his breath, only to suffer (again, like the drowning Lee), the indignity of being forced back to life (–). Jeffers’ inability to develop Edward into a viable character doomed Audis as an Oedipal temptress. Yet, through the successive drafts of the poem as “Storm as Deliverer” and “Point Alma Venus” to its final emergence as “The Women at Point Sur,” he was unable to abandon his tale, although in the end only Barclay remained as the protagonist of the work he would describe to his publisher, with no excess of modesty, as “the Faust of this generation” (CL ). If Barclay was Jeffers’ Faust, however, he lacked a Marguerite, for although Audis maintains a spectral presence in the poem, the strong female polarity that marks (and often dominates) his best work is absent here; instead, as the title itself indicates, there is only a dispersed field of sexual energy. As lordly patriarch, Barclay arrogates to himself whatever fulfills his need of the moment; as charismatic leader and prophet, he summons a maenad-like troop of followers, and finally a small horde of both sexes that, spontaneously grouping themselves as if under the call of a natural force, wander indeterminately “north.” The Barclay of “Point Sur” is fifty, a man in his prime, but celibate for fifteen years. Approaching a physical and spiritual climacteric, he abruptly abandons his congregation, denouncing Christianity in Nietzschean tones as a purblind creed and an ethic of “lies.” The rupture of Jeffers’ forebear Jonathan Edwards with his own congregation inevitably comes to mind; and, like Edwards, Barclay seeks renewal in the wilderness. Here he feels himself charged with a primal energy that Jeffers connects with the natural energies of “strain” described in the poem’s Prelude: “Dr. Barclay felt in his forehead behind the eyes the ache of stored force / Beating against the sockets of his eyes” (CP : ). At the same time he feels a premonition of death, and a sudden fear of blindness. These are both physical symptoms and tokens of spiritual crisis; Barclay thinks of Jesus on the Cross, himself dying ‘blind,’ betrayed in his sonship and denied his patrimony. In many respects, this brief, compressed passage is the crucial moment of the poem: 229

The Sacrificial Son . . . I shall not die blind. Jesus did: ‘why hast thou forsaken me, my God.’ I not his son take him by violence. This is the hybris in the tragedy, that buys destruction. Content. I will buy. (Ibid.)

Barclay is not to be denied the empowering vision that alone gives access to divine authority and its ultimate jewel, immortality. Although he is at best a second ‘son,’ he will, like Jacob, claim the patriarchal inheritance, not by stealth but by main force. In taking Jesus’ place, he does not replace but rather annuls him; Barclay’s is now the valid claim, and in prosecuting it by “violence” he means not to inherit (an acknowledgement of belatedness and hence inferior relation) but to usurp. God is challenged for denying Barclay the light of vision, but his real sin is priority, and his punishment will be oblivion. Not by succession but supersession will Barclay reign in his stead: thus is the fantasy of God’s paternal overthrow by Fate in “The Alpine Christ” reconfigured as a direct Oedipal confrontation in which Barclay absorbs the roles both of Father and Son. Barclay negates himself as a self-defrocked pastor and human father (his son Edward has already been noted, and his daughter April alluded to) in order to assume the role of a Son who monstrously assaults the divine Father. This is in fact an Oedipal regression to infantile ego, in which the world is seen as a projection of the self. Barclay himself understands it as “hybris,” the tragic hero’s challenge to the gods that represents the fullest stretch of adult ego-assertion. Like the figures invoked in “To the Stone-Cutters,” he acknowledges himself as one of the “foredefeated / Challengers of oblivion,” but he accepts the bargain: “Content. I will buy.” Barclay is thus the conscious author of his own tragedy, which, in Jeffersian terms, is as close to the primal act of creation as human possibility admits. In the next section of the poem, he experiences this as a physio-psychological enactment: Going down he felt a dizziness, he stumbled, and the world Dissolved in a moment. After a moment’s error in the gulf of emptiness He leaned and touched the hill with his hand, he modelled with his hand room enough to crouch on, and slowly, Painfully, element by element, summoned the world back. Willed it to being, and with the pain of creation. Walked in his made world: some minutes that followed Each footfall needed thought and creation to plant itself on For the gaps in the dim fabric. (–)17

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Jeffers’ clinically observant description is that of an epileptic seizure or stroke. It is also the visionary fit of Saul of Tarsus or of a medieval mystic, stumbling into rapture, momentarily losing the world, and then regaining it as fresh creation. Neither account is privileged, nor are they, of course, mutually exclusive. In returning to the world, Barclay experiences himself as recreating it, and thereby making it his own. This is no less a labor than God’s own; indeed, in Jeffers’ suggestive theogony, the divine act itself—the material extension of Godhood as the cosmos—may be construed as one of trial and error, in which the divine essence conducts a risky experiment on itself whose outcome is by no means predetermined. If we are to take the passage this far, then Barclay in a sense does reenact the primordial act of creation and the “gulf of emptiness” that it likewise may have engendered. Sublimity, at all odds, can go no further. Creation is the voluntary surrender of divine self-sufficiency (“He being sufficient might be still,” as Jeffers says in “Apology for Bad Dreams”), and in that surrender alone is human apotheosis conceivable. Having thus ‘created’ his world—and recreated himself in the process—Barclay proceeds to conflate the Christological roles of prophet, savior, and Godhead in his own person. On one level, he experiences this as travesty, recruiting followers to objectify his power (a prophet, as he reasons, must have disciples); on another, the sense of authority this gives him feeds his megalomania. Barclay exerts both psychic and physical control over his followers. He conjures his flock as an act of will before he begins to speak, and, “Enforc[ing] his own hallucination on his witnesses” (), draws them as if magnetically. Jeffers shows a fine sense of the psychology of religious hysteria here, the suggestive spark leaping from mind to mind, person to person, in a climate of shared susceptibility: Where yesterday Only one visionary from Palo Corona mountains18 Felt Barclay’s mind, to-day these five [new disciples] reverberating The vision enforced and focussed it, so that whoever on the coast from the Carmel southward Was vacant of desire a moment: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . each without knowing a reason turned the eyes toward Pico Blanco: so that when word came Of a man wielding powers and prophecies, they were not incredulous, they seemed to have known it before. ()

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What occurs here is a conflagration, the one prefigured in The Prelude when the “ring-bound molecules” in the Monterey oil tanks flare up in “Roaring marriage” as lightning strikes them (–). Barclay invokes the same energy when he declares to his followers that new divinity calls upon them to submit to kindling: “It says Flame! It has sent me with fire . . . / . . . your goodness, your righteousness, / Your love: rags for the fire” (). The ‘love’ that must consume itself appears most immediately as sexual trespass. Barclay himself experiences his new powers as an access of virility, and, as he urges his followers to cast aside restraint, he does so himself. At first he tells himself that he must “Crack the diamond breast-plate, / Chastity that sucks the power of prophets”, thereby freeing himself “To master the people” (). At the same time, however, he feels himself “shot back to puberty” by the force of his desire. This involves a complex Oedipal regression in which he usurps the place of his son Edward to become his daughter April’s lover. The Edward of “The Women at Point Sur” is the ghostly residue of the failed protagonist of earlier versions of the poem. Unlike Lee Cauldwell, he has gone to France to fight, but has been slain, and appears only as a revenant. He has not been his sister’s lover—they are twins in “Point Sur”—but Barclay, projecting his own desire onto his son, had paced in jealous fury while he locked himself together with April to bid her farewell (). Now the ‘adolescent’ Barclay, retrospectively taking Edward’s place, rapes April on a hillside, thus making him in a measure the instrument of his own incestuous lust. A vision of Edward appears in April’s dazed mind, speaking, in “falsetto fury”: . . . I’d like to kill him. Oh, Oh if he’d die! I didn’t ask to be born. Be grateful for it, be grateful! ()

This speech has no apparent relation to April’s violation, unless we imagine her identity suffused in this moment with that of her twin. Nor has Edward ever been Barclay’s competitor; as his ‘falsetto’ cry makes clear, he had been psychologically if not physically maimed. All he can wish for, in the depths of his impotence, is for his father to die; but, unable to challenge him, he turns his rage on himself (“I didn’t ask to be born”). As the Oedipal son can only appear, in “The Alpine Christ,” “The Coast-Range Christ,” and “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” in the absence of the father, so the presence of the father in “The Women at Point Sur” precludes that of the son. But Barclay does not merely appropriate his son’s identity in reversing temporal sequence and reclaiming 232



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his sexual adolescence; he abuses that identity to commit the most abominable of sins. Edward wishes his father dead, but Barclay slays his son twice over, first by taking his place, and secondly by dishonoring it. Barclay’s quest for transcendence has always contained a fatal element of regression in it, and his rejuvenation is in fact a symptom of hastening decay. The violation of April completes the circle of inversion, which, as Orestes makes clear in “The Tower beyond Tragedy,” forecloses the sublime and leaves humanity only with its own projected image on the face of the heavens. Barclay now rants to his followers that the Lord he serves “will make you Gods walking on the earth / And striking the sky” (), an allusion to (and intensification of) Orestes’ vision of “men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting, / Whom you call Gods . . .” (CP : ). What Barclay vulgarizes in appealing to the vanity of his followers is, however, the limit of his own essential vision. Again climbing the Calvary-like hill that appears to be its source, the “lost red sundown” of the dying day unfolds upon a vast scene of the sublime: It seemed to Barclay the cloud broke and he saw the stars, Those of this swarm were many, but beyond them universe past universe Flared to infinity, no end conceivable. Alien, alien, alien universes. At length, one similar To this one; instantly his mind crying through the vastness Pitched on the twin of this one, the intolerable identical Face framed in the same disastrous galaxy: and if once repeated Repeated forever. He heard the scream of suffered violence on the dark hill; he ate the miracle, The closed serpent. ()

What Barclay has seen, at the furthest pitch of creation, is the “face” of the eternally self-hanged God whose prototype is Prometheus and whose avatar is Jesus. Barclay has wondered, “Me also to be hanged on Caucasus?” (). The vision of the “intolerable identical / Face” seems to confirm this, and Barclay, in eating “the miracle,” echoes his earlier, Faustian vow: “Content. I will buy.” His vision of his disciples is similarly expanded, but the point on which it rests is another wound: The region people Were present in him, his mind contained them, and the others, Innumerable, covering the earth, cities and fields of humanity, the Americas, Asias, the ravenous

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The Sacrificial Son Billions of little hungers, the choked obscene desires, the microscopic terrors and pities, All present in that intolerable symbol his daughter With the bare bleeding wound in her. (Ibid.)

Barclay’s rape of April appears here as an Abraham-like sacrifice, in which he conflates the will of God with his own (“God has come home to you,” he tells his daughter, in the midst of violating her). The ‘Isaac’ of this sacrifice is not merely April but Edward, the twin secludedly present in her. It is Edward’s voice we hear through April’s distraction, the “falsetto” tone betraying the fact that Barclay has not only sacrificed one child but two: the violation of the daughter is at the same time the final emasculation of the son. From this point on, April veers slowly into madness, or, as we might differently say, is possessed by the alter ego of her sibling self. When a fantasy of savage conquest in Asia rises in her mind, she is puzzled: “These were new dreams and not a girl’s dreams, an adolescent / Boy’s, that made windy honey in her mind” (). When her mother Audis calls to her, April / Edward thinks, “She is calling my sister, I need not answer” (). As April has sequestered her brother within her, now he slowly asserts himself in her damaged consciousness, covering her wound with his own. April’s horror is now the consciousness that Barclay has annulled the proper relation between mother and daughter in another act of temporal reversal: “We have shared / Knowledge of a man, were virgin under one violence, / We harem-sisters” (). The confusion of identity between mother and daughter parallels that between sister and brother. Though she is now neither April nor Edward and yet at the same time both, she feels confusedly protective of Audis, on whom she has displaced her own sense of violation: “Though I am wrongsexed, defenceless mother, / I’ll be her sword and her son” (). The language here is strained to the syntactical breaking-point. April first appears to be addressing her mother imperatively in the second person (“Though I am wrong-sexed, defenceless mother”), only to switch into a firstperson future tense (“I’ll be her sword and son”). At the same time, the shift in tense converts what appears to be an object (“defenceless mother”) into a dangling participial phrase that suggests a description of April herself. Yet, neither male nor female, mother nor daughter, she is only “wrong-sexed”: a creature without true gender identity, and hence a neuter. The secluded Edward appears as well to Barclay in the dream and subsequent vision into which he lapses after his annihilating vision of eternal return, 234



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the procession of universes in which the “twin” of his own finally recurs. As this is both the philosophical and psychological crux of the poem, we shall consider it at length: In a dream a young man Approached him, and what was it they were saying? Edward, Edward, Why does thy brand drip red with blood? “That’s an old song And this is a dream.” He awoke. On the ledge a young man Approached him. “We knew by wire, Edward. The telegram Broke your mother’s heart and my mind from that hour Scrabbles at the doors, April seems not to care much.” Your hawk’s blood was never so red . . . “I am Christ, I have come to slay God who violated my mother And streaked the earth with its pangs.” (–)

Barclay’s dream, which soon becomes a waking fantasy, evokes his son in the accents of the Scottish parricide ballad, “Edward, Edward.” Recognizing him at once, he begins to recount conversationally the family’s response to the news of his death in France, noting with the malice of sexual jealousy that “April seems not to care much.” Edward represents himself as a vengeful Christ who has come to slay the God “who violated my mother.” The ‘mother’ in question is not an earthly one, however, but the female principle androgynously embedded in creation, because the “pangs” which result from the Father’s act are not “hers” but “its.” The suggestion here is that the creation itself is a violation of Being, and that, as the slain Edward is now futilely submerged within the deranged April, so the female pole that is an aspect of prime Being has been confounded in the welter of creation. Barclay responds, and the colloquy continues: “God has turned. God loves. O my son He has taken the people’s part against the wild stars.” “The agony” the young man answered “I suffered grew from your mind but I will make an end. My crucifixion a digging between the war-lines, My death-wound in the belly, I licked the wound in my arm Like a dog but in the anguish of thirst for three days.” Your hound’s blood was never so dear . . . “That is not my reason That I shall kill you.” ()

Barclay suggests that his relation to his disciples is that of a God who has turned against his creation out of compassion for his creatures; that is, assumed 235

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a Christological role. The Edward / Christ figure seems to accept this, and his own existence as incarnated suffering (“The agony . . . / I suffered grew from your mind”). His death in France is a Passion, complete with the three days of metaphoric entombment. It is not revenge for this the Son seeks, however, nor for the horror and scandal of the world itself: “All the earth’s agonies Scream in my ears like famished eagles in the aerie Furious for the black flesh of annihilation. To be ended and sleep, not to be renewed: that is not my reason That I shall kill you.” The old man: “O my son, my son, The enormous beauty of the world!” “It is too much to pity, Too heavy to endure” he answered, “I will make it peace; Too many times having attempted atonement. That is not my reason.” (Ibid.)

Two more reasons are adduced here, and rejected: the ‘agony’ of creation that seeks only the peace of annihilation; and, in seeming paradox, its beauty, which appears to the Son as a burden that necessitates sacrifice and atonement—we will recall once more Jeffers’ evocation of the coast “crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places” in “Apology for Bad Dreams.” The Son himself is bound to the wheel of creation, for infinite repetition—the vision Barclay is vouchsafed on his rock—means infinite atonement without efficacious result: that is, impotence. Barclay-as-Father, meanwhile, has already announced his assumption of the Son’s salvific role. His eternal power, uncircumscribed by the “universe / Of universes” that proclaim his glory, prepares for fresh creation: “I embraced the future, I came to a virgin . . .” (). The speech, which breaks off here, brings us back to Barclay’s violation of April, which he represents to himself as a divine empowerment. This act, as we have seen, is at the same time a symbolic castration of the secluded Edward; similarly, the new creation contemplated by the Father, begot upon the female principle once again, annuls the Son and robs him of his birthright. It is this—the threat of disinheritance, of absolute negation—that finally brings the latter at last to revolt: Nailed to the wood of groaning I meditated these things, And seeing as in a vision all the vain bitterness. I am one with the father, his equal in power, I have turned against him. I did not ask for existence. (–)

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The Son’s last utterance—“I did not ask for existence”—echoes Edward’s bitter comment in April’s mind, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Jeffers stresses the identity of these figures by calling the Son “the young man,” thus connecting them back to the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ,” and bringing the latter’s quest full circle. As the Young Man of the earlier poem seeks only reunion with the Father and annihilation in him, so the “young man” of “The Women at Point Sur” insists on his identity, and, implicitly, his right of succession. This young man—we are calling him, archetypally, the Son—is already “one” with the Father and “equal” to him. He acknowledges the Father’s ontological priority (“I did not ask for existence”), but rejects subordination on this ground. Though he has accepted the “wood of groaning” and the “vain bitterness” that the agony of process represents, he has done so not merely in obedience to command but as a voluntary act of submission. In other words, he appears not as a contingent being, but free, and, as free, coequal. His fidelity cannot be met with ingratitude; it must be acknowledged. Still less can he simply be expunged. His existence, although derived, cannot be comprehended even in a ‘universe of universes’; his freedom is imprescriptible. Barclay’s reverie transpires on several levels. He ‘sees’ and addresses the dead Edward, who replies in the accents of the archetypal Son (“I am Christ, I have come to slay God”) while retaining the identity of the earthly son slain (and symbolically castrated) in France (“My death-wound in the belly”). In the ensuing colloquy, Barclay is referred to as “the old man” and Christ / Edward as the “young” one, thus suggesting a more general Oedipal archetype not bound by the Christ story. At the same time, the parricidal Edward of the Scots ballad is also voiced between the lines of dialogue (“Oh I will kill my father dear”), and it is this Edward who, merged with “the young man,” appears at the end of the scene to draw his concealed dagger and strike: Oh I have killed my father dear. “I,” the young man answered, “To even that stabbing love of yours with steel.” He approached and the hidden right hand Was drawing from behind his loins, Barclay awoke from the dream And knew it for one. There was nothing. ()

As Barclay returns to focused consciousness—once again there is a brief, ambiguous hiatus (“The thick darkness / Was like annihilation”)—he absolves himself of paternal guilt while recognizing that the Son’s quest for vengeance may be eternal: 237

The Sacrificial Son No guilt, no judgment, no guilt, for I looked. There was renewal. Will the dead not be quiet? Oh horrible, pursue From one star-grain of sand to another through desert eternity? And if the life is annihilated and memory Lives . . . (ibid.)

Barclay’s self-absolution is futile because, as his vision of eternal recurrence suggests, the Son will never cease to accuse. Even temporal death may offer no release for him if his consciousness somehow persists, as Edward’s does in his own. If time is circular and nothing is lost through its passages and repetitions, then no sanctuary is possible, and the duel of priority and succession can never cease. There is no solution to this dilemma—the eternal Son pursuing the eternal Father who has slain him and yet must slay him again—other than in a Godhood that holds both poles of temporal creation in opposition and transcends both. This is the consciousness, the divinity, that Barclay seeks in his raid upon the sublime, which can come to him only in transport, and leaves only ruin in its wake in the temporal world. As he trembles with his vision of eternal recurrence, an earthquake shakes the coast: When the mountain was quiet his body had ceased trembling. He sat in the darkness exalted, his body shattered with exaltation, Considering this thing, feeling his humanity slipped off Lie on the rock like a skin, like a cast shirt. “When I trembled in a bad dream: the earth shook when I trembled. The dream knew me by name. It is true. I have touched truth.” He did not feel he had been received into communion, But that he had realized his own members and functions . . . “All the life, all the power. All. All the orbits and times.” ()

Barclay feels the earthquake not merely as an answer to his own trembling, but as an extension of it. The “dream” he has experienced is both his own and that of a divine consciousness that knows him “by name”—that is, as the father of Edward as well as the archetypal Father confronting the eternal Son. If this is not a full assumption of Godhood, it is a magisterial participation in it. Barclay feels in his own “members and functions” the divine counterpart, God actualized as the body of the world. He cannot be the truth, but, far beyond mere “communion,” he has, however briefly, experienced it. His vision is confirmed, its meaning unfolded: “The dream knew me by name. It is true. I have touched truth.” Barclay’s ecstatic identification with the Godhead is delusive, but it is not, 238



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in Jeffersian terms, mere delusion. Much of his vision expresses elements of religious intuition that appear repeatedly in Jeffers’ verse: a panentheistic or God-suffused universe; recurrent cosmic (and historical) cycles; the survival of post-mortem sentience; the necessity to “cast” humanity in order to enter a wider realm of consciousness. Parts of “Apology for Bad Dreams” might be construed as Barclay sermonizing, and of “Meditation on Saviors” as Barclay soliloquizing; indeed, these two poems are so intimately related to “The Women at Point Sur” that they may almost be described as parts of a single thoughttext. And Jeffers himself, reflecting on his “priest in revolt” a decade latter in “Theory of Truth,” would as we have observed acknowledge that Barclay had not only asked the fundamental questions of any religious quest but “touched his answers”—in short, as Barclay himself declares, “touched truth.” Barclay, then, is no mere charlatan; indeed, the hypnotic power he exercises over his followers in “The Women at Point Sur” and the visionary company he shares in “Theory of Truth”—Confucius, Lao-tze, Siddhartha, and Jesus—suggests that, if he cannot be seen as a religious founder (a role his unbalanced mind precludes and that, in any case, Jeffers thought unpropitious for the times), he might in some sense be regarded as a precursor. Barclay’s tragedy is twofold: first, he confounds a sexual pathology (desire for his daughter April, jealousy of his son Edward) with his divine afflatus; secondly, he is unable to translate his ecstatic vision into terms comprehensible to his disciples, and so leads them to ruin. What he tells them is that the poles of creation have been reversed, that sin is a delusion, the old virtues overthrown, and that destruction is God’s aim. This quasi-Nietzschean doctrine is both a promise of power and abundance and an incitement to mayhem. In the latter regard, Barclay partly invokes and partly embodies the figure of a universal strain struggling toward apocalyptic release that, introduced in the Prelude, tolls repeatedly through the poem. Such ‘strain,’ as we have seen before, is the quality of natural process itself in its ordinary workings; in its transcendent aspect, however, it appears as an intuition of cosmic overthrow, the violence of a new world cycle in its birththroes. Barclay figures this in the image of a self-hanged, self-torturing God—a reference not merely to the God of the Cross but to various Near Eastern and Norse deities—whom he describes as a self-begotten child: God is become a child: scimitar of light On the dark rim in the evening. Not the power but the soul Crescents or wanes between the nights of the centuries. Can a child sin? What’s done is that child doing it, and what has been done?

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The Sacrificial Son War, torture, famine; oppressions; the secret cruelties; the plague in the air that killed millions; that child Reaping a fly’s wings, innocently laughing From the rich heart? Oh it has no laughter though a child. It is tortured with its own earnestness, it is tortured. It is lonely: what playmate? It has no mother. The child that is the stars and the earth and men’s bodies, and the hollow darkness Outside the stars, and the dark hollow of the atom. (–)

The unmothered child is divine power in its cycle of rebirth; but it is also Barclay himself—“(He thought, ‘What do I know? I speak of myself. / Am I that child?’)”—in the false rejuvenescence of his climacteric, speaking now in the voice of vatic prophecy, now in the undertone of a man who realizes that insanity is the price of vision. Barclay experiences this partly as bifurcated consciousness (represented as the lengthy conversation with his Doppelgänger), and partly as the alternation between visionary exaltation and terrified doubt. In addressing his followers he is able to channel vision into speech, although at the cost of expediency (“One must paint pictures, no faith’s honest at the stalk”), but in intervals of recuperation he wonders whether “the God in his mind” is not merely the projection of his own desire. This is the very dialectic of the sublime, in which enraptured certitude collapses again and again upon the rock of skeptical lucidity. In fact, ego-projection and ecstatic vision are inseparable in the sublime experience; no one sees who does not wish to see, and what is seen is never freed from the engendering, subjective impulse. In Barclay’s case, that impulse is dark indeed: incestuous desire and repressed filicide. The vision he is vouchsafed is correspondingly dark as well. Unlike the Orestes of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” who sees “no color but clearness; / No honey but ecstasy . . . / no passion but peace,” Barclay’s self-lacerating divinity is a cosmic dervish that “tortures its own flesh to discover itself ” (). Neither vision is exclusive; they seem to represent for Jeffers the cycles of divine repose and activity. The paradox of a God who is simultaneously reposeful and active, who contains all opposition in himself, cannot be expressed in any single conspectus of the sublime. The visions of Orestes and of the Reverend Barclay are equally true, equally false, equally limited by character, corruption, and guilt. “Why,” Jeffers asks in “Theory of Truth,” “does insanity always twist the great answers?” He replies: Because only tormented persons want truth. . . . Only if the mind

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Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness: then it hates its lifecage and seeks further, And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private agony that made the search Muddles the finding. (CP : –)

At end of “Point Sur,” after the followers have fallen off, Barclay wanders alone to the site of an abandoned mine shaft in Mal Paso canyon to lie down “in the mouth of the black pit.” In language that echoes that of Christ / Edward, slaking his thirst with his own blood in his three-day pilgrimage toward death on the fields of France, Barclay sojourns toward death, only to find himself, like his God, besieged by renewal. To quote again the poem’s final lines: After three days, Having not tasted water, he was dying and he said: “I want creation. The wind over the desert Has turned and I will build again all that’s gone down. I am inexhaustible.” (: )

V Having expressed the sacrificial son in a variety of guises and attitudes, and having brought him from the abject piety and self-abnegation of the speaker of “The Year of Mourning” and the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ” to the Oedipally liberated but isolate figure of Orestes in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and the thwarted parricide Edward in “The Women at Point Sur,” Jeffers turned to the cultural archetype who most directly embodied the sublime quest for the Father in Western thought, Jesus of Nazareth. As we have seen, the Christ figure served as a talisman for the conflicted male protagonists of Jeffers’ early narratives and dramas, and even in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” Cassandra prophesies the Christian centuries to come (“I have known one Godhead / To my sore hurt: I am growing to come to another,” CP : ). Having invoked Jesus so repeatedly, having portrayed him as a guiltless savior in “The Alpine Christ” and having construed him as a failed avenger in the person of Edward Barclay, it seemed all but inevitable that Jeffers would turn at last to the historical personage as a dramatic subject. Jeffers’ first extended treatment of the historical Jesus, and his most personal one, is in “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” (CP : –), a poem written shortly after the completion of “Tamar” and bearing the traces of its imprint: 241

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Point Lobos had been the site of “Tamar,” and Tamar herself is referenced in the poem (“the burnt place where that wild girl whose soul was fire died with her house”). Jeffers begins with an evocation of a coastal graveyard, its unquiet souls, and its anxiously awaited day of resurrection (“When shall these dead arise, / What day stand up from the earth among the broken pines?”). This leads directly to the intimation of a new crucifixion (“Which tortured trunk will you choose, Lord, to be hewn to a cross?”). The startling revision of these lines, in which resurrection leads not to eternal peace but only to further agony on the cross, foreshadows the more comprehensive statement in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” and also, as we shall see, the reenactment of the Passion in “Dear Judas.” Jeffers proceeds at once to an emotionally charged evocation of Christ and the Passion that suggests, as perhaps nowhere else in his poetry, the costs of an abandoned faith: I am not among the mockers Master, I am one of your lovers, Ah weariest spirit in all the world, we all have rest Being dead but you still strive, nearly two thousand years You have wrestled for us against God, were you not conquered At the first close, when the first horrible nails went home Between the slender bones of the hands and feet, you frightfully Heightened above man’s stature saw the hateful crowd Shift and sicken below, the sunburnt legionaries Draw back out of the blood-drops . . .

One should not too readily identify the ‘I’ of this passage with the speaker of the poem, since the next lines make clear that it is the dead who comment on the Passion. At the same time, we are perhaps not incorrect in taking the sudden insertion of the first person pronoun (it will not be repeated for the next sixty-three lines of verse) as a personal interjection. This conjecture is strengthened in “Meditation on Saviors,” where the poem’s speaker revisits the Passion in the first person: “I saw the same pierced feet, that walked in the same crime to its expiation; I heard the same cry” (CP : ). The imaginative identification, not to say projection, is striking. Certainly the mature Jeffers was in no sense a believer; and yet, as we shall see, the crucifixion, and the broader vision of the self-hanged God it objectifies, may be regarded as the primal scene and master vision of his verse. The remainder of the poem’s first section instates the poet’s own vision against that of the Christ. Jeffers recalls the sense he expressed in his wartime verse of an agony so immense, a crucifixion so universal, that it could only be 242



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expressed in the image of a returned Jesus, an image that still for him abided: “nine years back you stood in the Alps and wept for Europe, / To-day pale ghost you walk among the tortured pines / Between the graves here and the sea.” The ‘ghost’ of the Christ is the lingering presence of the war, at war itself with the wild coast and the “nihilist simplicity” of the vision it offers of a sublime reduced to the most basic elements of cognition: Ah but look seaward, For here where the land’s charm dies love’s chain falls loose, and the freedom of the eyes and the fervor of the spirit Sea-hawks wander the huge gray water, alone in a nihilist simplicity, cleaner than the primal Wings of the brooding of the dove on the waste of the waters beginning, perplexed with creation; but ours Turned from creation, returned from the beauty of things to the beauty of nothing, to a nihilist simplicity Content with two elements, the wave and the cloud, and if one were not there then the other were lovelier to turn to, And if neither . . . O shining of night, O eloquence of silence, the mother of the stars, the beauty beyond beauty . . .

Jeffers returns to a primeval world in which all landmarks are lost in a gray “waste” and even the brooding dove, symbol of disembodied Trinitarian consciousness, finds itself perplexed between wave and cloud. Here is nothing but “freedom” and “fervor,” the element the seahawks—Jeffers’ purer symbol of divine activity—range in. Love fails here, as a secondary, limiting aspect of being, and even “things” are finally superfluous, the barest differentiation of matter being sufficient, or even mere potentiation (“if one were not there then the other were lovelier to turn to”). For a consciousness whetted on the purest contemplation of the world, “nihilist simplicity,” “the beauty of nothing,” is the final approach to divinity, exaltation dazzled on the edge of extinction. Jeffers imputes to his Jesus such a knowledge, but the creaturely translation of it is love, an act which, aimed downward, is pity, and upwards, a filial rebellion that masquerades as piety. The common denominator in both is the lust for dominion, a lust that blinds one to anything else, and thus cuts off access to divinity: You have known this, you have known peace, and forsaken Peace for pity, you have known the beauty beyond beauty

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‘Pity’ is the ruse by which the power-seeker mobilizes the human legion to “rise and slay” the hypostatized Father. In practical terms, the culture hero offers a vision of material conquest that, first taming the earth and the “tributary planets,” reaches out toward the stars. Jeffers here shrewdly appraises the relation between the Christian ideal of love and the West’s fascination with power, a fascination that not only outlives dogma but thrives on its demise. A Christ separated from divine restraint—the Christ suggested by the figure of Manuel in “The Alpine Christ”—appears necessarily as a usurper, and his followers, in effect, as freebooters. Were this in fact all, then Jesus would be a mere blind prophet, a tragic deluder of men. But Jeffers accords him a second-order level of vision, the level at which Manuel espies “the lift and fall, / And purposeless eternity of power” (AC ). Such a vision is intolerable; it begets love as the desire to endow power with purpose, and finally to supplant it. Once again, Jeffers appears to identify strongly with such an impulse: Unhappy brother That high imagination mating mine Has gazed deeper than graves: it is unendurable To know that the huge season and wheel of things Turns on itself forever, the new stars pass And the old return and find out their old places, And these gray dead infallibly shall arise In the very flesh . . .

As we have seen, Jeffers takes Jesus beyond this to a full cognition of the divine (“you have known the beauty beyond beauty / And the other shore of God”), only to have him fall back from what William Everson, in his discussion of the poem, calls “ultimacy,” into “contingency.”19 This is inevitable, since “nihilist simplicity” is, as the phrase suggests, annihilating, and consciousness, if it is not to be devoured, must return to a level at which eternal recurrence appears as a final term: the sameness in difference that is creaturely wisdom. One may rebel against this by the wilful act called love, or by the equally wilful one of acceptance, which in the poem’s second section is the strategy imputed to the Buddha, and which Jeffers would explore in the figure of Orestes: 244



The Sacrificial Son O why were you rebellious, teachers of men, against the instinctive God, One striving to overthrow his ordinances through love and the other crafty-eyed to escape them Through patient wisdom: though you are wiser than all men you are foolisher than the running grass . . .

VI Jeffers returned directly to the subject of Jesus five years later in the verse drama “Dear Judas” (CP : –). In casting his poem in the form of a Noh drama, he set out to depict the Crucifixion as a penitential story, taking place, as he noted, in “a haunted place and passion’s aftermath, [with] two or three ghosts or echoes of life, re-enacting as in a dream their ancient deeds and sorrows.”20 The ‘ghosts’ are Jesus, Judas, and Mary, attended toward the end by Lazarus, the symbol of futilely restored life. What they experience, as if on a stage, is the gesture and emotion of remembered action, always foredoomed, always identical, yet always freshly chosen. This is the purgatory of eternal recurrence, the level which, as Jeffers suggests in “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,” Jesus is unable to transcend. There is nonetheless significant difference in the treatment of Jesus in the two poems. Whereas in “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” he is taxed with having embraced pity, and thus with valorizing a human perspective above a divine one, in “Dear Judas,” Jesus aspires directly to divinity, and the lure of pity (itself, as we have seen, a mode of authority) is ascribed to Judas. Jeffers’ Jesus is not, of course, without compassion; it is his very capacity for it that attracts Judas to him. But compassion is a feeling with, and, for Judas, pity is a feeling as. He experiences the pain of the world helplessly, and his pity is an affliction for which he seeks a cure: Master I am neither sick nor poor nor heavy with sins, But I am in prison of my pity; the moaning of men and beasts torments me; the pain is not my own pain From which I come praying for deliverance. ()

In Judas, pity is purged of all suggestion of a will to power; rather, it is felt as a debility, an incapacitation. Judas confesses that he is unable to rejoice with others in their pleasure: he can only feel their pain. In this he appropriates the role of the Man of Sorrows, but without, of course, his claim to salvific powers. 245

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Jesus shrewdly observes that Judas knows only “the night side of love,” and takes him as a disciple with what appears to be a paradoxical injunction: To other men I say Be merciful, to you alone Be cruel. Life is not to be lived without some balance. (Ibid.)

Jesus does not mean to suggest that Judas should practice cruelty, of course, but rather acceptance. This is perfectly orthodox doctrine; all religions seek to accommodate suffering, and all seek to “raise” the useless sentiment of pity into the ennobling one of compassion. Judas wishes, devoutly, to be so raised, but he cannot escape the feeling that there is a certain amount of sham in the transaction. A covert dualist lurks in him, and he wonders “whether the evil that we reject from our hearts is not destroyed but goes blackening forth / To infest others” (). This is the shadow that he sees “Immeasurably stretched on the white road” to salvation, and from which, when Jesus describes Jerusalem as “a jewel washed with new milk” in the morning light, he turns in denial: “I dread the shining like the shining of paradise” (ibid.; emphasis added). The world’s pain is never resolved because—like the action of “Dear Judas” itself—it must be enacted forever as memory. If paradise requires amnesia, then perhaps the purgatorial stage on which Jesus and Judas find themselves is the best that should be wished for. Jesus replies to this: “You are too scrupulous” (ibid.). Jesus’ own compassion derives from his conviction of divine origin and destiny. It is a truth, as he tells the skeptical Judas, that is “trumpeted by ten thousand in heaven,” and yet at the same time a “mystery” that had been “hidden” from him in youth and only gradually revealed: I learned that the carpenter was not my father. Ah, Judas, you’re tender-hearted, you’d have pitied the torture And dark and burning fire of my days then. What could I think? Not to impute against my own source An impossible shame. . . . I loathed my own life, I was taken in a net. It drove me into the desert mountains, Where, after I had fasted beyond the moon’s ring, until my spirit was fluttering to leave the body, I then Remembered the prophecies and heard voices from heaven. ()

Even at this point, doubt lingers. Jesus directly confronts his mother, who, weeping, confesses that God is indeed his father. He is unable to account for her previous silence, but concludes that, in “hoarding” her knowledge of his 246



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true paternity, she had “sinned,” and perhaps more greatly than in any common adultery. Nor, it appears, has he fully forgiven her, for “Truly the torment of those days of my ignorance / Never has healed” (ibid.). Jesus has thus suffered himself, and mightily; but, in transcending that suffering through revelation, he can now offer salvation to others. Their pain is unassuaged, as is Judas’ participation in it, but Jesus’ triumph is to know that the redemptive truth of his own condition is its promise for all. Judas, whose skepticism has forced Jesus’ confession, dares not test him further: “Master,” he lies pityingly, “we know that you are God’s son” (). Jeffers’ speculative interpretation of the Christ legend suggested a Freudian reading of what, for him, appeared as the most audacious claim ever made by or on behalf of any historical personage: that the Hebrew prophet Jesus was the son of, and bore substantial identity with, the single, universal God propounded by Jewish monotheism. Whether the historical Jesus had actually made these claims, or whether his followers had spun a tale to that effect after his death, was immaterial, since in either case he was their source, and the power and fascination they exerted—“nearly two thousand years,” Jeffers would write later in “Theory of Truth,” “are one vast poem drunk with the wine of his blood”—was such that they cried out for explanation, particularly from a poet whose own psychic and artistic maturation was so self-evidently bound up with a reckoning of the paternal tie. To be coeval with the Father resolves for Jesus the tormenting question of origins that haunts the Oedipal protagonist. This issue is first made explicit in Tamar, who, discovering herself the product of incest, seeks as we will recall to erase the stain by annulling temporal succession itself: “time stands still,” she tells her father, you’ll learn when you have lived at the muddy root Under the rock of things; all times are now, to-day plays on last year and the inch of our future Made the first morning of the world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I am the fountain. (CP : ).

Jeffers’ Jesus seeks similarly to escape the sin of his begetting by imagining himself the origin of the world, and his human incarnation, consequently, as the condition of a divine destiny that simultaneously fulfills and revokes the temporal order: 247

The Sacrificial Son I tell you freely that to-day will see done What was determined before the rock was laid down under the towers of the mountains. This jewel of time Laid in my hand, rejected once would be lost forever. All greatness is a wrestling with time, And one who has got the grip of his gaunt opponent, if he lets go will not thrive, not again, but go down And the dust cover him, sheet over sheet above his forgotten face, century on century. I feel Signs in my soul and know my occasion. My soul is all towers. (CP : )

The “jewel” laid in Jesus’ hand is the knowledge that the apparent lapse of time between creation and incarnation is an illusion that obscures the indefeasible continuity of divine essence and hence the substantial unity of Father and Son. To lose the certitude of this and to accept the fall into time is to accept separation from the Father, with its attendant consequences of contingency, mortality, and oblivion. Jesus is thus bound to a paternal sublime that precludes the individuation at least notionally sought by Orestes in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy.” At the same time, however, he cannot achieve the undivided identification with the Father that would situate him beyond time, doubt, and death. He feels “the human part’s rebellion against the divine,” and with it the terror of the service to which he is ordered, for “it is dreadful for the frail flesh / Born of a woman to serve the triumphant occasions of God” (ibid.). The result is that he finds himself in the no-man’s land of Gethsemane, bound to the wheel of recurrence, perpetually suspended between the human and the divine: The lightnings and pinnacles of my spirit Cry out and call me: my Father is my trumpet: and the people’s eyes. Indeed it is strange: I am now so lifted Toward God that I seem to myself, among all these pressing Faces and voices, rather to walk alone in an ancient garden, among dark trunks of stone trees And patches of moon; imagining these things. (Ibid.)

This doubtful place is also the historical Gethsemane where Jesus spends the night before his entry into Jerusalem. It is not glory, he reflects, but “bitterness” to be called to an earthly throne (martyrdom is not yet clearly foreseen) for one who walked with the Father before the foundation of the world and “ruled the angels in heaven” (ibid). To have come instead “to a little place to rule a lost people” () seems an almost incomprehensible fall, and when Jesus again anx248



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iously questions Mary about his paternity he must will his faith back into being (–). That he is both risen from the people and descended from heaven—the dual, paradoxical nature of his genesis—divides his intention between the forgiveness of love and the purgation of wrath. These are, indeed, the two tokens of power itself, and Jesus sees at last that the “sword” he brings from heaven must be turned finally upon himself, the purchase he must gain one between heaven and earth. Here, where he reigns in radiant solitude over both realms with his own crucified flesh, is where his destiny is fulfilled, the discordant halves of his nature reconciled, and final dominion over the souls of men achieved: Two thousand years are laid in my hands Like grains of corn. Not for the power: oh, more than power, actual possession. To be with my people, In their very hearts, a part of their being, inseparable from those that love me, more closely touching them Than the cloth of the inner garment touches the flesh. That this is tyrannous I know, that it is love run to lust: but I will possess them. The hawk shines like the dove. Oh, power Bought at the price these hands and feet and all this body perishing in torture will pay is holy. Their minds love terror, their souls cry to be sacrificed for: pain’s almost the God Of doubtful men, who tremble expecting to endure it. Their cruelty sublimed. And I think the brute cross itself, Hewn down to a gibbet now, has been worshipped; it stands yet for an idol of life and power in the dreaming Soul of the world and the waters under humanity, whence floating again It will fly up heaven, and heavy with triumphant blood and renewal, the very nails and beams alive. I saw my future when I was with God, but now at length in a flashing moment the means: I frightfully Lifted up drawing all men to my feet . . . (DJ 32–33; CP : –)

From the temporal stasis of the “garden,” Jesus ranges the corridors of Christianity’s two thousand years, at once anticipating the far future and looking back from it as an achieved summit, like an actor who holds the totality of his role in mind as he performs it. If the ultimate experience of Godhood is, literally, to be the universe, then what Jesus aspires to is the second-order dominion of “possession,” to so inhabit mind and spirit as to wittingly coerce men and compel their love. This, Jesus concedes, is “tyrannous,” the hawk masquerading as the dove, the thirst for power degrading love into lust. 249

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The price of such power is the Cross. In a particularly dense passage of the above-quoted lines, Jesus muses that “pain’s almost the God / Of doubtful men, who tremble to endure it. Their cruelty sublimed.” Men, that is, fear that which most certainly and terribly masters them, pain. The ability to anticipate pain is what thrusts them into time, and is thus the basis of all knowledge. The capacity to inflict pain is, correspondingly, the origin of power as well. Pain and cruelty are thus inextricably linked, and human aspiration as such may be defined, in Jeffers’ gnomic but telling phrase, as “cruelty sublimed.” Cruelty is the supreme act of human mastery, and therefore a compensation for the experience of pain that is the common lot. At the same time, the human fear of pain is so intense that it must be imputed to sources that can then be propitiated; this is the origin of worship. God is “almost” envisioned in this, and all that monotheism effectively adds to it is the consolidation of the many sources of pain into a single entity, whose remission of pain is construed as ‘love,’ and whose permanent exemption from it, if granted, is conceived as heaven. What Jesus perceives is that, although the capacity to inflict pain makes a master, the willingness to suffer it, publicly and theatrically, makes a god. “I shall draw all men to me,” he reflects, “when I am lifted up”: without that The fierce world would never kneel down to slake its lusts at my fountain. Only a crucified God can fill the wolf bowels of Rome; only a torture high up in the air, and crossed beams, hang sovereign When the blond savages exalt their kings; when the north moves, and the hairybreasted north is unbound, And Caesar a mouse under the hooves of the horses. . . . ()

Like Cassandra in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Jesus dreams far forward, imagining a future in which the Caesars have been trampled and his image alone remains of Rome, “my gaunt pain erected in counterfeit.” The ability to possess the future is the key to possessing the past, and thus to rewriting his origin as divine. Only the scandalous act of appropriating the germinative power and identity of a monotheistic God, lord and source of all, can accomplish this, and assuage the self-doubt that gnaws at Jesus and condemns him, if not to the outright shame of bastardy, then to the obscurity that is the temporal lot of all: “no man shall live,” he says, “As if I had not lived” (). This is his most affirmative and revealing cry, the very wound of his pride. When Jeffers looked back a decade later on his creation, he made the point very explicitly: 250



The Sacrificial Son Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the prophetic splendors of the race of David. Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived. Too loving to curse his mother, desertdriven, devil-haunted, The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his father? Because God was his father, Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God. His personal anguish and insane solution Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem drunk with the wine of his blood. (“Theory of Truth”)

Jeffers’ suggestion is that Jesus is necessarily deluded, only half-aware of the repressed shame that drives him to such prodigal assertion, so “fantastic” and “insane” an account of himself. In “Dear Judas,” Jesus repeatedly doubts himself, much as Barclay does in his moments of introspection, and the knowledge of the animal torment he will suffer almost eclipses all else. His commitment, however, is fatal, and he expresses both his hope and his fear as one: “Torture on the cross is the only real thing” (). If Jesus were merely deluded, however, there would be no “poem,” neither his own nor Jeffers’. There is truth in his madness, and it is a truth inaccessible without it. Jesus sees his sacrifice as “lifting my peoples nearer / In emotion, and even at length in powers and perception, to the universal God than ever humanity / Has climbed before” (). The crucifixion, that is, is not only a means of divinizing Jesus himself, but, as a dimly apprehended Imitatio Dei, of shadowing the divine agon itself. No sooner has Jesus given utterance to this than he rejects it (“Dreams, dreams”), but he returns to the idea from a different perspective in his last meditation: Dear Judas, it is God drives us. It is not shameful to be duped by God. I have known his glory in my lifetime, I have been his glory, I know Beyond illusion the enormous beauty of the torch in which our agonies and all are particles of fire. ()

In his ‘human’ nature, Jesus senses the Cross as an aspiration toward divinity, not only on his own behalf but that of humanity as a whole. In his ‘divine’ one, he sees this aspiration itself as a part of God’s will, and himself as a holy dupe. This passage too seems to echo Barclay’s “Content. I will buy,” as well as 251

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one of Jesus’ earlier ruminations in which he expresses mystical union with the Godhead (“there is not a word nor a dream nor any way to declare his loveliness / Except to have felt and known, to have been the beauty”), only to feel himself deceived in the next instant: “Exultation, / You stripped dupe? I have gathered my ruins” (). Jesus may know “Beyond illusion” that the beauty and glory of God are real, and that he simultaneously perceives and is possessed by this glory—much as he wishes the “people” to be possessed by him. At the same time, however, he is conscious that the very exultation which overwhelms him is an effect wrought upon him by the power that bids him sacrifice himself, and consequently makes him its “stripped dupe.” Again, a single charged word bears multiple significations: Jesus is momentarily “stripped” of his illusion as he will be stripped on the Cross, and his nakedness will itself become a cloth of mystery that both conceals and reveals divine reality. On the Cross, Jesus will be an eidolon of Godhood, his own martyred flesh the substantial material of insubstantial vision. This is to be a dupe indeed, but—again paradoxically—one who knows exactly what he does and how he is used. The persona of Jesus was crucial to Jeffers’ exploration of the sublime. It enabled him to objectify the Oedipal drama he enacted awkwardly in “The Alpine Christ” and “The Coast-Range Christ,” which continued to haunt him in “The Women at Point Sur,” and which was to drive him almost to the end of his creative life. In the Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father and in David Carrow, Jeffers conflated the search for the personal and the divine father; in “Dear Judas,” he turned directly to Jesus not only as the prototype of this quest figure but as the key to the Western construction of the sublime. In Jewish lore, although various figures are enraptured and some even engage God in dialogue, only Moses has what one might describe as a sublime encounter, approaching the deity in his full glory. The scandal of Jesus, for his contemporaries, was the suggestion that someone else might do so again, and on the basis of an actual kinship with the divine. Here was the core site of the Western sublime. Greek heroes who bore divine parentage worked out their destinies on earth, and their later, secularized versions, trespassing on the inviolable border between the divine and human realms, were invariably crushed (Jeffers depicted one such hero in “The Humanist’s Tragedy,” a poem contemporary with “Dear Judas”).21 Jesus—whether as man or as myth—was thus the first figure who sought to collapse the boundary between the divine and the human, a project so outlandish on the face of it as to cry for explanation. Jeffers’ thesis—and, obviously, it is merely a thesis, or, more accurately, a 252



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dramatic device—is that Jesus fears the imputation of bastardy that, even more than the humble birth of a carpenter’s son, would subject him to obloquy in a stratified and racially exclusive society. As I have argued elsewhere, the absence of a father would also expose him to the unresolved Oedipal tensions that “Dear Judas” depicts in his relations with Mary.22 It must be remarked that Jesus’ suspicion of his birth is as much an excuse to reject “the carpenter” as a father (he never refers to Joseph by any other style) as to claim the paternity that trumps all others. Only a father who is omnipresent can shield Jesus from temptation; only one whose divine nature he shares can legitimate his desire, justify the sense of his own high powers, and vindicate the presumption of a providential destiny. Jeffers’ declared purpose in “Dear Judas” was to present “the only divine figure still living in the minds of people of our race, as the hero of tragedy.”23 As we have observed, the heroes of Greek myth might well be partly divine, but the protagonists of Attic tragedy were not, and the very notion of hubris on which they rested presumed a radical distinction between the human and the divine. The tragic hero might ignore or transgress divine ordinance, but the idea of such a hero claiming divine identity himself would have been unthinkable on the classical stage; the Greeks were contemptuous of Asiatic monarchs who permitted themselves to be worshipped, and they were scandalized when Alexander the Great accepted divine honors. By casting Jesus as a tragic figure, Jeffers reduced him to a secular one whose flaw—not the generalized one of hubris, but a delusion so extreme as to appear pathological—required not merely representation but explication. At the same time, if Jesus’ delusion were merely a private matter, there would be no interest, let alone tragic significance in his story. Jeffers’ task was therefore to do justice to a figure whom he described, candidly, as “a man of genius, a poet and a leader, a man of such great quality that He has been regarded as God—literally, God—by successive millions of people, for eighteen or nineteen centuries (and some future ones) of the greatest age of human history.”24 In the compass of his highly compressed drama and the pared-down setting of its Noh-like stage, he does so largely through the figure of Judas, the intelligent skeptic, who follows Jesus despite his rejection of the latter’s claim to divinity. What Judas recognizes is the human supremacy of Jesus, a man so manifestly superior to his fellows that he is able to give even such a one as Judas the gift of hope. Only when the enabling delusion he is prepared to overlook threatens to become a megalomania that will doom Jesus’ flock does Judas feel compelled to betray him.25 253

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Jeffers does not mean simply to render Jesus as a dramatic figure, however; he means also to depict the insight he had won through tragic delusion and witnessed in final sacrifice. This insight, as he noted in “Theory of Truth,” though partial and “stained,” was nonetheless real, and, even stripped of its doctrinal accretions, powerful enough to define an age. At the same time, the figure of Jesus continued to have deep personal significance for Jeffers himself. The Hebrew poet caught between a rejected earthly father and a hypostatized divine one had afforded him a means of projecting his own conflicted paternal relationship, and of understanding religious quest as a tragic agon. These elements were to come full circle in Jeffers’ ultimate depiction of the figure of Jesus in his verse drama, “At the Birth of an Age.”

VII “At the Birth of an Age” was the concluding poem of the dramatic trilogy that, with “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and “Dear Judas,” expressed Jeffers’ vision of the three major sources of Western civilization, which he identified in the Foreword to the Selected Poetry as “Hebrew-Christian, Roman, Greek, [and] Teutonic” (SP xviii; CP : ). In terms of his pursuit of the Christological theme, however, the relevant middle drama was “At the Fall of an Age,” his retelling of the legend of Helen of Troy, first published in Give Your Heart to the Hawks (CP : –). The version of Helen’s story chosen was that of Pausanias, who depicts Helen as meeting her end on the island of Rhodes. In Jeffers’ telling of it, her death is sacrificial, and thus a prefigurement of the Crucifixion. As she is hanged at the instigation of her enemy, Polyxo, the Myrmidons of Achilles, who have been summoned from death to accompany her, chant her dirge: Wild swan, splendid-bodied, Silent at last, silent and proud, fly up the dark. Clash bronze, beat shields, beauty is new-born. It is not to be whispered in Argos that Helen died like a woman, Nor told in Laconia that sickness killed her. Strike swords, blade on blade, the daughter of God Hangs like a lamp, high in the dark, quivering and white. The breasts are thrust forward and the head bows, the fleece of gold Shakes on the straining shoulders, writhes to the long white thighs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Come down and behold us Oh King of heaven and Oh hawks of Caucasus Come down and behold us . . . (, )

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Helen is resplendent and incorruptible in death; that is, immortal, as the bound Prometheus was in his agony, and as the crucified Jesus would become in the legend of his followers. Like both of these figures, she is eidetic, occupying a sublime and symbolic space, “high in the dark” and “fly[ing] up the dark”—i.e., no longer in the light of common day, but cast on a dramatic background against which she shines “like a lamp” while aspiring upward. The last-quoted lines of the description evoke both a Judeo-Christian “King of heaven” and the bound Prometheus on the Caucasus, thereby associating Helen with the archetypal acts of divine sacrifice in Western lore. Prometheus, the Titan, is a demigod, and, as Jesus is (self)described as the son of God, so the Myrmidons call Helen God’s “daughter.” In each case, the sacrifice of a divine offspring suggests the necessary condition for cultural renewal and the reaffirmation of divine purpose (“beauty is new-born”). At the same time, the common denominator in each case is the immitigable experience of pain, for without pain, as the Myrmidons tell Helen, the next age “could never be beautiful” (). The agony of Prometheus is perpetually renewed, and, as Christian theology asserts, the Cross is forever active. The Myrmidons tell Helen that the pain of her sacrifice will be “brief ” (ibid.). They refer, however, only to her mortal element, just as Jesus suffered mortally only while on the Cross. In her incorruptibility, as in his, pain must abide. It was in “At the Birth of an Age” (CP : –), first published in , that Jeffers finally drew the strands and suggestions of twenty years into a culminating vision of the divine agon itself. The action of the poem, derived from the Volsung Saga, pivots around the ambivalence of its chief character, Gudrun, the German wife of Attila the Hun, who, unable to exact revenge against her brothers for their murder of her first husband, Sigurd, turns the Germanic code of vengeance against herself and commits suicide. This, in the narrative portion of the drama, is only the last in a succession of sacrifices and sacrificial images. The first scene introduces us to “a haltered man / Hung in the oak above the fire-crumbled walls” of a ravaged farmstead. As Robert Brophy points out, the extended description of the scene—“A hill over a plain, a hanged man, a choked well, a stream at the hill-foot”—suggests a variety of sacrificial modes, the hill recalling both Calvary and the Caucasian scene of Prometheus’ suffering, the tree from which the farmer hangs the world-axis prominent in Norse mythology, and the choked and flowing waters the dammed and released passages of renewal that symbolize the efficacious discharge of sacrifice ().26 Gudrun’s youngest brother, Carling, is the next sacrificial figure; he first draws blood testing a sword edge, then receives a stigmata-like wound in his 255

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hand, and is finally killed while trying to rescue his captive siblings. Unlike them, he is physically and morally delicate, a poet by nature although, impelled by his own fierce imagination as well as the warrior code of his tribe, he idealizes the beauty and “fellowship” of battle. The resemblance between Carling and his earlier avatars, the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ,” Lee Cauldwell in “Tamar,” and Edward in “The Women at Point Sur,” will be apparent, although he is perhaps the most successful realization of the type. He resembles the divided Jesus of “Dear Judas” as well, the sensitive and brooding poet who brings not peace but a sword (Jeffers incorporates the biblical verse into Jesus’ discourse, CP : ), and finds his own destiny in violence. We may note, too, the striking passage in “Give Your Wish Light” where Jeffers describes men in battle as “drunken / Jesuses” who bestow death as if it were a benediction, and war itself as a collective sacrifice (: ). Jeffers never descends to glorifying war, whose heroism always proves a cheat and an illusion—the dying Carling bitterly describes himself as “a piece of skewered meat” (: )—but it seems to him, like the Cross itself, the shadow of a greater enactment. That shadow falls repeatedly across the poem. As Attila interrogates Lupus, the bishop of the besieged town of Troyes, he sees a fresco of Prometheus, whom he at first mistakes for the Christian God. The bishop corrects him; the image, he says, is of a “wise giant that loved mankind” and was “crucified . . . I mean hanged for it” (). Attila assumes that Lupus’ God, too, “was hanged for loving mankind”—an error that no Hunnish chieftain would commit—and Lupus, unwilling to contest the point, silently allows Jesus to be assimilated into the company of the Hanged Gods. This leads to a colloquy with Attila’s ally, the Goth Ricimer, who tells the story of his own hanged god, Woden (Odin). Ricimer scorns the idea of a sacrificial god; or, rather, of a god who could sacrifice to or for any lesser entity: We say that he hanged himself up as a sacrifice to himself. They hang up heroes and white horses to him but that’s not enough; he wanted the greatest sacrifice. There is nothing greater than himself, so he hanged himself up. (Ibid.)

Ricimer’s blunt account of the Self-Hanged God –a warrior’s deity—stirs recollection in Gudrun, who comes a step closer to the truth before faltering: I was brought up in it. We think there’s a great wisdom in pain that’s hidden from the happy. Woden’s our God of Gods and no power could hurt him: then he must hurt himself to learn it: how else, Wisdom’s higher half? It’s false, though, I learn nothing. . . . (Ibid.)

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Gudrun, herself torn between the imperatives of vengeance and the Christian ethic of forgiveness, sees “wisdom” not as an attribute of divinity but as an external power to be conquered by submission to “pain,” itself a hypostatized entity. Nor is Woden himself more than the chief of the gods among whom ‘divinity’ is dispersed. Gudrun’s vision thus remains partial and blinkered; it neither enlightens nor consoles: “I learn nothing.” The last shadow-God is Attila himself, the world-ruler whose barbaric order “sustains the earth,” and who only half-mockingly asks Lupus, “am I not like your God / That gave himself up to torture to save humanity, because he loved them?” () Attila is ready to give Gudrun the blood-vengeance her Woden demands or the mercy the new Christian God requires; his very power, only capricious in itself, makes him the servant of others. But since Gudrun herself cannot decide he is baffled, and events take their course instead. Gudrun adds her own suicide to her brothers’ deaths, and it is only with this that the shadows can be cast aside. Gudrun’s own “shadow” finds itself in a charged though empty silence (“I am in the whom alone,” ), in which a figure at length becomes visible in an attitude of prayer. Gudrun perceives Red stars in his hands and feet, a blood-comet Cut in his side. He is berserk-naked, young and gray-haired, one of the shieldless that burn young. ()

Self-evidently, this is the figure of the mortal Christ. Jeffers will however refer to him throughout as the Young Man, for, although his consciousness is that of Jesus (he refers to Judas and Mary, and is addressed as “Saviour”), he incorporates other sacrificial figures (Adonis, Thammuz, Dermot), and the memory of Carling as well. At the same time, his cognomen recalls for us the Young Man of “The Alpine Christ.” Like the personage of that abandoned poem, he is also in search of his father on what appears, at least at one point, to be a phantom field of battle. That he must seek, that death has not immediately united him with the Father, suggests a terrible nullity: “As to God: I know not whether he is good. I know not whether he exists. I have stood and gazed at the star-/Swarming cloud. . . .” () The cloud parts, to reveal the image of a “vast form” that resembles the fresco of the bound Prometheus. The Young Man fails to penetrate the form, however, and sees with bitterness not the longed-for “face of God” but “my dream of my own death / Hanged on the sky” (). Instead of the sublime encounter with the Father, the wastes of death reveal only the Son’s own doubled 257

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image projected throughout space and time; that is, the sterile vision of eternal recurrence. Of all the witnesses, the Young Man sees the least. The “Singers,” who represent Christ’s flock and who translate his despair into words of promise, perceive in the Promethean figure a “lonely virtue,” and Gudrun, closer yet to the truth, proclaims the world’s divinity in it: Here is the dignity We adored in rocks and waters, the reticent self-contained self-watchful passion of the gray rock The greatness of high rivers going west; here is the comeliness I knew in heroes, the high beauty of the helmets, The praise of Sigurd; here is the pain in myself and all. Here is reality, All that my living eyes ever saw was phantom Shadows of this. ()

Whereas the Young Man can only see himself as crucified in a world without end, Gudrun’s vision embraces the world as such in a single image that contains elemental forces, the action of heroes, and “the pain in myself and all” [emphasis added]. That is, the Young Man perceives his own unredeemed striving, while Gudrun sees in her pain an aspect of natural process, and in that the labor of the divine agon. Her vision moves the Young Man to recognize the Godhead at last; but it leaves him yet unable to perform the last task of the self, the perfect submission of praise: He is not a phantom. The stubborn violent rays and strain of reality Glow from those tortured limbs, I know them, I have found what I was all my life seeking, and all my death, The power my life-delusion called Father, and never feared him and never . . . hated him . . . before this time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  He is terribly beautiful. He is like a great flower of fire on a mountain in the night of victory, he is like a great star that fills all the night, He is like the music and harmony of all the stars if all their shining were harpmusic. He has no righteousness, No mercy, no love. ()

The Young Man now perceives the form as distinct from himself, but also as the negation of himself. It is no longer the object of a sublime quest, but 258



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alien and unattainable in its merciless majesty. Far from seeking union with it, the Young Man defines himself in opposition to it, even hatred of it. The selfhanged God and the crucified Son, as it seems, are destined to wage their duel forever, and the Young Man who as Jesus in “Dear Judas” had declared that no man would live as if he had not now says, “Let them cut the crosses out of the churches, no man remember me” (). The Young Man’s reaction is contrasted with that of the Singers and of Gudrun. What the Singers see is an inhuman glory, “the peace of the eagle / Forever circling / Perfectly forever alone, no prey and no mate, / What peace but pain?” To this is grafted the vision of a kind of Oedipus, whose “eyes are put out” and which rain an eternal fountain of blood, which is the world itself: “He is all that exists” (). Gudrun, on the other hand, sees “the beauty of power overcoming pain, and the earnest eyes,” whose gaze can be felt but not beheld: “I have come to my love, if only in a partial vision: his greater part / No poet can know” (). This image-complex of beauty, power, and pain is Jeffers’ riposte to the beatific vision of Dante; it compels praise but offers no salvation. God has none for himself; and the world is the suffering of God. At last, the Hanged God speaks in his own voice: If I were quiet and emptied myself of pain, breaking these bonds, Healing these wounds: without strain there is nothing. Without pressure, without conditions, without pain, Is peace; that’s nothing, not-being; the pure night, the perfect freedom, the black crystal. I have chosen Being; therefore wounds, bonds, limits, and pain; the crowded mind and the anguished nerves, experience and ecstasy. Whatever electron or atom or flesh or star or universe cries to me, Or endures in shut silence: it is my cry, my silence; I am the nerve, I am the agony, I am the endurance. I torture myself To discover myself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I have also my peace; it is in this mountain. I am this mountain that I am hanged on, and I am the flesh That suffers on it, I am tortured against the summit of my own peace and hanged on the face of quietness. I am also the outer nothing and the wandering infinite night. These are my mercy and my goodness, these

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Pain is thus the condition of “being,” construed in opposition to peace, and produced only by its deliberate violation. Creation is the voluntary exercise of divine power against itself; voluntary, to recall once more Jeffers’ comment in “Apology for Bad Dreams” that God “being sufficient might be still,” but also in some sense necessary, for without it divinity cannot fully realize its own plenitude. Lacking creation, there is only “the black crystal”—an image Jeffers also deploys in “The Women at Point Sur”—whose rays, trapped within, produce no light, but contain only an infinite density. The reader will note Jeffers’ anticipation of the concept of cosmic black holes, as well as the primal condition of matter before the Big Bang. Creation is contingent on divine will, and thus the image of the crystal can serve to represent both cosmic beginning and ultimate star-death; as the Hanged God says, “I have not chosen / To endure eternally; I know not that I shall choose to cease” (). But resurrection—fresh creation, the renewal of the cycle—is implicit in these words as well. With this theophanic scene, Jeffers completed the twenty-year journey toward a mature conception of divinity that he had begun in “The Alpine Christ.” In that earlier poem, ‘God’ spoke too, but only of his overthrow and supersession in heaven by a soulless and mechanistically conceived Fate. This Fate, which could neither be practically resisted nor morally accepted, suggested a dualistic universe in which the gospel of love as preached by the Christ figure of Manuel represented a tragic, oppositional value. Such a stance did not take Jeffers far beyond Hardy or Matthew Arnold. His own religious quest drove him in the direction of a materialistic monism in which the ineffable God could be known only through his manifestation in and as cosmos, a Godhead that was, literally, All. The Self-Hanged God, the archetypal figuration common to all Western religion and mythology, was both the most primitive and the most sophisticated intuition of which deistic thought was capable, embracing both the sacrificial propitiation of natural forces and the self-immolation of a divinity that instantiated itself as creation and whose signature was beauty. The last speakers in “At the Birth of an Age” are Gudrun and the Singers, and both affirm their willingness to “eat the serpent” of change and recurrence that represents the divine will. The Young Man, however, does not respond to the Hanged God’s speech. Indeed, he is entirely silent in the last pages of the poem, although, as indicated by others, he appears to remain on the stage of the sublime. His last speech, from which we have quoted only the final line, must 260

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now be considered in full: The fire on the mountain Lights all my depth. I see the ridiculous delusion that gave me power and the ways that led up to Golgotha, The delusion dies, the power survives it. I am not conquered. I set myself up against you, Oh merciless God not my father. On earth an old wave of time is fallen and a new one draws From the trough to tower higher: my spirit is the light in it, I am remembered, this age is mine. I have bought it with the stubborn faith of my people, and my own Insane idealism, the wine of my wounds, the tension of intolerable hope. Let me remembered Be a new spirit of mercy in the new age, a new equality between men, that each Unblinded behold the beauty of all others: thence happiness and peace . . . my longing chokes me. . . . When men are happy Let them cut the crosses out of the churches, no man remember me. ()

The Young Man affirms, as does Manuel in “The Alpine Christ,” the gospel of love that, as he now sees, is the distinctive part of his message. This love equalizes relations among men, and thus sets itself in opposition to the tyrannical ubiquity of the Hanged God, who in torturing himself condemns his creation to share in his ghastly experiment. The Young Man explicitly rejects this God whose terrible beauty and excellence excludes all “righteousness,” “mercy,” and “love” (), and who for all his power is “not my father.” The Young Man does not—cannot—mean that he is ontologically independent of God, that he has another source. He does not, that is, renounce the concept of paternity as such; rather, his is a moral rejection. The Jesus of “Dear Judas” identifies himself with God the Father and aspires to the union with him that the Crucifixion will bring. If there is a covert rebellion in this (is Jesus merely reabsorbed into the Godhead? is he co-regnant with the Father? is he, perhaps, his successor?), the Young Man of “At the Birth of an Age” is uncompromising in his insistence on separation and autonomy. He will have no part in an order that valorizes pain and suffering; indeed, that from a moral point of view consists of nothing else. The Young Man concedes that God is “terribly beautiful”; what he seeks, however, is a beauty that does not rest on shrieks and groans, and the agony of natural process. Jeffers had long before given this idea the name of “moral beauty,” in the poem of that title. This beauty is, as we will recall, is identified with the distinc261

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tively human aspiration toward “righteousness” that Nature otherwise lacks, and which, as we have seen, the poem’s speaker specifically denies as an attribute of divinity (“this is what the stars have not” [CP : ]). Jeffers did not forget this concept, although his notion of it had undergone a significant shift when it reappeared in the important letter to Sister Mary James Power, written about the same time as “At the Birth of an Age.” Here, moral beauty is construed not as an exception to universal process but as a part of it, by which man “may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things” (SL ).27 Instead of making man the heroic exception to a soulless universe, moral beauty was simply his burnt offering in the divine order. If moral beauty was then an aspect of universal value, it was not limited to or defined by interpersonal love, which, as we have seen elsewhere in Jeffers, is a problematic phenomenon that shades all too easily into narcissism or the lust for power. Such is in fact the case both with the Jesus of “Dear Judas,” with his vaunting boast that “no man shall live / as if I had not lived,” and with the Young Man of “At the Birth of an Age,” who similarly states, “I am remembered, this age is mine.” The Young Man, in claiming the “age” being born with his sacrifice, acknowledges that he does not speak for an eternal or even necessarily a perdurable value in preaching his gospel of love, for God himself is not love, and man is an unstable element. It will suffice him that men become “happy” through love, mercy, and equality; that is, conquered by his spirit. At this point, he declares, he will be content to be forgotten (“Let . . . no man remember me”). Surveying the ruins of the Christian vision from the perspective of nineteen hundred years, the Great War of his own time, and the new war that, in the s, Jeffers saw looming, the career of “love” was not overly convincing, and its future appeared dim. The messianic impulse, as he perceived, had entered secular politics, but only as Christianity’s degenerate phase; as he would write in “Self-Criticism in February” of those who urged him to declare “That God is love” or that “social / Justice will soon prevail”: “I can tell lies in prose” (CP : ; italics in original). The Young Man’s final speech in “At the Birth of an Age” is also followed by the skeptical comment of Gudrun: “He is beautiful, this easterner, but like a child / Desiring what men despise. Happiness? For all the living? How shamefacedly we should have to kill it / As if it were evil” (–; emphasis added). Gudrun represents the tension between the warrior ethos of Germanic culture and the emerging Christian ethic, and her own suicide is the product of her in262



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ability to reconcile these conflicting imperatives. The Young Man’s ecstatic and defiant speech seems to her, however, so impossibly at odds with human nature that it is, in this quite precise signification, “evil.” Yet at the same time Jeffers does not disavow it, nor does he deny his Young Man his rejection of a God who has “no righteousness, / No mercy, no love.” Jeffers’ Young Man is, finally, humanity itself, or, as we might more exactly say, the human perspective personified in its aspect of antagonism and difference. For this reason, he is not limited to the figure of Christ, although he incorporates him and appears to others as him (“this easterner”). More fully, we might say he is the archetypal Son, confronted by but refusing to yield to the Oedipal splendor of the Father. This distinction too, however, must seemingly give way before Jeffers’ monism, at least on an intellectual level. The fully revealed divinity of the Self-Hanged God is the undivided All, an ontological unity in which the distinction between creator and creation continually collapses back onto itself and is maintained, even for the Godhood itself, only by the perpetual exertion that is its “pain.” The terrain of the sublime seems finally collapsed here, the systole of divine activity to be answered by the diastole of creaturely praise, as the only response that creation can make to its creator. If the sublime as such is not to be negated in the revelation of ontological unity and oneness, its ultimate term, undisclosed till now, is resistance. The Godhood is not literally to be withstood, of course, since its power alone exists; nor is it to be rejected, since its essence is alone conceivable. Yet something is withheld within it, and this something is what is indicated by the Young Man’s clenched assertion that he has “never hated [the Father] . . . before this time.” If we follow Jeffers’ monism to its logical conclusion, it must appear to us that this ‘hatred’ is an aspect of divine self-withholding, and perhaps the keenest of its self-inflicted wounds. The Young Man’s destiny, as he finally perceives it, is precisely to hate the Father; it is for this that he was created, and all his long yearning is but the spasm of a great revulsion. Man himself, that is, is created as God’s adversary, and his aspiration towards him is only to climb the summit of his hatred. Put another way, man’s love of God—of which he alone is capable, since his praise alone is voluntary—is the precondition of his hate. Insofar as man be regarded as an element of the cosmic order, this hatred may be construed as the embedded natural consciousness of its separation from divinity, the reaction of the cosmos to its own finitude. But this is philosophy; and Jeffers is a poet. For him, the dramatic perspective must be final: what is embodied in man must be displayed in man. The Jeffersian Son is condemned to rebel forever against the Father. 263

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VII In the sublime as configured in “At the Birth of an Age,” the divine essence continually pours itself into creation by means of an exertion that, depending on perspective, appears as “pain,” “strain,” “torture,” or, as we have more generally called it, natural process. Since this process is seamless, indivisible, and perpetual (“I know not that I shall cease”), it is also reciprocal, as substance ‘answers’ to the terms of its continuous creation with what Jeffers variously calls “suffering,” “praise,” or, in the most extreme and paradoxical case, opposition. This is the case of man, in whom sentient consciousness, an attribute of all matter, achieves reflective and intellectual form. On the stage of the sublime, this consciousness takes the form of ontological awareness of the fundamental condition of creaturely existence, namely, individuation and contingency. One is a kind, a this-and-not-that, and, within this stipulation, an individual, an Iand-not-you. But this consciousness can only be realized in terms of the divine unity against which it exists. The beauty and terror of the sublime threatens to overwhelm the individual subject, and provokes an oppositional awareness, a self-affirmation that, powerless to affect its own contingency, takes the only form of resistance available to the subject: a withholding of the assent and praise that arises spontaneously from creation, even in the accents of its agony.28 This resistance takes the form, affectively, of hatred, although of course such a response can exist, too, only within divine permission, and as part of the divine agon. It is here where Jeffers leaves his Young Man in “At the Birth of an Age,” who after declaring his hatred of the Father falls silent as Gudrun and the Singers continue their hymn of praise. The archetypal Son cannot quit the stage of the sublime as long as he is bidden to remain on it, but he can and does renounce his quest for the Father, his yearning to be at one with him. Henceforth, his existence will be a rebuke to the Godhead, albeit a rebuke it accepts to itself. Consequently, too, the sublime will be a scene of divine self-exposure in which something other than praise is engendered. Is it the tincture of regret that divine agency feels in the self-immolating, self-extensive act of creation? “Heautontimoroumenos repents,” Barclay says at the end of “The Women at Point Sur” (CP : ), referring to the Greek term for the voluntarily suffering God. Is that ‘repentance’ a part of the divine praxis itself, or the germ of cyclic process by which creation is reabsorbed and re-emitted from the “black crystal” of annihilation (“Night,” CP : –)? Jeffers does not permit us to unpack the 264



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phrase. What is left is the unresolved tension between creation and decreation that lies behind his conception of the sublime.29 Between “The Women at Point Sur” and “At the Birth of an Age,” Jeffers wrote several major narratives in which the father-son conflict featured prominently if not determinatively, and which in each case involved the death of the son. These included “Cawdor,” “Thurso’s Landing,” “Margrave,” and “Give Your Heart to the Hawks.” The theme would continue to resonate in later narratives, too, including “Such Counsels You Gave to Me” and “The Love and the Hate,” and find a final transformation in Jeffers’ last completed narrative, “Hungerfield.” It would be repetitious beyond necessity to explore these works in detail, and the reader may be referred to my earlier commentary on them.30 We may look at them selectively, however, to reinforce our discussion of the sacrificial son and its implications for Jeffers’ construction of the sublime. In “Cawdor,” the young wife of the title character conceives a passion for her son-in-law, Hood. The elder Cawdor, believing himself deceived, slays him on a site of natural grandeur, the Rock, whose eminence dominates the landscape. The Young Man of “The Alpine Christ” also appears on a height, as does the Young Man of “At the Birth of an Age,” who is glimpsed at the beginning of the theophanic scene “standing on a rock” above Gudrun (CP : ). Hood Cawdor does not keep his purchase; he is flung to his death and lies disfigured among the boulders below, “his broken shoulders / Bulging his coat in lumps the starlight regarded.” The ‘witness’ of the stars makes this a liminal scene, and the image is intensified as Jeffers describes how the “spilth” of Hood’s skull lies under “the cold star-gleam” (CJ : ). This is a site of sacrifice even more unredeemed than Golgotha, whose victim, neither aspiring toward the Father from the Cross nor hanged in archetypal imitation of him, is merely an exposed carcass, “its gray and white jellies / Flung on the stones like liquor from a broken flask, / Mixed with some streamers of blood.” In “Thurso’s Landing,” the cable and skip that Reave Thurso decides to cut down from the canyon are an ambiguous symbol. From one point of view, they are a blighted patrimony that represents not only the failure of his father’s business but his unexplained suicide; from another, they are an overmastering presence that has withstood storm and earthquake to become part of the landscape, an aspect of fate and an emblem of Oedipal judgment. Do they represent (in our terms) a threshold of the sublime, or a barrier to it? For Reave, they are simply an eyesore and a reminder of shame, but the recoil that strikes “at the 265

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loins” and leaves him paralyzed from the waist down is condign punishment. In effect, his Oedipal transgression has left him crucified, not vertically but horizontally. Disdaining opiates despite unremitting pain, and, even more, the suicide that would equate him with his father, Reave makes a project of his condition. In the lines we have previously quoted: Pain is the solidest thing in the world, it has hard edges, I think it has a shape and might be handled, Like a rock worn with flat sides and edges, harder than rock, but Like love it can hardly last more than fifty years. ()

Reave’s decision that pain will be his life puts us in mind, of course, of the Self-Hanged God. This is not an Imitatio Dei in the sense of a voluntary sacrifice such as martyrs and mystics might make, because Reave dismisses the idea of a God to whom such a sacrifice would be acceptable. Instead, he imagines an empty surround “with no good in it / Except the courage in us not to be beaten” (). Reave, that is to say, rejects both sacrifice and sonship. There is no one beyond himself to valorize his pain, no one to whom he can offer it, and no purpose in it but a wilful act of self-creation; by making his pain voluntary, he becomes, as Jesus says in “Dear Judas,” the “chisel” that cuts his own flesh (CP : ). Paradoxically, this is the precondition of the truest Imitatio Dei, in which the very denial of its divine prototype effects the closest approximation to it. With the Hanged God of “At the Birth of an Age,” Reave asserts that “I am the nerve, I am the agony / I am the endurance” (CP : ). His only will is to endure, to prolong agony to the last breath. It is Reave’s very rejection, or in Jeffersian terms his unawareness of divine presence, that brings him close to the Hanged God’s agon. He thus exemplifies what Jeffers means when he declares man to be the “ape” or the “dupe” of God; that is, the deceived and unwitting mimic. The Jesus of “Dear Judas” finds in this the final reckoning of human destiny and the Imitatio Dei: Dear Judas, it is God drives us. It is not shameful to be duped by God. I have known his glory in my lifetime, I have been his glory, I know Beyond illusion the enormous beauty of the torch in which our agonies and all are particles of fire. (CP : )

Jesus here appears to accept the conditions of sacrifice, the terms on which it has been exacted, and the vision of excellence that is its seeming reward. The 266

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Young Man of “At the Birth of an Age,” with a more detached and clarified vision, rejects the mercilessness that manifest Godhood reveals. Reave Thurso more nearly embodies the divine agon than either of these figures, but he does so from a stance that rejects divinity altogether. His embrace of pain is actually a negation of existence, at least from any humanly tolerable perspective, and his mercy killing by his wife, Helen (itself an ambiguous gesture which reveals as much hatred as love) is the only dramatically possible resolution of his story. ‘Love’ and ‘hate’ were, as we have seen, Jeffers’ Empedoclean metaphor not only for the extremes of human responsiveness, but of the cosmic cycle as such, with its alternating rhythms of creation and dissolution. This latter was typically gendered, with the creative phase being figured as male and paternal, and the recuperative one as female and maternal. For Jeffers’ monist deity, these elements were only different aspects of an ineffable and indivisible entity, and the cosmos itself a unitary, vitalist organism. But human cognition could not avoid dualistic categories, human experience could not be framed without differentiation and finitude, and humanity could not be brought to the full consciousness of divinity without engendering antagonism and rebellion. In other words, man could not love God without hating him. This was the paradox of the Christological sublime. It was thus perhaps fitting that Jeffers should entitle the last of his narratives of Oedipal opposition, and the last with an overtly Christological subtext, “The Love and the Hate.” The setting is World War II, a conflict which, as we shall see in our next chapter, Jeffers intensely opposed, and in which one of his own sons fought. Young Hoult Gore, prodded to enlist by his jingoistic father although under age, is killed in combat in the Pacific. Like many of Jeffers’ characters—the list includes the Young Man in both “The Alpine Christ” and “At the Birth of an Age,” Agamemnon in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” Edward Barclay in “The Women at Point Sur,” Old Martial and Hood Cawdor (as well as the caged eagle) in “Cawdor,” the entire cast of “Dear Judas,” several of the personae in the cycle, “Descent to the Dead,” Achilles and his myrmidons in “At the Fall of an Age,” and Carson Pierce in the short mid-period narrative “Resurrection”—Hoult possesses post-mortem consciousness; like Carson, he returns from the grave.31 Carson’s account of this is elaborate (CP : –), but Hoult is short and to the point: I was killed on Meserole Island twenty days ago. I lay in the shade and watched myself swell Until they found and buried me, but after that

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What Hoult ‘remembers’ is the life he was cheated out of by his father’s talk of honor, and the unresolved maternal attachment he shares with Orestes, Edward Barclay, and Howard Howren in “Such Counsels You Gave to Me.” His bitterness is exacerbated by the discovery that his mother, Reine, has taken a friend his own age, Dave Larson, as a lover. Hoult’s generalized rage, which symbolizes that of an entire generation of sons duped, like that of the Great War, into meaningless sacrifice, focuses itself on Oedipal retribution. We may note that in Jeffers’ previous dramatic depictions of Christ, actual resurrection does not occur.32 The Jesus of “Dear Judas” returns nightly to relive the scene of his passion, but he does not transcend it. The Young Man of “At the Birth of an Age” finds himself in a posthumous state, but not a privileged one: he is only one figure among many, on whom he cannot act and with whom he cannot intelligibly converse. Far from having to salvation to offer, he descries only an infinite void in which death is the sole reality and dissolution the common destiny (CP : –). We are meant, however, to regard Hoult Gore as literally resurrected, and by his own will: “There are millions and millions,” he tells Reine, “but as far as I know I am the only one / That has come back” (CP : ). Hoult’s immediate reference is to the war dead, but, as the shadows of slain comrades gather around the farmstead, he widens his implication. “They come to watch us,” Hoult explains, Because—as a matter of fact—I am the only dead body that has had the energy to get up again Since Jesus Christ. His whip was love, they say. Mine— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . fury. ()

Hoult thus presents himself in the guise of an Antichrist. His identity is intuited by the serving-girl Jesusa, whose name the family has Anglicized to ‘Hazel,’ and who silently flees the household. When Reine expresses her own incredulity, he bares his wounds and forces her to play the role of Doubting Thomas, sinking her hand into his body cavity in a scene of surpassing horror: She came like a sleepwalker feeling her way, Wide sightless eyes, and laid her hand on the purulent

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Lips of the wound. He said, “Deeper,” she slipped Her hand into the hollow, this lung was gone, she felt the dreadful Fever of his body, and the heart flapping and leaping In its wet sheaths, and the shudder of the diaphragm. He breathed like a running dog, saying, “Deeper, deeper. Oh, You’re near me now.” ()

Later, Hoult turns dinner into a parody of the Last Supper, bringing not life but death: Now it is comic. Take it in remembrance of me. This is my body That was broken for nothing. Drink it: this is my blood That was spilled for no need. (–)

Nothing remains but the enactment of vengeance. Hoult picks off Dave Larson with his rifle, and then turns it on his father, who, riding to protect his cattle from a sudden fire, is hit, as Hoult exults, “right in the string of the back. Right in the loins” (). Thrown from the saddle in the face of the advancing blaze, the elder Gore drags himself forward as Hoult disinterestedly observes his futile, agonized progress: Poor old worm, the race is fixed. You cannot win it. I don’t hate him at all, it’s justice. ()

This scene inverts two previous ones of filial sacrifice. When Reave Thurso is struck by his father’s cable, he too attempts to crawl forward, “His belly and legs flat to the ground, his head / Lifted” (CP : ). Similarly, Hoult’s declaration that “justice” has been served echoes the elder Cawdor’s response to his son Hood’s death: “Justice. Justice. Justice” (: ). The fire itself assumes an apocalyptic character. Hoult declares that God has sent it even as he has “lined the sights” of his gun, and a red-tailed hawk, drawn to the flames, is seen plunging into them. Here, as well, the scene from “Fire on the Hills” is brought to mind, where the eagle perches on a burnt pine, awaiting its prey. The eagle, as we will recall from our earlier discussion, is figured in that poem as a divine manifestation, aloof from the destruction it symbolizes; but the hawk in “The Love and the Hate” enters the more universal conflagration in which nothing is spared, and no symbol or witness remains. Hoult has a vision of his own, but it is one of pure negation: “No distinction, no difference, no rank, no relation, no end, nothing but infamy” (: ). What he imagines is a universal soup of death in which all, warmakers and war victims, are drowned and decomposed, but the horror that lies beyond even 269

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this is deindividuation, the resumption of all created existence into the primal matrix, the monistic absolutism of God. Hoult can slay the earthly father, but not the divine one whose deadly intent is implicit in the first act of creation (“I know not that I shall choose to cease”). This is the Son’s eternal protest against the Father, the fact that as the subject of creation he is barred forever from succession, and is merely the object of death. Such consciousness is intolerable, and although derived (like everything else) from divine consciousness, is irreconcilable with it. Once again, the divine paradox asserts itself: if to discover God to the fullest extent possible to creaturely consciousness is to love him, it is also to realize oneself as victim and sacrifice, and therefore to hate him as well. In a discarded draft for the poem, Hoult declares, “I am the Resurrection and the Death”; that is, the resurrection that brings death (CP : ). This is another figuration of himself as the Antichrist, but at a deeper level it is the expression of the fundamental paradox of the Son’s condition. Even if the Son can overcome death in his own person, he is inefficacious for others. In “The Alpine Christ,” Manuel discovers, beyond the death even of the heavenly father, the impassable barrier of Fate. In “At the Birth of an Age,” the Young Man tells his disciples, “You are dead; your lives are finished; there is nothing more. / . . . / There is nothing good after death” (CP : ). For both Manuel and the Young Man, love must be the consolation. Manuel declares that love . . . is the need that beggars Fate, and crowns With glory and deathless calling the weak hearts And mortal, of mankind. This is the light, Which lacking, all were darkness, this the beauty, Touch of whose flowery and starry wand transforms The lump of its own likeness:—so divine And so required is love. (AC )

Similarly, the Young Man discovers that Out of huge delusion My truth is born. It has nothing to do with the dead; I loved the living and taught them to love each other. Even now on earth my love makes war upon death and misery, not like a sword, like a young seed, And not men’s souls, but far down the terrible fertile future their children, changed and saved by love, May build the beauty of an earthly heaven on all our dead anguishes, and living inherit it. (CP : )

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Both Manuel and the Young Man assert the imperative of human love as a consequence of the discovery that it exists nowhere else. After the death of God the Father, Manuel perceives only “the purposeless eternity of power” in a material, mechanical universe; contrariwise, it is the very revelation of divine purpose in the Hanged God that repels the Young Man, with its vision of a “terrible fertile future.” Without connection to divine love, human love is ultimately a counsel of despair, and the Young Man’s vision of an “earthly heaven” is a delusion even more “huge” than his former belief in a divine one, as first the Great War of – and then the even greater one of – would make clear. Hoult Gore is Jeffers’ ultimate personification of the victims of these wars, the “only one” who has come back from the grave to testify for the rest, and to seek what vengeance and satisfaction he can. Hoult imagines an army of corpses marching on Washington to bring the warmongers to account (: ; see below, Chapter 6), but his revenge will be limited in fact to killing his father and his Oedipal rival, Dave Larson. Hoult’s attitude toward his father is actually complex, and his killing of Larson is not merely a punishment of Reine but, on some level, a defense of the elder Gore’s honor. With both of Reine’s lovers dispatched, however, he spends his last strength on his ultimate goal, the lovedeath possession of Reine herself. Like many of Jeffers’ heroes, and like his Christ figures as well, Hoult expresses a radical disgust with the terms of life. This takes the form of a desire to negate existence by a return to the mother that is at the same time an Oedipal supersession of the father. It is, in short, an act of revenge on both his progenitors, but one paid for by his own death. The pathos of Hoult’s character—the quality that makes him humanly sympathetic—is that he has been denied his majority, and the ordinary consolations of life and love that youth may expect. Reine will be his only lover, and in her he will achieve neither temporal succession nor Oedipal regression, but final extinction. The act of love is literally coincident with death; as the maddened Reine describes it, just before her own suicide: kind, kind: we must be kind. He melted into horror, his brains ran out Through his nostrils: how could someone long dead Be alive from there down? ()

Jeffers’ last completed narrative, “Hungerfield” (CP : –), may be considered a coda to our examination of the sacrificial son. Hawl Hungerfield, a 271

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rancher in his fifties, has neither father nor son, but, as a veteran of both world wars, may be said to embody the experience of both in his own person. As a wounded soldier in World War I, he had repelled a personified Death by sheer force of will, and now, when Death comes again for his aged mother, Alcmena, he determines to fight him a second time, and is again temporarily victorious. Alcmena, however, is ready to die, and sees Death as the “bridegroom” her son has denied her (). Calamity ensues from this interruption of the natural order, and, as in “Tamar” and “The Love and the Hate,” the entire household perishes. For our purposes, however, Hungerfield represents a throwback to Jeffers’ earliest perspective. As Jeffers had been unable to accept his father’s death in “The Year of Mourning” and “The Alpine Christ,” so Hungerfield rejects the ‘natural’ passing of an aged parent, and with it the terms of life. Death appears here as the embodiment of the Fate whose dominion encompasses even the paternal divinity of “The Alpine Christ,” and who is represented, like the Hanged God, “in human form, handsome and arrogant” (). Just as Fate is intolerable only from a human perspective, so, too, the personified Death of “Hungerfield,” culling the living at pleasure, is “nothing horrible; it was only absolute power / Taking its own” (ibid.). No one but Hungerfield thinks of resisting him, as the Young Man alone in “At the Birth of an Age” refuses submission and praise before the Hanged God, and declares his hatred instead. Thus, the Son finds himself in a posture of eternal negation, and it is in this, perhaps, that his sacrifice most truly consists.33

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I We have thus far considered Jeffers’ construction of the American sublime under two principal aspects: as a privileged mode of access to the divine through the experience of natural grandeur, and as Oedipal praxis. The latter appeared as a condition of the former, since, in Jeffers’ reading of the Western mode of experience, the perception of divinity was bound up with a dialectic in which the earthly father had to be negated to affirm the immanent God within and beyond phenomena. This dialectic was, in turn, the ground of human drama and conflict through which alone tragic, subjective consciousness could be forged, and the divine relation realized. We must now more closely consider a third aspect of our native sublime, however, the idea of America as a redeemer nation destined to give light to the world. In its Puritan incarnation, it represented a great collective enterprise composed of a myriad of self-enlightened, self-motivated individuals.1 This conception was sublimated into but hardly effaced by the secular republic created by the founding fathers. It manifested itself in the unresolved polarities of the American experience, at once materialist and millennialist. These in turn were reflected in a tension between personal virtue and the national aggrandizement of what the English republican James Harrington felicitously termed “a commonwealth for increase.”2 On a political level, the dilemma of virtue and commerce was played out in the conflict between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles, although the doctrines of each were at least partly receptive to those of the other, and Jeffersonianism would prove readily enough adaptable to imperial expansion. In the national literature that emerged in the nineteenth century, the two camps were represented most distinctively by Emerson and Thoreau. At the same time, however, there was a third response, seen first in Hawthorne, and, more profoundly, in Melville. Hawthorne, the Jeffersonian skeptic, saw in the idealized 273

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agrarian community the breeding-ground of hypocrisy and vice, while Melville perceived the modern commercial metropolis as a Dantesque inferno in which the individual was crushed and destroyed. The question of the democratic community becomes particularly acute in Melville, who in Moby Dick offered a paradigmatic representation of the American sublime. Melville’s early novels of romance fantasized a primitive Eden as an implicit refuge from urban anomie. In his later work, the vein of Orientalism exhausted, he posited the enforced despotism of the sailing vessel as the only alternative to the hellish underworld of the great city, New York in Pierre and London in Israel Potter, or the even more infernal anarchy of the steamboat in The Confidence Man. In maritime or naval life, the worst fate was shipwreck and drowning—a deadly, but at the same time a shared and common destiny. In the London of Israel Potter, however, Melville’s “City of Dis,” an ultimate solitude awaited, for here, as Melville wrote, “an ocean rolled between man and man.”3 The mid-nineteenth century thus represented, in Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, the Emerson of “Fate,” the internment fantasies of Poe, and even in James Fennimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the first crisis of American literature. Even Whitmanian expansiveness contained its hysterical undertone, and its forebodings of cosmic dissolution. America’s literary crisis was inseparable from the unfolding political crisis of the Union. It is impossible, I think, to read “Fate” () without sensing the distress of the abolitionist Emerson, and the agony of Whitman’s and Melville’s Civil War battle pieces speak for themselves. They suffered for the human loss, but in Whitman’s case also for the prophetic vision of a continental and worldbestriding America. This vision, the bearer now, via Emerson, of the Puritan faith in American exceptionalism, was bound up with the new creed of democracy to which Whitman had given such decisive expression in Leaves of Grass. The threat to this vision—a sacramentalized People giving light to the nations, by example when possible and by force when necessary—was the core of Whitman’s concern, and indeed of his identity, since, with characteristic abandon (the “enthusiasm” of his Puritan predecessors) he had embraced it with the whole of himself. For the Union to dissolve would be for the People to dissolve, and such a calamity was inseparable from personal dissolution for the prophet who had taken them to his breast.4 Whitman’s vision, and the imperializing instinct behind it, was nowhere better expressed than in the “Birds of Passage” section of Leaves of Grass: 274



Democratic Vistas O you youths, Western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers, O pioneers! Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers, O pioneers! All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers, O pioneers!5

The success of Northern arms assured the Union even as it divided our literature, launching a new civil war that played out in Faulkner and beyond. The City was equally triumphant, the protests of a Dreiser notwithstanding. During the Gilded Age, the contest between virtue and commerce appeared to have been decided. The commonwealth for increase had won, and America’s imperial destiny seemed set. The notion of a providentialist America had not yet disappeared, however; indeed, as Whitman had foretold, it was more essential than ever. Thoreau and Hawthorne had died during the Civil War; Emerson was silenced by failing powers; and Melville would break a self-imposed silence only at the end of his life to describe the tragedy not of a ‘Western youth,’ but of a Briton. Whitman alone remained to speak for the heroic generation, his certitudes renewed but with a new shadow of doubt on them. His book of prophecy was Democratic Vistas, and in it he declared that “What Christ appear’d for in the moralspiritual field for human-kind,” namely, the transcendent equality of all souls, democracy fulfilled on the political level that was inseparable from it, as the “general caller-forth . . . not for grand material personalities only, but for immortal souls” (). Mere “grand material personalities,” like the mere form of democracy, could not assure America’s fulfillment of its destiny. The States had, it was true, overcome the twin evils of “secession and slavery” that had once threatened them, and emerged to affirm the democratic ideal beyond the hopes of its fondest spokesmen (, ). As long as they remained true to this ideal and strove daily to realize it in thought and action, the nation’s future was unlimited: 275

Democratic Vistas Long ere our second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba. When the present century closes, our population will be sixty or seventy millions. The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, gloriously led, or ever can lead. ()

Writing thus in the late s, Whitman at once revives the old dream of the war hawks of  for dominion over Canada and anticipates the annexationist claims of the Spanish-American War, not merely for Cuba but for the Philippines and beyond (“The Pacific will be ours”). It is an imperial fantasy of breathtaking scope, but one dependent on constant spiritual and moral fitness, and on fidelity to the synthesis of Christian and democratic idealism on which the American vision must rest. This difficult task is essentially the task of the imagination, and so of the poet: “The priest departs, the divine literatus comes” (). A fit and thriving literature is the true engine of empire. Whitman suggests some further idea of what this prescription entails: I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism of our current age, our States. But woe to the age or land in which these things, movements, stopping to themselves, do not tend to ideas. As fuel to flame, and flame to the heavens, so must wealth, science, materialism—even this democracy of which we make so much—unerringly feed the highest mind, the soul. Infinitude the flight: fathomless the mystery. Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe, competes with, outcopes space and time, meditating even one great idea. Thus and thus only, does a human being, his spirit, ascend above, and justify, Nature, which, probably nothing in itself, is incredibly and divinely serviceable, indispensable, real, here. ()

Whitman bears here, as elsewhere, the indelible stamp of Emerson. An otherwise vulgar materialism is the fuel of greatness, of empire, if it is infused by a sense of the human project, which is nothing less than to “justify” inhuman nature and valorize it with the human spirit. There is a touchingly innocent unconsciousness in the way Whitman invokes the double sense of ‘tend’ in urging us to be mindful of “ideas,” both as tendency and as nurture: it is almost the Sunday pastor reminding his rich parish not to forget faith, hope, and charity on the weekdays. At the same time, however, the sublime is both evoked and 276



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revoked in the image of man, dilating “beyond the sensible universe” and meditating on the “great idea” which turns out, ultimately, to be himself. Permeated by that idea, Nature, “probably nothing in itself,” fills out with human grandeur, and acquires divine amplitude, reality, and, not least of all, utility. It would be difficult to imagine a vision more at odds with that of Robinson Jeffers.6

II By the early twentieth century, America had fulfilled much if not all of Whitman’s prophecy. It was the world’s leading industrial power; it had the population he had predicted, and nearly the full complement of states. Its navies dominated the Pacific, and its standard had touched down in Asia. Still, the single caveat in this imperial vision remained, for if the Atlantic, unlike the Pacific, was to be only “mainly ours,” then the implicit boundary with the “elder” races of Europe was still recognized. America was a fully engaged competitor of the European powers in Asia, but it held aloof from the alliance system that quartered Europe itself, and would lead in  to general war. Continental America, girded by its oceans, had no direct stake in whether the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were French or German, and no immediate one in whether the world’s second largest navy would be the British or the German one. It watched the looming European war warily; it would certainly be bad for trade, although perhaps good enough for banking. Economic as well as sentimental interests would impel America toward the Allied side, but President Woodrow Wilson’s announcement of military neutrality won general approval. The war would in any case be brief, as virtually all observers agreed; neutrality was not only the prudent policy but, given America’s distance from the fighting and its own unpreparedness for it, the practical one as well. Robinson Jeffers, too, was a neutral. From the beginning, the Great War assumed for him the character of a tragic contest, whose strategic interests and precipitating causes were of no more significance in themselves than those of the Trojan or Napoleonic wars. Adopting, indeed, a Homeric (and Hardyesque) perspective, he was content to attribute the war to supernatural forces. With God’s reluctant assent, the Angel of Death is sent in “The Alpine Christ” to “touch” Francis Ferdinand, thereby provoking it (AC ). The very triviality of the war’s proximate cause—the assassination of a crown prince—may have suggested to Jeffers its transcendentally irrational character. For this reason, 277

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there could be no preference in its outcome, and the combatants on both sides could only be seen as pawns in a theomachic contest. Jeffers depicted himself as quite literally above the fray in the persona of the Young Man, who seeks the father-god on the Alpine heights even as God the Father, in the poem’s allegory, suffers supersession and death. The Young Man’s obsessive quest is such that he can hardly take notice of the carnage about him, let alone take sides in it. Since, moreover, he seeks only the particular death that will reunite him with the father, the game of killing can have no significance for him. With America’s entry into the World War in April , however, Jeffers’ attitude changed. While Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy appealed to him no more than the Treasury Department’s concern to have Allied war debts repaid, and despite being found unfit for active duty, he was eager to serve. The call of blood, especially in one who had brooded so deeply on the war, may simply have been too great. The literature of the Great War is filled with the testimony of those who experienced it; in Jeffers’ case, the inability to do so, except imaginatively, produced a lasting scar of its own.7 The war would remain both the crucible and the lodestar of Jeffers’ mature thought. His epitaph for it, however, was brief: Ten million lives were stolen and not one star Dulled, wars die out, life will die out, death cease, Beauty lives always and the beauty of peace. (“The Truce and the Peace,” CP : )

The war, vast in human perspective, was fleeting in a cosmic one; the ten million lives “stolen,” an unspeakable tragedy as well as a crime—though without a visible or indictable author—likewise receded against the backdrop of man’s final insignificance. To feel its pain and bear the tragedy, while perceiving the larger grandeur in which it was set and by which it would be absorbed, seemed to Jeffers the great and earnest task of poetry in the postwar world. The war also profoundly altered Jeffers’ relationship to his native soil. He was essentially rootless until well into early manhood: born in suburban Pittsburgh and educated in Swiss academies, he moved in his mid-teens to southern California, and took postgraduate studies in Washington State. As we have noted, he planned to take up residence in England until forestalled by the outbreak of the war. Up to this point he had been, like most of his Modernist peers, culturally and intellectually oriented toward Europe. Only with the Old World 278



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cut off did he discover the central California coast, and only gradually did he commit himself to it and find in it the ground of his art. Jeffers experienced the war, as did many others, as a crisis of Western values that sharpened the distinctiveness of the American experiment. At the same time, it brought home to him the fact that the era of American exceptionalism was over, and that the nation’s destiny would henceforth be entwined with the larger forces of history. This was a matter of acknowledgment, but also of resignation. It challenged the native poet to define his nation within the world and not merely against or apart from it, and thereby to forfeit the exemption from time that its encomiasts had implicitly claimed for it. It was true that the founding fathers had deeply pondered the fate of ancient republics; that Thomas Cole had warned of America’s possible fate in The Course of Empire; that Whitman, even in chanting “the new empire grander than any before” (WCPP ), had also brooded on decay and dissolution. But no one before Robinson Jeffers had written a poem such as “Shine, Perishing Republic”: While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, like a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are always the mountains. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth. (CP : )

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This is a relatively early poem of Jeffers’ maturity——and it was written at a moment when American power and prosperity seemed at their zenith. The immediate postwar depression had receded, and the age of the skyscraper had begun. The Dawes plan rearranged the finances of Europe and made clear, a generation before NATO and with a new world war yet to be fought, that America was the Continent’s ultimate master. Jeffers perceived this, and understood that the Great War had cast the die. America had embraced empire in the name of democracy, a project he believed fatal to both. “This” America—a new phenomenon, scarcely recognizable as the descendant of a Jeffersonian republic of thrifty farmers—is first figured in the poem as an industrial process, a “molten mass” that swallows and incorporates all agrarian memory and value, leaving it not even the dignity of remembrance as it suffers dissolution. Jeffers moves quickly to organic imagery, however, suggesting that what seems an all-ingesting monstrosity—“monster” is the ultimate figure of the poem—is in fact merely the middle term of a far larger and more encompassing process, analogous to the great natural cycles that govern all phenomena.8 The agents of empire do indeed act upon history, but not as they think, for they can only make “haste on decay,” accelerating an inevitable process and shortening a season they think to prolong. This is figured in the poem’s central image of a streaking meteor that makes a “mortal splendor”: an artificial and momentary sublime that has, nonetheless, its appointed place in the scheme of things. This ‘splendor’ conceals an underlying “vulgarity,” the full ugliness of which is compressed in the copula “thickening center; corruption” in the poem’s penultimate stanza, with its suggestion of massification and induced decay. And it is only here that Jeffers suggests the practical course for his own protest. If empire’s busy agents can act, so too can his children, founding themselves neither on the corrupted industrial present nor the unrecapturable agrarian past, but on the “mountains,” the ground of landscape itself and hence of access to the sublime. America’s aspiration to empire, which Whitman expressed as the natural succession of a new and vigorous race to an “elder,” implicitly exhausted one, had taken on a different cast with the nation’s involvement in the Great War. For many, the war revealed a far deeper crisis of culture and value than all but a handful of critics—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud—had suspected. Whatever prudential, opportunistic, or ideological considerations lay behind America’s participation in it, the blood taint of the Old World’s decay had crossed the Atlantic, and now infected the New. 280



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Jeffers would hardly have accepted the crudity of Whitman’s distinctions; he looked at America as the bearer rather than the successor of Western culture, and the “corruption” he decried in “Shine, Perishing Republic” was home-bred as well as inherited; in short, it was civilizational in scope, and far more broadly cyclical than the fate of any individual nation: . . . our Pacific has pastured The Mediterranean torch and passed it west across the fountains of the morning; And the following desolation that feeds on Crete Feed[s] here . . . (“The Cycle,” CP : )

At the same time, however, the Great War had both sharpened Jeffers’ sense of the Western crisis and made it more personally intimate, a corruption close enough to be smelled: This is the breath of rottenness I smelt; from the world waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little, Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath. (“Meditation on Saviors,” CP : –). You are tired and corrupt, You kept the beast under till the fountain’s poisoned, He drips with mange and stinks through the oubliette window. The promise-breaker war killed whom it freed And none living’s the cleaner. (“The Women at Point Sur,”CP : ).

These summary observations epitomize Jeffers’ assessment of the Great War itself, and the postwar situation. The “beast” kept under was a decadent culture craving violent release; the war that promised this release offered only death to its victims, and disillusionment to its survivors. That was not all, however, for the beast’s thirst for blood—the essential characteristic of a civilization in decline—was, once aroused, not soon to be slaked. A new war was inevitable, and perhaps, as Nietzsche had foretold, an era of “monstrous” wars. The postwar moment was merely a hiatus; but it was not a passive one. The coming “blood-bath,” horrific but now unavoidable, would spawn its Caesar, a false ‘savior’ but one already longed for. Purgation through violence—the ‘promise’ the Great War had broken—had left only violence itself, and the task of managing it would fall to a new age of tyrants. This perception was the context of “The Women at Point Sur,” in which the Reverend Barclay served as the lightning-rod for the psychic violence that had 281

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pooled even on the distant California coast. Barclay’s incitement of this violence was a recognition that the crumbling Christian order had to be destroyed and its commandments revoked; his own flawed vision did not permit him to perceive that he was merely an agent of that process, not the harbinger of renewal. The age of Caesars would have to supervene before a new order could be conceived. Jeffers spelled this out more fully in “The Broken Balance” (CP : –), a poem written shortly after “Meditation on Saviors” and most fruitfully read in conjunction with it. The poem’s seven sections proceed from the prophecy of a new age to the anticipation of a final one, and the posthuman future beyond it. It begins with a passage from Plutarch’s life of Sulla which recounts the mysterious trumpet-blast that presaged the fall of Etruria and the triumph of Rome. Sulla himself was, of course, the patrician general, famous for his bloody proscriptions, who seized control of Rome itself during the final decades of the republic. The poet hears such a blast, both “shrill and mournful,” and understands that another historical epoch is passing: It was hard to be wise. . . . You must eat change and endure, not be much troubled For the people; they will have their happiness. When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry it; When life grows hateful, there’s power . . .

The trumpet’s authority brooks no contradiction: if its pronouncement is difficult to accept, it is impossible to misinterpret and futile to resist. This is not political quietism or civic abnegation, nor is it submission to prophecy (prophets mislead). It is a kind of wisdom lost on moderns, who recognize no reality save that which they produce and consequently bend to their will. The ancients, Jeffers suggests, were wiser in accepting limits, even if they did so by such crude means as searching for signs in the heavens or reading entrails. No epoch can be final save that which terminates the human race itself, and that termination is implicit in the cycles of history of which human experience consists. The poet cannot “mourn” this latter end any more than he can lament the cosmic cycles of extinction and renewal which contain it; what he can pity is his local habitation, his own age, for it is that in which he is contained. This idea undergoes a complex, dual development. The “people,” Jeffers concludes, are not to be pitied, for “they will have their happiness,” that is, their portion, not as individuals but as clients of a more or less benevolent Caesar. It might seem a contradiction that happiness can be maintained and perhaps 282

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even increased in a time of warfare and general decline—Jeffers means material comfort and security, of course—but this is the bargain Caesar offers, and can even for a time keep. What is lost is personhood. Jeffers develops this point in the poem’s second section (“To the Children”): Power’s good; life is not always good but power’s good. So you must think when abundance Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough. The steep singleness of passion Dies; they will say, “What was that?” but the power triumphs. Loveliness will live under glass And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains. There is beauty in power also. You children must widen your minds’ eyes to take mountains Instead of faces, and millions Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power After the lone hawk’s dead.

“Power,” “dough,” and “passion” are the critical terms in this passage. Passion is “a steep singleness,” that is, the product of an intense individuality that suggests the swoop of a predator who is personified as the ‘lone hawk’ of the last line. Such passion is asocial, but it is necessary and revivifying to society when it occurs as tragedy, the harsh corrective to norms that should never be too well obeyed and the creative violence that keeps human possibility open. As it disappears, individuals become integers (“pawns”), and soon the mere “dough” of which an undifferentiated whole consists, an image which returns us to the “molten mass” in “Shine, Perishing Republic.” Such a mass is not inert, however; it supports power. Our common conception is that power is neither good nor bad in itself, but to be judged by its fruits. Universal power, as we recall, is universal value for Jeffers; but when he says, and repeats, that power in a public context is to be regarded as “good” and even beautiful, the irony is transparent, and the starkest contrast intended. Divine power is the most concentrated will conceivable; it is the ultimate passion, and steeply “single” in the strongest sense. What Jeffers qualifies in the section’s penultimate line as “massed power” is of a very different sort. It represents not an individual but a collective will, a will paradoxically intent not on acting but on being acted for. Caesar is not its master but its servant; his commands are the echo of its wish. Massed power is essentially power without locus, and therefore without true intent and responsibility. Such power can have no moral basis and 283

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no moral outcome; it can only accede to the lowest common denominator of interest, in this case mindless prosperity and ease. For Jeffers, this was the very opposite of what he understood by the democracy whose passing he had lamented in “Shine, Perishing Republic.” He made this point unmistakably clear in a sequel poem of the s, “Shine, Republic”: The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining; of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man. There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord, its dangerous beauty binding three ages Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but never quenched it. For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery; But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man. And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom. You did not say “en masse,” you said “independence.” But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also. Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel. You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar. But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep the spot sore. Be great, carve deep your heel-marks. The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury. (CP : )

Jeffers is very direct here. Freedom is the core Western value, but, more than a value, it is a “passion,” that is, an activity that requires sacrifice. It is collectively defended but not collectively owned; each individual must affirm it. We are once again reminded of the stubborn Protestantism of Jeffers’ heritage, and Luther, whose own personal affirmation—freedom of conscience—was the founding act of what the Reformed tradition liked to call “Christian liberty,” is surely no casual exemplar. But Luther himself is a late figure in a tradition that 284



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Jeffers traces back to Aeschylus, who both fought at Marathon, in Jeffers’ genealogy the founding moment of Western freedom, and created the tragic drama. Freedom and tragedy, as we have seen, are inseparable for Jeffers, and the tragic choice is the ultimate assertion of liberty. This assertion may be deeply misguided and destructive, as it often is for Jeffers’ heroes, for when freedom is conflated with will, measure is lost; but the tragic illumination that results has value nonetheless, and, as Jeffers asserts, “splendor” too. Freedom, in short, is the distinctive Western value; but it is not an absolute one, for it can be abused like any other behavior. Tragedy, indeed, is precisely the device by which the West applies corrections to itself, and Aeschylus himself offers in the atoning figure of Orestes the hero who, by suffering ritual purgation, cleanses both the free man and the free community of the transgressive excess that affirms the common value. Tacitus and Washington may also be viewed as paired figures: the Roman historian who laments the death of the free republic and castigates imperial rule, and the taciturn liberator who, offered a crown, declines it in the name of liberty. Freedom of conscience, as Luther and Tacitus suggest, is possible under any circumstance, provided one is willing to pay the price; but political freedom can exist only under a republic, or at least a constitutional regime. Such freedom, however, may be severely qualified or even effectively denied except to a privileged elite. Egalitarian freedom is possible only in a democracy—Whitman’s value, and Jeffers’ no less. It is at this point, however, that Jeffers suggests the paradoxical nature of democratic governance. Where all are free, freedom may deny itself. A democratic citizenry can maintain its character only if each person maintains his or her individual independence, a condition to which modern urban life, with its economic dependency and bureaucratic control, is fundamentally inimical. “You did not say ‘en masse,’ Jeffers apostrophizes his countrymen, “you said ‘independence.’” Massification—Jeffers’ choice of terms is, as usual, tellingly precise—is the condition toward which modern man tends. This is a condition in which all think and feel alike; that is, do not think and do not feel. The lines we have quoted previously are again apposite: Broad wagons before sunrise bring food into the city from the open farms, and the people are fed. They import and they consume reality. Before sunrise a hawk in the desert made them their thoughts.

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In this brief, self-contained section from “Meditation on Saviors” (V), Jeffers epitomizes the modern condition. The “broad” wagons and “open” farms suggest amplitude and abundance in contrast to the constricted spaces of the city, but a troubling emptiness, too (what kind of farm is “open”?). The people are fed, but it is not clear that what they eat is nourishing rather than merely sustaining. They import and consume “reality”—another nebulous quantity— but do not produce it; indeed, since “reality” subsumes everything while specifying nothing, they produce nothing at all, not even their thoughts. The desert “hawk” that provides these latter is an ambiguous symbol (perhaps a failed savior?), but the image is further refracted in the ‘lone hawk’ of “The Broken Balance,” whose death marks the definitive failure of civilization and the ultimate extinction of personality. The entire passage suggests a sterility in which agrarian fecundity—the Jeffersonian basis of the free community—is blighted by subservience to the parasitic city, and both, yoked together, are destined to perish as one. That concentrated urban populations can no longer think or act for themselves does not mean that they are inert; indeed, they become ever more febrile. The great cities glitter with an inner decay, just as their nighttime lights mimic while obscuring the stellar galaxies. In “The Purse-Seine” (), Jeffers draws an analogy between the phosphorescent shoals of fish whose gleam reveals them to the nets of the Monterey fishing fleet, and the brilliance of the distant city, awaiting its own fate. The fish, knowing themselves caught, thrash wildly in the net, beating the water “to a pool of flame.” The scene is beautiful “and a little terrible,” and just so is the shining city, also “beautiful . . . and a little terrible” as its own invisible nets close about it: I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. (CP : )

Jeffers does not anticipate immediate collapse, but the die, he asserts, is cast. The powers of government will inexorably expand and the domain of liberty shrink; the alternative to that is revolution which expands such powers even further; and, to that, anarchy and dissolution, the final ‘mass-disaster’ (ibid.). 286



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“The Purse-Seine” crystallized the fragmentary but persistent antiurban strain in Jeffers’ thought. Antiurbanism had been, of course, deeply embedded in the Romantic tradition from Blake and Wordsworth on. We have noted it in Melville, and, with his French contemporary, Baudelaire, it became a major trope in Western literature. Sometimes an object of fascination, sometimes of horror, sometimes of both, the expanding city, with its ever-increasing claim on the resources of the countryside, was the dominant fact of modern civilization. The city’s critics were divided among those who observed it from within, such as Baudelaire, Biely, and Eliot, and those who judged from afar. Suburban-born and in part city-bred, Jeffers was not immediately one of the latter, although his taste for solitude was evident early and his childhood experience of the Swiss Alps left an abiding impression. He was still leading a rather unfocused and bohemian life when he discovered Big Sur, and the recollected response to it we have noted—“I could see people living . . . essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca”9—was, certainly, a selfconscious wish to will away the “ephemeral accretions” of modern urban life. Similarly, his decision to build Hawk Tower, his stone refuge, placed him in the company of such antimodernist figures as Yeats, Rilke, and Jung, for whom the tower was an essential symbol if not an actual place of residence.10 The city slowly became, for Jeffers, the oppositional image, a Babel tower that sheltered not the lone individual but compressed and confounded the many, and, rising unsustainably, was condemned to fall: the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. (“Summer Holiday,” CP : ) the beautiful power That piles up cities for the poem of their fall . . . (“A Little Scraping,” CP : ) The greatest civilization that has ever existed builds itself higher towers on breaking foundations. (“Night Without Sleep,” : )

Until “The Purse-Seine,” Jeffers’ antiurbanism had been chiefly limited to comments about the “pride” and “arrogance” of cities, which, of course, went proverbially before a fall. “The Purse-Seine,” however, suggested an actual process of collapse. Technological and economic interdependence (“We have geared the machines and locked all together”), the inevitable product of high commercial civilization, had produced and concentrated “vast populations incapable of free survival.” Free was the critical term here. The natural environment was both the basis of survival and the ultimate test of it, for those incapable of liv287

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ing directly from the land were the captives of whatever artificial environment sustained them. The modern city-dweller was not only cut off from “the strong earth,” but “insulated” from it—removed by successive layers of artifice that slowly destroyed the millennia of stored knowledge and skill that made hunting, husbandry, and cultivation possible. This knowledge was recapturable, but not easily, since it required active practice and judgment. Should the artificial environment fail, whether through war, economic crisis, or the degradation of the natural world (examples of which had been obvious in the preceding twenty years), calamity was inevitable, since urban populations were helpless. Jeffers did not expect any immediate crisis to be decisive, nor the final, cumulative crisis to arrive for generations and perhaps centuries, but “the house,” as he had said in “The Broken Balance,” “[was] mined” (CP : ). Jeffers could offer no comfort to those who sought political or economic solutions to the dilemma. Reform was palliative at best; mass revolution would only hasten the process of decay. Jeffers had many friends on the left who sought to enlist his support until he had gently but firmly discouraged them. To James Rorty he wrote that “Of course as a matter of right and justice I sympathize with radicalism” (CL )—a sympathy that did not extend, however, to political commitment and activism. In responding to a query from New Masses, he conjectured that the workers’ struggle would “break moulds, intensify and pervert ideas, force discoveries”: a list remarkably congruent with his own artistic project. But he added, disconcertingly, that “a really new culture could arise only beyond the Lethe of a new dark ages” (ibid., ); and, in “Self-Criticism in February,” he summarized the long, unsuccessful courtship of the left in lines we have previously noticed, and which could brook no misinterpretation: If only you could sing That God is love, or perhaps that social Justice will soon prevail. I can tell lies in prose. (CP : )

What appealed to Jeffers in the workers’ movement was its call for freedom and equality—the freedom of labor itself, and the equality of laborers among themselves. In this might be seen the prospects for a renewed democracy. But, apart from his latent suspicion of any mass movement, Jeffers regarded modern labor as an appendage of the industrial and commercial process, and enmeshed in its destinies. As he wrote in “The Broken Balance”: Men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked Their natures until the souls die in them;

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They have sold themselves for toys and protection: No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys. (CP : )

As often in Jeffers, punctuation is used to create tension, so that there is no resolution in the passage until the final clause with its resounding period: “Men sold for toys.” The workers, no doubt under conditions of oppression, produce these “toys,” and within their means consume them. At the same time they are, even in rebellion, consumers of “protection” as well, since they lack the independent means of self-defense. The abolition of class society cannot, in Jeffers’ view, alleviate this predicament, since the “anthill” includes capital and labor, producers and consumers, all of whom are wedded to an economy of abundance whose premise—that material commodification is the human reward, and its ceaseless multiplication man’s daily bliss—is nowhere challenged. This lies behind his use of the term “people” as a universal signifier for modern society, regardless of class or condition: Uneasy and fractional people, having no center But in the eyes and mouths that surround them, Having no function but to serve and support Civilization, the enemy of man, No wonder they live insanely, and desire With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death. ()

Jeffers reverts to the image of “toys” in one of his bitterest poems of the s, “The Trap”: I am not well civilized, really alien here: trust me not. I can understand the guns and the airplanes, The other conveniences leave me cold. “We must adjust our economics to the new abundance . . .” Of what? Toys: motors, music-boxes, Paper, fine clothes, leisure, diversion. I honestly believe (but really an alien here: trust me not) Blind war, compared to this kind of life, Has nobility, famine has dignity. (CP : )

Jeffers is not here valorizing war in the manner of the pre- Decadents and Futurists, although his view of it remained, as it had been since the Great 289

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War, complex and conflicted. Rather, he describes it in “The Trap” as the worst thing he can think of, except for civilized “abundance.” Clearly, too, he is not commending “famine,” but using the term to suggest that civilized surfeit leads as certainly to death, with the further insult of ignominy—a moral and spiritual death imposed on an ultimately physical one. Famine will be, in any case, the consequence of war, but what is present already, what constitutes the civilized disease, is the peculiar gluttony of modern society, with its force-feeding of commodities. To this, Jeffers opposes a voluntary abstinence. Such abstinence, of the kind that he had suggested for his children in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” begins with a principled withdrawal from society. Withdrawal does not mean disinterest; indeed, it can strengthen, to the point of agony, the sense of the human predicament. The unnamed hero of “A Redeemer” (CP : –), lives alone with his wife in an isolated canyon, where he methodically picks at the deep, raw wounds he has made in his hands, “like stigmata of crucifixion.” Unlike Jesus, to whom he scorns resemblance (“Your little Jew-God?”), he boasts that his pain is voluntary and prolonged—not a brief sojourn on a cross, but a daily sacrifice “to save [the] many.” The narrator who visits him wonders whether he is sane, but remains agnostic on the point (“I searched his face for madness but that / Is often invisible, a subtle spirit”). The ‘Redeemer’ makes clear that his pain is not merely propitiatory, but efficacious in itself, an antidote to pleasure: “I am here on the mountain making / Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms, the lovely blameless children, the terrible / Arrogant cities.” His only fear is of death and of the disaster that must then follow, and he concludes with the Sophoclean refrain: “I wish . . . I had never been born.” The ‘Redeemer’ is unable to redeem himself: a not uncommon fate for Jeffers’ saviors, as we may recall. Nor is withdrawal to the scene of the natural sublime necessarily an escape from the anti-sublime of the city (“terrible,” as Jeffers says again of it here, but also an “anthill,” a mass that traps rather than releases light). In “Going to Horse Flats” (CP : –), another dialogue staged as a chance encounter, an old man who has chosen solitude finds himself ravenous for news, but, pathetically, unable to read more than the headlines of a newspaper discarded in a mountain gorge. Jeffers is not mocking a cripple, but portraying (as his dialogues generally do) his own divided self, “caught,” as he says in “The Sirens,” “in the net of the world / Between news-cast and workdesk.” (CP : ).11 In “A Redeemer,” however, Jeffers leaves the last dialogue to the ‘Redeemer’s’ 290



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wife and the wife of the visitor, neither of whom has to this moment been mentioned in the poem: His wife came from the door while he was talking. Mine asked her quietly, “Do you live here all alone, Are you not afraid?” “Certainly not,” she answered, “he is always gentle and loving. I have no complaint Except his groans in the night keep me awake often. But when I think of other women’s Troubles: my own daughter’s: I’m older than my husband, I have been married before: deep is my peace.’ ”

In these few lines, a small, artful feat of dramatic compression, Jeffers conjures a character out of nowhere and paints her in full.12 The ‘Redeemer’s’ wife is a woman of limited horizons who has had a difficult life. Her husband’s eccentricity is folded into the round of domestic concern with which she is content. She has no need of his ‘antitoxin’: “deep is my peace.” As Jeffers never ceases to remind us, salvation takes place one soul at a time.

III The question of ‘salvation’ became increasingly urgent for Jeffers as a second world war approached. In “The Women at Point Sur,” he had depicted the failure of the Great War to purge the Western malaise; a year later, he evoked the imagery of that poem to prophesy the greater war to come, the larger tragedy to be played: . . . here the heavy future hangs like a cloud: the enormous scene; the enormous games preparing Weigh on the water and strain the rock; the stage is here, the play is conceived; the players are not found. (“Contrast,” CP : )

The prophet who knows his prophecy will be unacknowledged or disbelieved—Tiresias, Cassandra—is a tragedian; it is the last office open to him. Twenty years after writing “Contrast,” Jeffers, looking back on the war he had foreseen, endured, and survived, ruefully identified himself with the maddened Trojan seeress, “mumbling in a corner a crust of truth, to men / And gods disgusting” (“Cassandra,” CP : ; and see above, pp. 39 and 94). But if the Great War had formed him as a lyric and tragic poet, World War II would come to 291

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seem an event almost too large for tragedy. Dreading it, experiencing it, and finally attempting to frame it in an historical and ontological context, would be the principal task of the second part of his poetic career. The tensions and contradictions inherent in such a task would stretch his art to the breaking point, and would compel him to rewrite his vision of America as well. If we consider the arc of Jeffers’ career framed by the publication of Cawdor and Other Poems () and The Double Axe and Other Poems (), three major strands emerge. After the mixed reception of “The Women at Point Sur,” Jeffers reconsidered his narrative strategies in “Cawdor,” “Thurso’s Landing,” and “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” the trilogy that, as we have seen, marked the emergence of the hero of endurance. In these poems, he continued to work out his conception of the California sublime, and, indirectly, of a panentheistic God whose pervasive presence in the material cosmos precluded any location of final value in its particular elements. At the same time, he produced a dramatic trilogy in “Dear Judas,” “At the Fall of an Age,” and “At the Birth of an Age,” whose purpose, as he noted in the Foreword to the Selected Poetry, was to consider the principal sources of Western civilization. In “Thoughts Contingent to a Poem,” a brief address written shortly afterward, Jeffers suggested that these sources were in critical respects irreconcilable, and that the resulting tensions had been both fructifying and destructive (CP : –). This suggested that the Western experiment had a term which, if not imminent, was discernible in its fundamental makeup. Finally, Jeffers continued to produce shorter meditative poems, whose thematic prototypes were “Apology for Bad Dreams,” “Meditation on Saviors,” and “The Broken Balance.” In these latter works, he tracked the approach of the new war, and tried to inscribe it within the broader arc of the West’s destiny.13 In “Apology for Bad Dreams,” Jeffers had suggested that ‘tragedy’ was a response to the conditions of landscape, a human violence evoked by the violence of natural process. The intense, small-scaled versions of tragedy that Jeffers offered in his narrative poems, whose protagonists were ranchers and farmers rather than tyrants and kings, were an epitome of the larger dramas of the sublime; but they were made of the same stuff. The difference between incest in a canyon and the conflagrations of a world war was merely a matter of scale. In “Meditation on Saviors,” Jeffers had widened his perspective to consider the postwar condition of the West, “stalled between storms,” in search of a new savior but capable of generating only the temporal Caesar. Here was not tragedy but spectacle, for tragedy entailed moral choice, and it was precisely the 292



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capacity for such choice that modern populations were anxious to shed, the burden they wished Caesar to bear for them. In “The Broken Balance,” Jeffers took the further step of considering whether the universal culture that the West now represented had not taken a fatal detour, and whether the human project itself was not in question. Previous civilizations had been organized around the vision of a great founder, a vision that, however expressed, always based itself on the appeal to a transcendent order. Such appeals had lost credibility in the post-Darwinian world, in which man found himself opposing the collective mind of technē to the indifference of the cosmos. Jeffers captured this process in a brief stanza in “Meditation on Saviors”: The apes of Christ lift up their hands to praise love: but wisdom without love is the present savior, Power without hatred, mind like a many-bladed machine subduing the world with deep indifference.

Man, that is, had opposed his own “deep indifference” to that of the cosmos, a “wisdom” that was in fact a suicidal revenge against the world. The self-lacerating prophet of “A Redeemer” had made the same point at length: They have done what never was done before. Not as a people takes a land to love it and be fed, A little, according to need and love, and again a little; sparing the country tribes, mixing Their blood with theirs, their minds with all the rocks and rivers, their flesh with the soil: no, without hunger Wasting the world and your own labor, without love possessing, not even your hands to the dirt but plows Like blades of knives; heartless machines; houses of steel: using and despising the patient earth . . . Oh, as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, so you came west and raped The continent and brushed its people to death. Without need, the weak skirmishing hunters, and without mercy. Well, God’s a scarecrow; no vengeance out of old rags. But there are acts breeding their own reversals In their own bellies from the first day.

The ‘Redeemer’ has in mind the conquest of western America, and particularly the California coast, but Jeffers’ strictures clearly have a wider significance. 293

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The point is made yet again, and most decisively, in Section V of “The Broken Balance”: Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth Under men’s hands and their minds, The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city, The spreading fungus, the slime-threads And spores; my own coast’s obscene future: I remember the farther Future, and the last man dying Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.

It is only with this passage that Jeffers suggests a meaning for the hitherto opaque title of his poem. As we have noted, its opening section references a passage in Plutarch, which suggests that the “balance” that has been broken is a political one, as in the balance of powers that upholds a republican constitution. This is not mistaken; the lines that conclude this section of the poem (“When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry it; / When life grows hateful, there’s power . . .”) certainly echo the theme of lost resolution and independence from “Shine, Perishing Republic” and “Meditation on Saviors.” It becomes clear with Section V, however, that this meaning is a subsidiary one, and that the crucial balance broken is not one among powers within a commonwealth but in the relation between humanity and the natural environment. This relation is the symbiotic one described in “A Redeemer” (to love the bountiful earth as one gratefully takes one’s portion from it, to bind one’s blood and intelligence to its elements), and repudiated in the spoliatory practices of modern, mechanized agriculture and the conscienceless rapacity that underlies it. Such rapacity, inseparable from the technological prowess that appears to be its handmaiden but is actually its master, is symbolized in the thresher (“plows / Like blades of knives” [“A Redeemer]; “mind like a manybladed machine” [“Meditation on Saviors”]). Man, binding his intelligence to the machine instead of to the earth, becomes mechanized himself, a monster incapable of any goal but extraction, any relation but dominion. Jeffers in fact perceptively anticipates much of the consequence of modern industrial agriculture. Here, on the “happy farms” that provide for the ever-expanding appetites of the city, machines pulverize the earth, monoculture erodes it, and overfertilization saps it. The temporary result appears to be increased productivity; the ultimate one is soil exhaustion and the loss of the biodiversity that enables local habitats to thrive and ecosystems to connect. The description in “The Broken Balance” is almost startlingly prophetic: “The world sickens 294



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with change, rain becomes poison, / The earth is a pit . . . / The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature / Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.” One recalls that the ox yoke is also a symbol of balance, the image of man, beast, and earth in harmonious association and labor; this balance, too, is “broken” in the machine. Jeffers was not alone in his critique of the new agricultural regime. The so-called Southern Agrarians, twelve mostly youthful writers and scholars, published a manifesto in , a year after “The Broken Balance” appeared in its definitive form in Dear Judas and Other Poems. In it, they declared that as “the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations . . . it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.”14 This was the ideal of the Jeffersonian freeholder, an ideal that, as James Agee was to point out a decade later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was more honored in the breach than in the observance. The Agrarians observed that machines tended to “evict” labor wherever they appeared, the same process the Luddite weavers of Georgian England had rebelled against a century earlier. But agrarian dispossession was of a different order of magnitude and consequence. Urban craftsmen and laborers who lost their livelihoods found other employment or disappeared into the faceless proletariat, but they tended to remain in situ in their tenements and hovels. Displaced farmers left the land, so that, as the Agrarians noted, “the part of the population supporting itself upon the soil [had been reduced] to a smaller and smaller fraction” of the whole.15 At the beginning of the twentieth century, more than half the American population still worked the land; by the century’s end, that number had been reduced to three per cent. The continent that had been so assiduously settled as America expanded westward had now, in an extraordinary reversal, been emptied out and crowded into urban and suburban preserves. What the settler population had done to native Americans, confining them to arid enclaves, they had now done to themselves. This process was already visible in the s and s, and the Agrarians, with Jeffers, had seen the coming of “vast populations . . . insulated / From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent.” The Southern Agrarians hoped to engender a social movement; instead, they became a mere literary curiosity. It would be another two generations before agrarianism again found a spokesman in Wendell Berry, a figure deeply indebted to Jeffers.16 Jeffers himself foresaw only spoliation, what he had called “my own coast’s obscene future.” In a way, tragedy itself was preparatory to this. “The house is mined,” he had written, referring to the Western project at large, 295

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but also, perhaps, to the local ranches and farmsteads that would be burned, abandoned, or dispossessed in the wake of his tales of passion and incest. The seasonal burning of pasture was a natural phenomenon of the coast, a means of organic renewal. The homestead burnings of Jeffers’ protagonists—Tamar Cauldwell, Hoult Gore—had a deeper signification, the clearing that presaged a coming dark age; and the Inhumanist “caretaker” who occupies the Gore property in “The Double Axe” is, quite clearly, a prophetic figure who squats on the symbolic ruins of a civilization (see below, 32ff.). Jeffers is subtler but no less decided in describing the fate of Cawdor’s house: Japanese tenants Now kept the house; short broad-faced men who planted Lettuces in the garden against the creek-side And beans on the hill. The barns were vacant, the cattle Were vanished from the high pasture. (CP : –)

This passage is from Jeffers’ “The Loving Shepherdess,” a narrative he based on a Scots border legend.17 Its heroine, on her own way to death, stops not only at Cawdor’s canyon, but also by Tamar’s gate and among “vacant cabins and a ruined saw-mill,” perhaps an anticipation of “Thurso’s Landing.” There can be no mistaking Jeffers’ intention to survey a coast not only “formed” for tragedy, as he had noted in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” but already marked by it. In a sense, Jeffers seems to look beyond the “obscene future” of urban sprawl and dude ranches that he had foreseen for the Big Sur region to a reverse colonization, the Japanese tenant farmers succeeding the failed Anglo settlement.18 In “The Broken Balance,” however, Jeffers looks further still, to human extinction. His first image of it, a “last man dying” under the stars, has a certain pathos;19 but in the poem’s final section, he gives full rein to his disgust: Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass Stands narrowed between the people and the storm. The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet Summer after summer encroach and destroy. Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color, Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars; But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.

By the late s, then, Jeffers had arrived at a posthuman perspective that one might call devolution—an end to humanity that involved no redemptive 296



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or transcendent closure, but simply prime nature taking back its own with the humblest of its instruments, grass, from a creature that had wrecked its own habitat. T. S. Eliot had expressed an analogous thought with his observation that the human project would end not with a bang but a whimper. Both suggested the post-Darwinian, post-Christian stance of Modernism, with its sense of man’s exposure to an unforgiving cosmos. Eliot, of course, remained a Christian as Jeffers did not, which might pose the question as to which of them was more authentically “Modernist.” But Jeffers, the residual Calvinist, did stand out from his Modernist peers in one respect. If humanity was, indeed, to selfdestruct, the sin and its deserts were on its head alone.

IV The themes that had emerged from Jeffers’ work in the late s—the tragic nature of human destiny, the decay of Western civilization, and the potential for species extinction—continued to preoccupy him in the following decade. These concerns were all wrapped in apprehension about a new war. It was one thing for Jeffers to consider the decline of the West in terms of long-term tendencies projected into an indefinite future, and another to confront the imminence of a new and more disastrous iteration of the Great War. In “Rearmament” (CP : ), he confessed the difficulty of trying to maintain perspective: These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous To admire the tragic beauty they build.

The metaphors Jeffers had employed to distance contemplation from emotion in his earlier work—the “ring-bound molecules” awaiting their liberation in the Prelude to “The Women at Point Sur,” the “molten mass” hardening in “Shine, Perishing Republic”—are invoked again, only to have their adequacy rejected. It was true that, from a contemplative height, history might exhibit the “grandeur” of the natural process of which it was part (as well as a degradation uniquely its own), but the death of “persons,” particularly those who die as “victims,” was, inescapably, a moral event. Thus, while pity was a “fool”—that is, an inefficacious response, one that changed nothing—it was entailed for anyone who could see the totality of the impending tragedy. Distance and detachment, the detachment not of indifference but of nonpartisanship, was required to see 297

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the tragedy whole; but to see was, in the most painful sense, to feel. This is the thrust of “A Redeemer,” whose protagonist will certainly not save “the happy towns and farms” with his sacrificial witness, but who can humanly react in no other way to the doom he foresees. The divided consciousness of “Rearmament” is even more painful, because the speaker both sees and feels in the most exacerbated sense, so that the beauty and the pity of the tragic spectacle are simultaneously experienced, although the former seems “monstrous” to the latter. To hold this consciousness in suspension, neither rejecting the terrible beauty of the tragedy nor succumbing, as the ‘Redeemer’ does, to the “tearing” pity it evokes, is the last act of prophetic extremity. In the lyrical midsection of “Rearmament,” which again is typical of the triadic structure we have noted in Jeffers’ shorter poems, the “tragic beauty” of impending war is likened to other forms of natural process, both violently creative and destructive (a glacier’s descent on a forest; the “death-dance” of leaves in autumn; the bloody forcing of a maidenhood), before the poet returns to a personal perspective and summation: I would burn my right hand in a slow fire To change the future . . . I should do so foolishly. The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

The “tearing pity” of the poem’s first section is evident again in the poet’s offer to sacrifice his hand (and, inferentially, his art) to forestall the disasters ahead. This was a reference to the Roman patriot Mucius Scaevola, who reputedly burned his hand in a gesture renowned in antiquity.20 But the ‘foolishness’ of such an idea is immediately apparent to him, for it would be of no more significance to the course of events than the ‘Redeemer’s’ self-crucifixion. The poem ends with a restatement of the “beauty”—here very nearly conflated with necessity—of modern man’s own death-dance, and the eclipse of personality by collective consciousness. The poet alone, ultimately, mourns the passing of “persons” and their transformation into “victims,” for the tragedy is precisely in the loss of individuality that extinguishes personal awareness and responsibility, and creates the perishing mass whose fate is inevitable. It is with “Rearmament” in mind that we can better read the elegiac perspective of the closely contemporary “Shine, Republic,” with its affirmation of the free individual and its ironic injunction to the emerging empire to “con298



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serve the forms” if not the substance of liberty and to “carve deep [its] heelmarks” for a future age. Jeffers nonetheless remained torn between insight and empathy. In response to a query in  from the League of American Writers concerning the Spanish Civil War, he recalled Scaevola again, while affirming his neutrality: “I would give my right hand, of course, to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win” (SL ). Needless to say, Jeffers realized that such a statement could satisfy no one. As he wrote in “The Great Sunset,” another poem about the imminence of war: “To be truth-bound, the neutral / Detested by all the dreaming factions, is my errand here” (CP : –). Jeffers was not in fact isolated at this point, except prophetically. The Seventieth Congress adopted neutrality as the official position of the United States in , an act that reflected widespread public sentiment across the political spectrum. It spoke for Jeffers too, but did not allay his fears. In “Contemplation of the Sword” (CP : –), the first of many poems he would now date as well as title (April, ), he dismissed the possibility of a diplomatic resolution of Europe’s quarrels (“Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide”). War was brewing in Asia, too, and had already begun in China. Whatever Jeffers wished or Congress mandated, a general conflagration was inevitable, and the likelihood that it would spare America was slender indeed: “I have two sons whom I love,” he shuddered, “. . . / . . . and they are now of the age / That war prefers.” The panentheistic God he had affirmed, the God who clothed himself in a vast and violent cosmos indifferent to persons, was still beyond judgment, but Jeffers now wavered before him as he had never done before: Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart.

The “vileness” the poet deplores is entirely associated with the human. Nature as such contains pain and death, but “pain can shine,” Jeffers says, a phrase that echoes the end of “Thurso’s Landing,” and death, as he says in “Night,” “is no evil.” Human degradation can excite pity or contempt, but it is morally impossible to praise. The temptation, in a natural theodicy, is to segregate humanity from the rest of the cosmos, just as, in a Calvinist one, God is absolved of responsibility for sin. Jeffers, however, is committed to a God who is literally all 299

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in all, and must therefore not only contain evil but, at some level of intention, will it. To accept God in all his works, which is the only way to acknowledge him, is not to valorize evil, but to admit a dispensation that passes human understanding. The poet, too, has his difficult place in it, his task of reciprocity: You will not repent, nor cancel life, nor free man from anguish For many ages to come. You are the one that tortures himself to discover himself: I am One that watches you and discovers you, and praises you in little parables, idyl or tragedy, beautiful Intolerable God. (“Contemplation of the Sword”)

V For the next decade, Jeffers’ work was almost wholly absorbed by the Second World War. “Perhaps we desire death,” he wonders in “The Sirens”; “We count the months now; we shall count the days,” he declares in “Nerves,” a poem dated February  (: ); “Night comes: night will claim all” is the theme of “Watch the Lights Fade” (: ). On the eve of Hitler’s attack on Poland, he again admonishes himself to “Beware of taking sides: only watch” (“The Soul’s Desert,” : ). Neutrality, of course, was not indifference, nor was it an absence of preference. As war approached America, Jeffers took the unusual step of expressing himself in prose. For more than a quarter century he had offered his public, apart from a few prefaces and forewords, terse responses to questionnaires, and a handful of reviews, only his verse epics and lyrics. This was deliberate, a decision he had made clear in “All the Corn in One Barn.”21 If, as he would note in the Foreword to The Selected Poetry, modern poetry had to “reclaim some of the power and reality that it was so hastily surrendering to prose” if it were “to survive at all” (CP : ), then the poet’s commitment to it must be complete, a work not only of personal expression but of cultural renovation. This commitment was bound up with Jeffers’ conviction that the deepest truth-telling could only be embodied in verse, and that in turn with the poet’s prophetic function. “I can tell lies in prose”: Jeffers’ provocative comment in “Self-Criticism in February” was not only a reflection on the increasingly propagandistic uses to which prose was being put in the s, but on the limits of a discursive medium as such. Language could properly touch reality, as opposed to externally describing it, only by seeking its own most primal source in the flux of process; 300



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and this source, in the natural rhythm and song of the body, was poetry. As he had declared in “Continent’s End” (CP : –): Mother, though my song’s measure is like your surf-beat’s ancient rhythm I never learned it of you. Before there was any water there were tides of fire, both our tones flow from the older fountain.

This extraordinary valorization of language suggests the depth of Jeffers’ commitment to his poetic art and the purification of language, a project he shared with Rilke, Yeats, Williams, and Pound. Unlike these figures, however, he had made a programmatic decision to carry out this project solely in verse, not yielding ground to prose but incorporating its strengths: clarity, directness, and vigor. With such firmness, poetry could express the whole of modern culture, but on its own unique terms. That Jeffers should turn to prose on the eve of this culture’s greatest crisis thus requires comment. “The Poet in a Democracy” (CP : –),22 which Jeffers prepared as a lecture to the Library of Congress on his  reading and lecture tour (the only one he ever took), was prompted by a very mundane circumstance: the need for funds to pay a new property tax on Tor House to extend a county sewer line. It is almost certain that there would have been no tour without this painful stimulus, and therefore no lecture: most commentators have been content to leave it at that. If we examine the text, however, it suggests a particular urgency on Jeffers’ part to speak plainly, and to engage his countrymen not from the distance of a poet—a distance in part created by the circumstances of modern poetry itself—but as a fellow citizen. The lecture contains plentiful helpings of verse, as if Jeffers was afraid to get too far from it, but it is also the most direct statement of his Jeffersonian ethos; his riposte, as it were, to Whitman. Democracy, Jeffers states, refers to “a system of government,” but also to “an attitude of mind.” This latter meaning is “secondary” in common parlance, but, he suggests, it is constitutive of the democratic society from which popular government arises, and in which freedom—the ultimate political value—can flourish. A democratic polity can take various forms, but Freedom is its purpose. Every decent government on earth aims at justice and public welfare, but ours is also aimed particularly at freedom; and that word, I think, best expresses our national ideal, the basic principle on which this republic was founded.

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Jeffers then went on to read the first stanzas of “Shine, Republic,” stopping before the lines that suggest the ultimate supersession of freedom by luxury and empire. Other republics—and even aristocracies, monarchies, and certain enlightened dictatorships—had provided space for creativity and the freedom essential to it, but freedom was a universal good, to be distributed as widely as possible. It had thus been the “special glory” of America to have provided “the greatest freedom for the greatest number of people.” Jeffers’ twist on the utilitarian catchphrase was not, I would suggest, accidental. Jeremy Bentham’s definition of social justice as the greatest “good” of the greatest number left the former to be defined by the latter (or at least on its behalf), with the consequence that no particular good was instated, and any good liable to rejection. In substituting the overarching value of freedom for Bentham’s abstract and contentless “good,” Jeffers declared that freedom as content preceded democracy as form; that it was its presupposition and basis, as well as its practical goal. Although he recognized that other civilizations had been based on other values, freedom was, as he had affirmed in “Shine, Republic,” the defining characteristic of the West, the element which—even in eclipse—constituted its highest and most essential good. It followed from this, and from the nature of freedom itself, that it was to be maximally shared: hence the “special glory” of the American experiment. Freedom was thus at once both ideal and praxis, but it was also, for Jeffers, a certain predisposition, which he called an “attitude of mind.” This attitude entailed: tolerance, disregard of class-distinction, a recognition that each person, in certain rights and values, is equal to any other person. It means: no snobbery. And no flunkyism, no indecent humility.

The public sphere was the sum of all private ones, each individually designed and protected, at the social level, by a democracy of manners. Tolerance was the prime virtue; it provided the negative space in which freedom might be enjoyed, the tacit agreement not to impose one’s judgment or will on others. Distinctions of wealth were, within the limits of “public welfare,” inevitable in such a system, but status and privilege were not. Equality meant respect, the positive face of toleration. The citizens of a democracy deferred to one another’s choices, but not their persons. The disgust Jeffers felt at any assertion of class hierarchy is evident in his choice of terms—“snobbery,” the imposition of such norms from above; “flunkyism,” subservience to the will and purposes of others; “indecent humility,” the failure to respect oneself before others. This was 302



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precisely the Jeffersonian ethos, backed by the economic independence that was its prerequisite and whose decline Jeffers had so lamented. Jeffers’ subject was not, however, democracy as such, but the specific place of the poet in it. Jeffers had often taken a high, prophetic tone in his verse; the poet, he asserted, was a truth-teller who was bound to be misunderstood or rejected, and, in moments of crisis, actively “detested.” We must recognize such pronouncements as strategic, a rhetorical form of self-presentation meant to engage his audience. When asked in  by the editor of New Verse to respond to the question as to what, as a poet, distinguished him “from an ordinary man,” he replied with a deprecatory murmur: “Nothing essential; a little specialization” (SL ). It was this point he took up in his address: This [democracy] is a great ideal for all men and women. I should like to emphasize it especially for the men and women who write poetry, and indeed for all creative writers and artists. These are a queer people and have strange aims, and are often quite unsuccessful in attaining the things that most people want. Therefore they sometimes feel that they are regarded with suspicion, or patronage, or even contempt; and sometimes they resent this attitude, whether real or imaginary, by foolish assumption of superiority and special dedication. I do not believe for a moment that a poet, as such, is any better, or any worse, than a congressman—or a carpenter; and this is the special bit of democracy that I should like to emphasize for all artists.

Jeffers appears to invoke the philistine canard of poets and artists as “queer people” with “strange aims” who are “unsuccessful” by conventional standards. However, he does not impute such views to anyone else, but states them as his own. This is, no doubt, doubly ironic, an assumption of the stereotypes of the vulgar; but, lest we regard it simply as such, he proceeds from this premise to describe the inferiority (typically) felt by poets in a democratic society which, unlike certain aristocratic ones, accords them no protection and respect. Their response, he suggests, is all too often an inverse snobbery that stakes false claims to deference. In a democratic society, however, all callings are worthy of respect, and the only standard to apply to any work is whether it is well or badly done. This, Jeffers says, is the “special bit” of democracy that he commends to poets. What poets do require, he continues, is freedom, which “is essential” to them. A carpenter may do his work as well (if not as happily) in an unfree society as a free one, but the poet can do no work at all: indeed, in a perfectly totalitarian state, poetry is inconceivable. Such was the case, Jeffers says, in Sparta, which had to import a poet, Aleman, “to make their choruses for them”—songs sung 303

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in unison. On the other hand, he cites the funeral inscription of Aeschylus, who proudly records his participation in the Battle of Marathon but makes no mention of his career as a tragic playwright. This, Jeffers suggests, is as it should be; for a democratic posterity, Aeschylus wished to leave the name of a citizen-soldier. The poetry, by comparison, was “Nothing essential; a little specialization.” If Athens was a good place for poets and Sparta no place for them at all, it would be “dishonest,” Jeffers says, not to acknowledge that the clash of interests between the two states had brought ruin to Greece, as a similar contest was ruining Europe. The Peloponnesian War had cost the Greeks their freedom, and Athens its poetry. The clear implication was that the same process was at work again, and that in the struggle between fascism and democracy, freedom would be the only certain loser. This suggested strongly that America was well advised to stay out of the European conflict, lest it pay the same price as Athens. But American society, as Jeffers had pointed out ever since “Shine, Perishing Republic,” had already gone far down the same road on its own. The Jeffersonian ideal of the independent homesteader had given way to urban culture and industrial agriculture, and these in turn entailed an economy based on universal free trade. The Great Depression had made that point emphatically for anyone who might have missed it, and the new European war, in large part its result, threatened the world trade order as even the Depression had not. Under the circumstances, it was vain to hope that America could remain disengaged from the conflict, or at any rate its consequences. But it was even more delusory to believe that this would not exact a profound cost: I say this as a duty. Europe will be physically and morally exhausted after this second world war; and perhaps it will be our destiny to carry the heritage of European culture, and what we have added to it, across a time of twilight to a new age; as Byzantium carried the culture of Greece and Rome across the dark centuries, from that age to this one. Therefore we must guard what we have, for it is precious; and if we feel ourselves forced to intervene in foreign conflicts, we must consult the interests of our people first; and our generosity second,—we have always been generous; and ideology last. But sentimentality, never. We can still afford the material risks of sentimentality, but not the disillusion that follows it.

Jeffers still holds out the hope that America can avoid direct participation in the war; in the long run, however, it will bear its weight. In any case, with all that America had lost—a subject he did not wish to deal with in the lecture—what it had retained and might still preserve was precious. If forced into conflict, it 304



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must be guided by the people’s interest first, which could not in all likelihood be separated from its generosity, and perhaps not completely from its ideological preference (presumably for democracy, and hence for England).23 Sentimentality, however, the unfortunate by-product of generosity and ideology, was to be avoided at all costs. This was hardheaded advice, yet purposively vague. The people’s interest might be partly material—encirclement by hostile powers would hardly be conducive to trade or to liberty—but, in the full context of the talk, it clearly suggested the primacy of securing freedom. Sentimentality was the reverse of this. We are left to guess what it might have consisted of, but Jeffers offers a clue in the lines that immediately precede the quoted passage. These describe, ironically, how Rome conferred ‘freedom’ on its conquered province of Greece, and quote Wordsworth that such a gift is “A gift of that which is not to be given / By all the blended powers of earth and heaven.” If we follow this suggestion, sentimentality would appear to be the delusion that freedom could be the object of a crusade, to be extended benignly through aid or propaganda, or forcibly by the sword. It meant the reduction of freedom to a commodity, which was its actual negation. It is needless to belabor the history of the Cold War, or the wars that have followed it, to acknowledge Jeffers’ perspicacity on this point. Jeffers read a number of poems that illustrated his mounting concern with the European crisis, including some we have considered. One that he did not include, however, relates more nearly to the passage we have quoted than any other: Lucretius felt the change of the world in his time, the great republic riding to the height Whence every road leads downward; Plato in his time watched Athens Dance the down path. The future is a misted landscape, no man sees clearly, but at cyclic turns There is a change felt in the rhythm of events, as when an exhausted horse Falters and recovers, then the rhythm of the running hoofbeats is changed: he will run miles yet But he must fall: we have felt it again in our own life-time, slip, shift and speed-up In the gallop of the world; and now perceive that, come peace or war, the progress of Europe and America Becomes a long process of deterioration—starred with famous Byzantiums and Alexandras, Surely—but downward. (“Prescription of Painful Ends,” CP : )

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“Prescription of Painful Ends” was the culminating poem of a series that had meditated on the historic legacy of Greece and Rome, beginning with “The Broken Balance” and continuing through the verse dramas “At the Fall of an Age” and “At the Birth of an Age,” as well as such poems of the late s as “Hellenistics” and “Thebaid” (CP : –; –). The reference to ‘Byzantiums’ clearly links the poem to the suggestion in the lecture that America would ultimately play the mediating role of the Byzantine empire as the transmitter of cultural values through a dark age. It is also the clearest statement in Jeffers’ verse of “cyclic turns” or culture ages, the notion that civilizations embody certain core ideas and values that wax and wane but ultimately have a determinate life span, so that no single of vision of life defines the species.24 Within the broader context of Western civilization, the local cultures of Greece and Rome had seen their day, as that of Europe and America were now seeing theirs. Whether the larger project of the West itself would come to an end with them was a “misted landscape” through which the future was unclear, but its material culture, in which the entire world was now implicated, was both incomparably greater and more fragile than any that had preceded it. This made the potential consequences of collapse correspondingly dire. The collapse was not imminent, even in the apocalyptic scenario of world depression and world war; but these events betokened the future. The disintegration of the Roman empire was the work of half a millennium from Lucretius’ time, and the modern West, the climacteric of the civilization that contained Rome, could not “destroy itself,” as Jeffers had said in “Decaying Lambskins” (CP : –), “but only deep-wounded drag on for centuries” as well. Even beyond that, however, “rich unplanned life” would continue (“Hope Is Not for the Wise,” : ), and find ways to renew itself: Oh distant future children going down to the foot of the mountain, the new barbarism, the night of time, Mourn your own dead if you remember them, but not for civilization, not for our scuttled futilities. You are saved from being little entrails feeding large brains, you are saved from being little empty bundles of enjoyment, You are not to be fractional supported people but complete men; you will guard your own heads, you will have proud eyes. (“Hellenistics”)25

This vision was far off; but what of the poet in the present? Jeffers offered two prescriptions for himself. One was to create poems “for treasuries, time306



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conscious poems”: in short, poems that might survive a night of barbarism and speak beyond their age (“Prescription of Painful Ends”). In addressing the “distant future children,” Jeffers was attempting to do precisely that, in terms both clear enough to reach them and vivid enough to engage them. This, he thought, was what Lucretius had done in De Rerum Natura and Plato by means of his myths. But poetry could not flower in a future age without being rooted in the present, speaking to and for the present, and suffering its evils. In this complex dialogue, the poet partook of his time while attempting to transcend it. Thus, Plato had “hive[d] the Greek honey,” but the modern poet had a more difficult task: Our own time, much greater and far less fortunate, Has acids for honey, and for fine dreams The immense vulgarities of misapplied science and decaying Christianity: therefore one christens each poem, in dutiful Hope of burning off at least the top layer of the time’s uncleanness . . . (Ibid.)

With that, Jeffers could only await the coming of a war he had long known to be unavoidable.

VI Jeffers’ reaction to Pearl Harbor was already foreseeable in a poem written before the event, “Shine, Empire,” which completed the trilogy begun with “Shine, Perishing Republic,” and “Shine, Republic.” If “Shine, Republic” had, with “The Poet in a Democracy,” offered a largely positive, not to say idealized view of the American experiment, “Shine, Empire” is thoroughly disillusioned and embittered: Powerful and armed, neutral in the midst of madness, we might have held the whole world’s balance and stood Like a mountain in a wind. We were misled and took sides. We have chosen to share the crime and the punishment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I have often in weak moments thought of this people as something higher than the natural run of the earth. I was quite wrong: we are lower. We are the people who hope to win wars with money as we win elections.

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I have quoted this poem extensively not for its intrinsic quality—it is the weakest of the trilogy—but for its directness and completeness as a political statement. In many respects, much of the poetry that Jeffers was to write over the next decade as he watched the war unfold and pondered its aftermath was a commentary on and extension of this text, and a projection of its disgust. Jeffers’ attitude should not be confused with simple isolationism. As American civilization was an extension of Europe’s, so the destinies of the two continents were inextricably linked: this is very clearly expressed in “Prescription of Painful Ends.” The American version was ruder, to be sure, but also open and democratic, and detached from Europe’s blood feuds. These, and no higher cause, were responsible for the new world war, as for the one that had preceded it; as Jeffers had written earlier in “Hellenistics”: “Europe mixes her cups of death, all the little Caesars fidget on their thrones, / The old wound opens its clotted mouth to ask for new wounds.” One might sympathize with an underdog (England in “I Shall Laugh Purely,” Finland in “Moon and Five Planets,” [CP : ]); one might lament the agony on both sides, as Jeffers did with Spain; but that was all the more reason for not taking sides, which could only produce an increase of suffering on the war front and a loss of freedom at home. The “stains” of Europe, the ancient divisions of blood, language, religion, and class that Jeffers had decried in “The Poet in a Democracy” and “Shine, Empire,” had defiled America too. As in his ‘agrarian’ poems, European settlers had proved themselves unworthy of the continent that had offered them a second chance. After all the effusion of blood its conquest had cost, they had not emancipated themselves, and were consequently “lower” than the feuding populations of Europe that had remained behind. The latter had at least the excuse of history, of a continent with too many nations and too little land; but America, without a vital stake in the European quarrel, had made a com308



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mercial calculus: “We are the people who hope to win wars with money as we win elections.” The debasement of the democratic process itself had been the precursor of a war in which our principal ally was to be a ruthless and cynical dictatorship. The war came in due course, and Jeffers greeted it, almost derisively, in “Pearl Harbor”: The war that we have carefully for years provoked Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. Our warships are shot Like sitting ducks and our planes like nest-birds, both our coasts ridiculously panicked, And our leaders make orations. This is the people That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world An American peace. (Oh, we’ll not lose our war: my money on amazed Gulliver And his horse-pistols.) (CP : –)

From a Jeffersonian perspective, the war represented above all a failure of democracy. America had been betrayed by its leaders, who, surprised by the very war they had plotted, made “orations” over sunken ships and blasted planes. If the politicians were directly culpable, however, a public that had allowed itself to be deliberately misled—the “Dream-led masses [dancing] down the dark mountain” of “Rearmament”—bore ultimate responsibility. Jeffers had cautioned his hearers in “The Poet in a Democracy” that, if the country had to enter upon war, it should be from necessity, not “sentimentality.” Less than a year later, in “Fourth Act” (dated January ), he found that sentimentality had indeed prevailed: “Because you are simple people, kindly and romantic, [you] set your trust in a leader and believed lies” (: ). The flaw was ingrained, and, for a republic, fatal; as Jeffers had written earlier in “Ave Caesar,” “we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists / . . . / We are easy to manage, a gregarious people, / Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries” (CP : ). Such a nation would not know liberty long, nor regret its passing: Men will fight through to the autumn flowering and ordered prosperity. They will lift their heads in the great cities Of the empire and say: “Freedom? Freedom was a fire. We are well quit of freedom, we have found prosperity.” (“Hellenistics”)

Sentiment had corrupted a people easily wearied of the tasks of freedom, personal independence, and collective vigilance. The motives of its leaders were 309

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another matter. Jeffers’ interest had been concentrated on Europe, but his observation in “Pearl Harbor” that the war with Japan had been “carefully for years provoked” showed that he had been attentive to America’s Pacific policy as well. A war of empire—the inevitable result of an expansionist commercial power confronted with an ascendent rival—had been long planned, and, in the view of many, deliberately instigated by escalating political demands capped by an economic embargo. The only unforeseen element was that the enemy would strike at a point seemingly beyond its reach; but the very shock of Pearl Harbor, followed by Hitler’s declaration of war, had stilled opposition to a war against the Axis powers on all fronts: as Jeffers commented wryly in “Pearl Harbor,” “As for me, what can I do but fly the national flag above the top of [Hawk] tower?” Jeffers’ comment in “Shine, Empire” that Roosevelt’s intentions “were good” (CP : ) obviously suggested that they were no longer to be so regarded. Similarly, the statement in “Fourth Act” that the people had trusted a leader and “believed lies,” plainly implied that Roosevelt had prevaricated. “Pearl Harbor” went further, citing unnamed “men who [had] conspired and labored / To embroil this republic in the wreck of Europe.” But in “Wilson in Hell,” Jeffers finally leveled a direct accusation. Woodrow Wilson, the president who led the United States into World War I, had been an ambivalent figure for Jeffers. He wrote a eulogy for him at his death in , which took the form of a dialogue between Wilson and a voice identified only as “it.” Wilson, conscious that his vision of a permanent peace remained unfulfilled, is reluctant to leave the lists, and tormented by doubts about his legacy. His interlocutor suggests that the only peace is that of the grave: “Victory you know requires / Force to sustain victory, the burden is never lightened, but final defeat / Buys peace.” Feeling himself mocked, Wilson wonders why he was duped into pursuing a fantastic vision. The voice, representing the mystery on the other side of death, replies that “Each [thing] for its quality / Is drawn out of this depth. Your tragic quality / Required the huge delusion of some major purpose to produce it.” Wilson, despairingly accepting this verdict as he enters his death, concludes that “This is my last / Worst pain, the bitter enlightenment that buys peace”: not the peace he had labored to establish on earth, but that of his own oblivion (“Woodrow Wilson,” CP : –). Eighteen years later, Jeffers recalled Wilson as a tragic prototype, and imagined him addressing a posthumous Roosevelt: Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said, “I blundered into it Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that I died

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Democratic Vistas In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you Blew on the coal-bed, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You have too much murder on your hands. I will not Speak of the lies and the connivings. I cannot understand the Mercy That permits us to meet in the same heaven.—Or is this my hell?” (“Wilson in Hell,” CP : )

There is still shock in reading the bald statement, “Roosevelt died,” and the shock is even more direct when one reflects that this poem was written in , when the President was still alive and conducting a war. Wilson’s indictment, which is clearly Jeffers’ own, does not scruple now to accuse Roosevelt of deliberate deceit, and the consequent responsibility for “murder.” If the war itself is a tragedy, Jeffers refuses to accord Roosevelt the status of a tragic actor, and Wilson’s query—“is this my hell?”—is answered in the poem’s title itself. In posing the question, Wilson is less surprised to find himself in perdition than dismayed to apparently occupy the same circle of guilt as a man without any redemptive quality. Jeffers did not attempt to publish this poem while Roosevelt lived, but when he included it in the  manuscript of The Double Axe and Other Poems, his Random House editor, Saxe Commins, asked him to reconsider it, along with nine other poems that Commins regarded as incendiary. In another of those poems, “What Odd Expedients” (CP : ), Jeffers referred to the “cripple’s power-need of Roosevelt,” which also offended Commins, although the full passage—“The crackpot dreams of Jeanne d’Arc and Hitler; the cripple’s power-need of Roosevelt; the bombast / Of Mussolini; the tinsel star of Napoleon”—reveals his intent to be a condemnation of political leaders and visionaries in general, and the oblique reference to Churchill in another poem, “Pourvou Que Ça Doure”(DA ), as “a gin-muddled butcher-boy,” is hardly more flattering.26 Whether such invective was poetically or intellectually effective was, of course, another matter. What was most offensive, perhaps, both to Commins and to contemporary reviewers of The Double Axe, was Jeffers’ refusal to distinguish between the combatants and their leaders. Of course he did not expect and certainly did not desire his country’s defeat on the battlefield; his point was rather that any outcome would be destructive of democracy, and that victory would only hasten the process of empire. Whitman could remain sanguine about the American prospect despite the horrors of the Civil War, but, for Jeffers, this was no longer possible. Writing in , he looked beyond the 311

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war to the future it had made inevitable: Actum est. There is no returning now. Two bloody summers from now (I suppose) we shall have to take up the corrupting burden and curse of victory. We shall have to hold half the earth; we shall be sick with self-disgust, And hated by friend and foe, and hold half the earth—or let it go, and go down with it. Here is a burden We are not fit for. We are not like Romans or Britons—natural world-rulers, Bullies by instinct—but we have to bear it. Who has kissed Fate on the mouth, and blown out the lamp—must lie with her. (“Historical Choice,” CP : )

Jeffers tried to console himself with familiar adjurations to admire the world’s beauty and the intrinsic value it represented. He tried to see the value, and even the beauty, in war itself. In “The Bloody Sire” (CP : ), he recollected the Darwinian function violence had served: What but the wolf ’s tooth whittled so fine The fleet limbs of the antelope? What but fear winged the birds, and hunger Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head? Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

History was not exempt from this process, he went on, for “Who would remember Helen’s face / Lacking the terrible halo of spears?”; and Christ’s sacrifice, too, as he had noted long before in “Meditation on Saviors,” was efficacious only through an act of bloodshed. In “Invasion,” the poem composed in anticipation of D-Day, Jeffers likened the impending battle to the vast impersonal forces of natural process, always primed for collision and catastrophe, that subsumed the mere surface play of biological struggle he had invoked in “The Bloody Sire”: I know a narrow beach, a thin tide-line Of fallen rocks under the foot of the coast-range; the mountain is always sliding; the mountain goes up Steep as the face of a breaking wave, knuckles of rock, slide-scars, rock-ribs, brushfur, blue height, To the hood of cloud. You stand there at the base, perched like a gull on a tilted slab, and feel The enormous opposed presences; the huge mass of the mountain high overhanging and the immense

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Democratic Vistas Mass of the deep and somber Pacific.—That scene, stationary, Is what our invasion will be in action. Then admire the vast battle. Observe and marvel. Give it the emotion That you give to a landscape. (CP : –; see also above, pp. 119–121)

Jeffers’ willed attempts to see the war in terms of a Darwinian and geologic sublime were themselves at war with the ‘tearing pity’ that its human reality aroused in him, and the sense of dismay and disgust that its prosecution evoked. “Never weep, let them play,” he had written in “The Bloody Sire”; but in “Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind,” a particularly bitter reflection on America’s careless might, he would say instead, “Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible magnificence of the means, / The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby / Pathos of the result” (CP : ). The propaganda of wartime broadcasts roused him to even greater fury; “It might be better,” he wrote in “Ink-Sack,” “to let the roof burn and the walls crash / Than save a nation with floods of excrement” (). The gloating of a radio announcer over the bombs falling on virtually defenseless German cities was “perhaps the most ignoble statement we have heard yet” (“An Ordinary Newscaster,” ), in part because of the abject failure of moral imagination it represented, and in part for the bullying tone of a self-righteous victor. Jeffers was no more tolerant of the high cant of Allied propaganda—the Four Freedoms, the March of Democracy27—than he was of mere jingoism. England might have been forced to fight for the rags of an empire (or accept a quisling peace), but America had been under no such compunction. In embracing the war, America had committed itself to empire; empires could only be sustained by war; and a militarized state—the rule of ‘Caesar’—was the death of democracy. Jeffersonian democracy, as Jeffers understood it, was based as far as possible on economic self-subsistence and decentralized government. Mass democracy was a contradiction in terms, and a militarized state was its consequence. This, he believed, was Roosevelt’s legacy. It is with these sentiments in mind that we can best understand Jeffers’ engagement with the persona of Hitler. Jeffers had grasped Hitler early as a figure of world-historical importance, and also as a figure of doom; “A man of genius,” as he wrote in “The Day Is a Poem” (CP : ) “. . . cored on a sick child’s soul.” He understood fascism itself as a phenomenon of romantic irrationalism, and this in turn as a symptom of civilizational decline: in “Thebaid,” he linked Hitler with other charismatic authorities (“Christ said, Marx wrote, 313

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Hitler says”), but also with a coming epoch of warfare: Faith returns, beautiful, terrible, ridiculous, And men are willing to die and kill for their faith. Soon come the wars of religion; centuries have passed Since the air so trembled with intense faith and hatred.

This was the downward, destructive path Jeffers had glimpsed in “Rearmament” and “Prescription of Painful Ends,” and Hitler was the prototype of the leaders such an era would produce. By comparison, Churchill and Roosevelt were merely men of their time. From a rationalist perspective, of course, Hitler was an anachronism, with his revival of pagan rites and symbols; but these, as Jeffers saw, were a first rehearsal for the new barbarism, a ransacking of the old property shops of tribalism. For this reason, Hitler himself could only be a transitional figure, trapped between the old and the new. In “The Bowl of Blood” (CP : –), a masque written at the high tide of Hitler’s triumph in , Jeffers depicts him seeking counsel from a seeress, and coming away with a premonition of defeat (“Win or lose I shall lose” []), but also with the injunction that he must meet his destiny (“My Leader, play out the tragedy” []). It was because Hitler, alone among his contemporaries, represented in Jeffers’ view great if profoundly regrettable historic forces, that he had genuine tragic capacity, and was therefore worthy of depiction. Three years later, in “Tragedy Has Obligations,” Jeffers wondered whether Hitler would in fact meet his nowinevitable end suitably: If you had thrown a little more boldly in the flood of fortune You’d have had England; or in the slackening Less boldly, you’d not have sunk your right hand in Russia: these Are the two ghosts; they stand by the bed And make a man tear his flesh. The rest is fatal; each day A new disaster, and at last Vae Victis, It means Weh den Gesiegten. This is the essence of tragedy, To have meant well and made woe, and watch Fate, All stone, approach. But tragedy has obligations. A choice Comes to each man when his days darken: To be tragic or to be pitiful. You must do nothing pitiful. Suicide, which no doubt you contemplate, Is not enough, suicide is for bankrupt shopkeepers. You should be Samson, blind Samson, crushing

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All his foes, that’s Europe, America, half Asia, in his fall. But you are not able; and the tale is Hebrew.

I have seen a wing-broken hawk, standing in her own dirt, Helpless, a caged captive, with cold Indomitable eyes of disdain, meet death. There was nothing pitiful, No degradation, but eternal defiance. Or a sheepfold harrier, a grim, grey wolf, hunted all day, Wounded, struck down at the turn of twilight, How grandly he dies. The pack whines in a ring and not closes, The head lifts, the great fangs grin, the hunters Admire their victim. That is how you should end—for they prophesied You would die like a dog—like a wolf, war-loser. (DA –; cf. CP : )

This was certainly a remarkable poem for an American to have written in , although, unlike Pound’s evocation of Mussolini in the Pisan Cantos, it offers not the slightest shred of partisan sympathy. Rather, Hitler is weighed again as a tragic figure and enjoined to meet his end boldly, as even an Elizabethan villain might. Whether he would die as a “dog” or a “wolf ” remained to be seen; but die he would. Jeffers had no more to say of Hitler, and the actual death of Roosevelt seemed not worth remarking. He was preoccupied now with an emerging postwar world that would pit Russia and America against each other, “two strong bulls ranging one field” (“What Odd Expedients”). The defeat of Germany seemed to him a mere exercise in the weight of numbers, and the Nuremberg trials disgusted him as an exercise of victors’ justice (“War-Guilt Trials,” CP : ). He took due note of the Nazis’ atrocities, but refused to decouple them from those of Stalin at a time when the gulags were for the most part getting a free pass from Western opinion (“I wish you could smell the Russian and German torture-camps” [“The King of Beasts,” CP : ;]).26 Victory and defeat in any case were only relative terms, for the war had assured nothing but further war, and the values of freedom and democracy Jeffers had still hoped to preserve in his Library of Congress address had been sacrificed in it. There was no longer anything but the contest of rival empires, the world that Orwell was soon to depict in , in which America would come to know in time the ruin it was now inflicting, and a degraded citizenry make no better show of itself: I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened And forecast victory; never one moment’s doubt. But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next

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Democratic Vistas Great war’s column of dust and fire Writhes up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer What others have, the brutal horror of defeat— Or if not in the next, then the next—therefore watch Germany And read the future. We wish, of course, that our women Would die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain: It will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey; Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate. (“We Are Those People,” CP : )

VII Jeffers had asserted freedom and democracy as core values, one personal and the other social, the first as an end, the second as its means. There was a third value, however, both personal and social, that crowned the arch: truth. Jeffers had often invoked animal predators as an image of freedom—the eagle, the hawk, the wolf—but these, as he noted, merely lived their “felt natures”; freedom was their natural condition, and required only a natural environment. The human situation was more complex, for man’s freedom was enacted within a web of social relationships, and even the hermit (as such poems as “An Artist” and “A Redeemer” attested) was not free of entanglement, but only brooded on it in solitude. In this sense, the great “unsocial birds” represented a far purer and less compromised vision of freedom; and no wild animal in its natural condition ever wished to renounce its freedom, as humans so often did. Man’s distinctive quality, the painful product of his intelligence and experience, was his search for truth. Such truth as he might win was partial, occluded, provisional, for absolute truth was a divine attribute. The quest was difficult and the results, by definition, were always disturbing and thus risky. Therefore man had as low a tolerance for truth as for freedom, if not lower; as Jeffers remarked wryly in “Cassandra,” men would “liefer / Meet a tiger on the road.” Yet, considered in its essential character, humanity was compelled to seek what it preferred to avoid; it was, in the poet’s singularly defining phrase, “the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, the atom to be split” (CP : ). The search for truth was forced, on a personal level, by passion, transgression, and tragedy. Prophets might intuit it; poets might express it. But high civilization organized it as a distinctive social activity, science. Science was disciplined passion, but passion nonetheless, “the wild fence-vaulter,” as Jeffers 316

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called it in “Roan Stallion.” In its humbler aspects, it served utility; in its meaner ones, power. But its higher sphere was disinterested, a passion as such: “Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom” (ibid.). Its grand, organizing concepts were the product of men of genius, no less than the insights of prophets and saviors. Unlike the latter, however, these need not be tainted by “private impurity,” and they were not necessarily distorted in translation, as religious insight was by preaching or theology. Instead, they were expressed in a language as fully objective as humans were capable of, that of mathematics, and could thus be shared and competently discussed by anyone conversant with it. With science, truth was no longer evanescent; it had genuine purchase. Nonetheless, science was no less susceptible to the prevailing culture than any other human enterprise. In “Prescription of Painful Ends,” as we have noted, Jeffers had deplored “The immense vulgarities of misapplied science,” which had produced the “toys” for which, as he said in “The Broken Balance,” men had been “sold.” Science, too, could become “confused, personal and fabulous,” even while its engines became ever more precise and independent of human control: The exact intelligent guns Can almost wheel themselves into action of their accord, and almost calculate their own trajectories. The clever battleships know their objectives, the huge bombing-planes and meteor pursuit-planes, . . . all poised for . . . what? (“Decaying Lambskins”)

The “what” Jeffers left dangling was, on the most obvious level, the new war approaching; but also its entailed consequences, which would surely include the development of weapons more ‘intelligent’ than ever—that is, more independent of human control—and also more destructive. All of this was easily foreseen, but the advent of the atomic bomb raised the stakes to an entirely different plane. This was not mere engineering and applied chemistry, for now, as Jeffers had said, the most elemental forces of nature had been bent to the service of war. The knowledge of atomic structure was no longer, as he had described it in “Roan Stallion,” “useless” and hence disinterested, but a threat to the life of the planet. This led Jeffers to an anguished reassessment of science itself, but also to a reaffirmation of the quest for truth as the final and indefeasible value, which humanity could not renounce without renouncing itself: Science, that gives man hope to live without lies Or blast himself off the earth:—curb science

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Democratic Vistas Until morality catches up?—But look: morality At present running rapidly retrograde, You’d have to turn science back too, back to the witch-doctors And myth-drunkards. Besides that morality Is not an end in itself: truth is an end. To seek truth is better than good works, better than survival, Holier than innocence and higher than love. (“Curb Science?”, CP : )

Jeffers would never decline from this position. He believed that humanity must try all its capacities, and not “go down the dinosaur’s way” (“The Beaks of Eagles,” CP : ) until it had fulfilled its destiny. The alternative was obscurantism and barbarism. This was hard counsel, because evil no less than good was concealed behind truth, and because unmediated exposure to it might, as Jeffers’ tragic protagonists had learned, come at the price of madness and death. Once again, we hear the Augustinian note in this. “Good works,” “survival,” “innocence” and “love”: these were the modest goals and virtues of conventional piety; they masked truth or were simply irrelevant to it. Prophets and saviors had once aspired to the heights, but their truth could no longer be encoded in modernity, and produced only the Barclays of a decadent and retrograde faith. For all its own vanities and delusions, for all the potential of a genuine apocalypse its destructive powers had unleashed, science was the source of modern truth, the frame and ground of even the poet’s art. This truth, which had eclipsed revelation, was most often called by Jeffers “discovery.” It was neither precisely the method nor the consequence of scientific praxis; its hard clarity had a reverse opacity, as of a blazon or a mirror (“Every discovery is a broken shield,” : ; “the steel mirrors of discovery,” : ). Jeffers grasped its peculiarly driven quality in “The Silent Shepherds”: . . . the vast hungry spirit of the time Cries to his chosen that there is nothing good Except discovery, experiment and experience and discovery: To look truth in the eyes, To strip truth naked, let our dogs do our living for us But man discover. (CP : )

This might almost be the call of the self-hanged God, demanding that his “chosen,” too, turn the scalpel of consciousness on themselves. The deliberately unconsoling truth science seeks is a violence that attempts to reproduce the primordial act: “No wonder,” Jeffers says in “The Great Explosion,” “we are so 318



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fascinated with fire-works / And our huge bombs: It is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling fire-blast we were born from” (BE ; CP , and cf. ). But truth was no more to be faced in the end than the big bang itself, no more than mimicked in the supercolliders of which Jeffers might have wryly approved—so far—in their Faustian extravagance and perfect ‘uselessness.’ Science itself would remain forever on the other side of an impenetrable veil. Empirical verification could never define or establish truth; it could only indicate its proximity without penetrating its mystery: The mathematicians and the physics men Have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, Never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, They invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space. Nevertheless their equations bombed Hiroshima. Their terrible things worked. (“The Great Wound,” BE ; cf.  and CP : )

Jeffers has caught here in his own astonishment something of the credulity of the scientists for whom to reproduce an effect of nature was to comprehend it. They had their equations and their effects, but nothing more; ask them, he says, for their “reasons,” and “They would break up into neo-Christian jargon like Einstein” (“To Kill in War Is Not Murder,” BE ; CP : ). At their worst they were, like the civilization they all too often ignobly served, “a race of cheap Fausts, vulgar magicians” (“Decaying Lambskins”); at their best, they stood at their time’s edge of truth. In a sense, Jeffers’ view of the scientist was an updated (and suitably constrained) version of Emerson’s American Scholar. It is, indeed, remarkable how close Jeffers’ vision of the free, independent, truth-seeeking individual was to Emerson’s. With allowance for the rhetorical style of a nineteenth-century New Englander, and the sad interval of history between them, these words of Emerson’s might easily have served Jeffers: Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit;—not to be reckoned one character,—not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section to which we belong . . . ? Not so, brothers and friends—please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our hands; we will speak our own minds. . . . A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.28

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This, too, reflected the Jeffersonian ideal on which American democracy had been predicated. Emerson had watched party and section prevail, and drag the nation into civil war. Jeffers had seen two world wars betray America into empire, and, beyond that, threaten the world itself with nuclear apocalypse. The Emersonian Scholar could seem only a quaint relic in the postwar age, no more relevant to it than the Calvinist thunderings of a Jonathan Edwards had been to Emerson’s own era. The same might be said of the recluse of Walden, who had formed the other, oppositional half of the ideal Jeffers had tried to restate for his contemporaries. It is perhaps with this in mind that we may cast a last, retrospective look at Jeffers’ latterly creation, the hero of endurance. This prototype, “self-included” to recall the description of Cawdor, “savagely individual” to borrow from another quarter (BE ), was in a sense the last stand of the Jeffersonian ideal, and the embodiment, in a decadent time, of its tragic limitations. Economically marginal, politically irrelevant, the hero of endurance had, indeed, nothing to offer except his tragic potential. To be sure, this was a negative exemplum, and the fate of a Cawdor, a Thurso, or a Fraser might seem a fruitless sacrifice. Let us recall, however, that a sacrifice freely chosen and endured to the last is never, in Jeffers, inefficacious: And I said, “Burn sacrifices once a year to magic Horror away from the house, this little house here You have built over the ocean with your own hands Beside the standing boulders . . .”

Jeffers was speaking in “Apology for Bad Dreams” of the heroes of transgression who had populated his earliest mature narratives, and who had taken their fate violently in their own hands. The great rift that opened in his mind then, a change as decisive as the one that brought him from “The Coast-Range Christ” to “Tamar,” created a hero of another kind. There was a price to be paid too, as he also reflected in “Apology,” “for the future / Luck of the country.” Perhaps the hero of endurance was his somber gift to it. Freedom and democracy, dependent as they were on individual virtue, were ultimately social in their nature, as Jeffers’ half-maddened hermits and recluses had attested. But the quest for truth, even were it the truth of a moral witness pursued to madness or death, was the last stand of conscience, as it might be the last honor of a nation.

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I Jeffers had used incest through a lifetime of storytelling as a means to depict human self-absorption, as well as to ignite tragedy. Incest, he felt, was above all a failure of individuation, which as we have seen was the key to adult maturity and virtue in all its forms: emotional and intellectual independence on the personal level; freedom on the political one; ‘sanity’ on the ontological one. Although man was a social animal, and doomed, as it were, to civilization, his task was to realize his potential as an individual, and his first responsibility was to himself. This responsibility was the opposite of narcissism, not self-regarding but world-regarding. The individual had duties toward himself, clarity of perception and thought and, ideally, economic self-sufficiency; toward others in decency of behavior and mutual aid; and, toward the natural world, in responsible stewardship. Beyond that, there was a duty of praise, religious in nature, which came through participation in the world’s beauty and hence in divine value. Jeffers thought the aesthetic faculty the most distinctive human attribute, but also the rarest of gifts. He did not find it naturally in himself, although his entire work is a celebration of beauty. In a poem written after Una’s death, he confessed that he had “to consider and take thought / Before I can feel the beautiful secret / In places and stars and stones, to her it came freely” (“Salvage,” CP : ). More than once, indeed, he called Una his “eyes.” On the other hand, participation in the world’s beauty did not require perception of it. In “The Wind-Struck Music,” a poem whose valorization of the pastoral life we have noted (above, p. 156), a colloquy takes place between two riders herding their cattle on an early autumn morning: “Look, Tom. My God. Ain’t that a beautiful sunrise?” Birnam drew down his mouth, set the hard old chin, And whined, “Now, Ed: listen here. I haven’t an ounce of poetry in all my body. It’s cows we’re after.” Ed laughed and followed; they began to sort the heifers out of the herd.

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Jeffers does not mock the man without an ounce of poetry, but eulogizes him: This old man died last winter, having lived eighty-one years under open sky, Concerned with cattle, horses and hunting, no thought nor emotion that all his ancestors since the ice-age Could not have comprehended. I call that a good life; narrow, but vastly better than most Men’s lives, and beyond comparison more beautiful; the wind-struck music men’s bones were molded to be the harp for. (CP : –)

Birnam does not have to appreciate beauty to participate in it; he needs merely to live in conformity with the dictates of an unproblematic human nature: a man who likes to get up early and ride under sunrises without noticing them. This is Jeffers’ version of pastoral, animal husbandry in an Arcadian setting. One can add a little fancy to this, since man is prone to imagination and a primitive poetry, in moderation, adds to spice to existence. Onorio Vasquez, the visionary shepherd of the mid-period narratives, is the prototype of such a poet. This for Jeffers is the proper norm of human life, rooted in the earth, seasoned by the weather, open to the skies. It had indeed been the life of man not long before, at least far from the metropolis, in the time of Emerson and Thoreau. It was the life still glimpsed by Jeffers on his arrival in Carmel, although long eclipsed in the cities of the plain. Even before them, however, the fatal turn had been taken, and primitive vision hardened into religious myth. Onorio Vasquez had seen processions in the sky that faded to leave it as before, but, as Orestes complained in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” the Mycenaeans could only see “men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting, / Whom you call Gods” ( CP : ). The world had turned into a fable of human origins and destination, its very elements a mere tapestry of the human image. Beyond that lay only the realm of “harps and habitations” that Jeffers had mocked in “Night,” the medieval circumference where man (and man alone) dwelt with the Father, and beyond which imagination could not go. The Copernicus whom Jeffers praised in “The Double Axe” had not displaced the medieval cosmos but only man’s place at its center. Only a century later, however, Pascal would speak of the infinite spaces whose silence appalled him, and presently science began to extend the actual reach of the cosmos, to map its galaxies and nebulae, and, in Jeffers’ own time, to posit stellar expansion: not the mere filling up of a preconceived void, but the constant creation 322



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of space. The red shift theory intrigued him—unless, as he wrote in “Margrave,” with the wry skepticism he applied to human formulations of knowledge in general, “a trick of distance deludes the prism” (CP : ; cf. “Passenger Pigeons,” : ). The idea of a continuous creation suited his own metaphoric needs in any case, for natural process, the material correlate of God’s self-experimentation, could not be confined in a static continuum, but almost presupposed an expanding one. Until scientific reckoning had supplied such a model, post-Victorian thought played with the Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence, or worried about the cosmic heat-death posited by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (a poetic variant of which was Hardy’s image of Fate). As we have seen, such ideas, as well as the Vedic one of continuous cycles of transformation, had played an important role in Jeffers’ development. But the progressive refinement of telescopic instruments and the widening scope of astronomical theory gave him fresh impetus. He frequently visited the Lick Observatory, where his younger brother Hamilton was an astronomer, and befriended the great Edwin Hubble, who was his guest at Tor House. It is clear that he found the idea of an expanding universe liberating, not least because it diminished man’s own self-inflation: The earth was world and man was its measure, but our minds have looked Through the little mock-dome of heaven the telescope-slotted observatory eyeball, there space and multitude came in And the earth is a particle of dust by a sand-grain sun, lost in a nameless cove of the shores of a continent. Galaxy on galaxy, innumerable swirls of innumerable stars, endured as it were forever and humanity Came into being, its two or three million years are a moment, in a moment it will certainly cease from being And galaxy on galaxy endure after that as it were forever. (CP : )

Jeffers sketches in these few broad strokes a history of Western cosmology, incorporating Hubble’s nebular hypothesis but also the kernel of doubt that must underlie all metaphor. The observatory telescope, he does not fail to note, ironically resembles the medieval model of a circular universe, and so is a “mock-dome” of the heaven it reveals, old belief built into new wisdom. It is also an “eye-ball,” suggesting the eye that actually looks through it and hence the human propensity for self-reflection—the “trick that deludes the prism”— but also the Emersonian trope that had played such a critical role in “The Truce and the Peace.” 323

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An astronomical metaphor clearly lies behind Emerson’s own figure of the ‘eyeball,’ but, in a characteristic move, he assimilates the telescopic eye to the human one, making it not merely an enhancement of the human sensorium but, as it were, an incorporated faculty. Jeffers, on the other hand, carefully distinguishes the observing astronomer from his optical device, and both from the outer, independent reality they are both likely enough to misreport. A further tension is set up by the then-newly propounded theory of the expanding universe. Whereas the Emersonian eyeball sets itself up as equal to any dimension, a kind of black hole of the intelligence whose force irresistibly pulls the cosmos into the arc of cognition, for Jeffers the reverse is true: what the telescope and the spectrograph disclose is a universe whose ever-receding boundaries make any final framing impossible. To this he adds a grimly ironic conceit: I thought, no doubt [the stars] are fleeing the contagion Of consciousness that infects this corner of space. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The sane uninfected far-outer universes Flee it in a panic of escape, as men flee the plague Taking a city. (CP : ; see also above, p. 146)

This is Emerson stood on his head. Instead of imperious mind exerting its command over the cosmos, the taint of consciousness inspires a shudder of revulsion that communicates itself throughout the material world. Such a response, of course, presupposes a level of consciousness in matter itself, which is the natural corollary of a divinely immanent universe. We shall return to this issue; for the moment, however, we may note the satisfaction with which Jeffers apparently regards an indefinitely extensible cosmos. If the stars in their flight cannot get enough of space, neither, it would seem, can the poet’s imagination. Far from being appalled at the prospect of an unbounded cosmos, Jeffers is positively elated by it. Intellect, Emerson-style, is the enemy of the sublime, a pit in which it is trapped; the remedy for it is a universe whose chief occupation is a ceaseless redoubling upon itself, a furious outthrust of dimension.1 Jeffers reconstructs the passages in “Margrave” about the stars’ flight from human contagion in a passage from “The Inhumanist,” whose protagonist, as we will remember, is discovered in one scene by his daughter furiously whetting his axe. We have considered this passage in part before (pp. 40–4), but a fuller quotation reveals further aspects of it: 324



The Cosmological Sublime She found her old father Working the treadle grindstone behind the house, grinding an axe, leaning the steel on the stone So that it screamed, and a wild spray of sparks Jetted on the black air. “What are you doing to your axe, Father?” He would not hear her, she clutched His hard shoulder and drove the fingernails in. “Why are you grinding your axe, Father, In the deep night?” He turned a contorted face and said, “It is not mine. Why should I ruin mine? This is a rust-headed skull that the former people Left in the shed.” The steel screamed and she shouted, “Why are you grinding it?” “I hate, and I want to kill.” “Whom are you going to kill?” “No one,” he groaned. “Who is worth killing? I am sick tonight, I am human: There is only one animal that hates himself.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He stooped over the stone, the steel screamed like a horse, and the spark-spray Spouted from the high hill over land and sea. It was like the glittering night last October When the earth swam through a comet’s tail, and fiery serpents Filled half of heaven. (CP : –)

The old man is figured here as the deity,2 torturing his creation in the form of the screaming axe (which, as Jeffers suggests elsewhere in the poem, is also an inseparable extension of himself) to produce the “spark-spray” that spouts across the heavens like the one image the unaided eye is afforded that mimics stellar formation, a meteor shower. The old man is almost unconscious of his labors, or at any rate unwilling to acknowledge them, for he will say when questioned by his daughter in the morning that he had simply been asleep. He adds, however, that “I will be turned to the outer magnificence, the all but inhuman God. I will grind no more axes” (ibid.). The small parable Jeffers constructs here suggests that stellar creation and flight are a consequence of God trying to purge himself of his own taint of humanity, a task that must fail since, containing and comprising all things, he must necessarily be human as well as anything else. When the old man recovers his own human identity with dawn, he says, with good Jeffersian resolution, that he “will be turned to the outer magnificence” and away from what he 325

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calls, in a fine drum-roll of misanthropy, “this ghost-ridden blood-and-bone thing, civil war on two legs and the star’s contempt, this walking farce, / This ape, this—denatured ape, this—citizen—.” But the God he looks for in the “magnificence” will not be free of man, for he is not the “inhuman” God Jeffers so often praises, but, in an important modifier, all but inhuman. Even God cannot purge what he has created, and even a self-hating humanity will be unable to fully destroy itself in the nuclear apocalypse that is the setting for “The Inhumanist.” If man’s own salvation lies in the disinterested contemplation of the divine magnificence most spectacularly figured in the heavens, and thus in an aesthetically rather than instrumentally informed science that seeks to know the world as beauty, the very enterprise of science raises the human paradox in its acutest form. In “The Inhumanist,” Jeffers had praised Copernicus and Darwin as the two great human liberators, the former for having broken the little jewel-box of medieval cosmogony and opened the way for a true appreciation of the scale of creation, and the latter for having both connected man to the world through assimilation to his animal forebears and for having destroyed the illusion that it existed solely as the stage of his own drama. This twin shock to human selfimportance, however, had created its own reaction. Jeffers acknowledged the Pascalian dilemma of man’s solitude in an illimitable cosmos in the short poem “Quia Absurdum,” which begins: “Guard yourself from the terrible empty light of space, the bottomless / Pool of the stars” (CP : ).3 Men did so, as he had observed in “Thebaid,” in the form of a renewed obscurantism disguised as faith. Since this faith was not based on new religious vision but was merely a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of scientific truth—that is, the most persuasive knowledge available—it would merely beget a renewed cycle of religious warfare in which science itself would become the servant not of enlightenment but destruction. The degradation of science was thus to be feared both as a means of actually promoting ignorance, and of threatening both human and planetary survival. It was this which had provoked the questioning of “Curb Science?” and “The Inquisitors.” Jeffers took a longer view in “Diagram,” another poem we have noted briefly before (above, p. ). If the excesses of science had provoked a violent reaction, its enterprise was by no means eclipsed; indeed, the very severity of the reaction attested its underlying strength. This was partly hopeful, but also uniquely threatening:

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The Cosmological Sublime Look, there are two curves in the air: the air That man’s fate breathes: there is the rise and fall of the Christian culture-complex, that broke its dawn-cloud Fifteen centuries ago, and now past noon Drifts to decline; and there’s the yet vaster curve, but mostly in the future, of the age that began at Kittyhawk Within one’s own lifetime.—The first of these curves passing its noon and the second orient All in one’s little lifetime make it seem pivotal. Truly the time is marked by insane splendors and agonies. But watch when the two curves cross: you children Not far away down the hawk’s-nightmare future: you will see monsters. (CP : )

Here, as in “Prescription of Painful Ends,” Jeffers sees a cultural formation past its prime but not yet spent, and a rival one only fairly beginning its course, not yet fully competitive with it (one must remember the efforts of Descartes and Newton, not to mention those of a Teilhard de Chardin, to save the appearances of Christianity), but fated to clash. The form of the poem is dialectical; the outcome it predicts, however, is no happy Hegelian synthesis but a vision of “monsters.” The hawk whose “nightmare” presages the future is an image of flight, and it is the human capacity for flight—“a chief desire of man’s dreaming heart for ten thousand years,” as Jeffers would write in “The World’s Wonders,” made “the chief means of massacre” (CP : –)—that both symbolizes and (already) enacts the nightmare. If science as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge offered a noble goal for the exercise of human faculties and a basis for accepting the cosmos, science as technē threatened unparalleled destruction. There being no way to separate these elements, there was also no way to forestall them: “you will see monsters.”

II “Diagram” was, like many of the shorter poems that succeeded “The Broken Balance,” an exercise in prophecy, a function Jeffers had adopted with some reluctance and which he regarded, particularly after the onset of the Second World War, with bleak irony. Silence was best: “One should watch and not speak,” he wrote in “So Many Blood-Lakes” (CP : ). The prophet could only offer himself as an object of ridicule and derision, since he was powerless to 327

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affect events, and would be rewarded for predicting them only with hatred and contempt. “As for me”, Jeffers wrote, “laugh at me. I agree with you: it is a foolish business to see the future and screech at it” (ibid.). Nor was there any personal satisfaction in seeing private fantasy writ large as public tragedy. The despised prophet was not absolved from guilt for having spoken the truth, but all the more guilty for failing to make it prevail: So long having foreseen these convulsions, forecast the hemorrhagic Forces of civilization past prime striving to die, and having through verse, image and fable For more than twenty years tried to condition the mind to this bloody climate:— do you like it, Justified prophet? I would rather have died twenty years ago. “Sad sons of the stormy fall,” You said, “no escape: you have to inflict and endure . . . and the world is like a flight of swans.”4 I said, “No escape.” You knew also that your own country, though ocean-guarded, nothing to gain, by its destined fools Would be lugged in. I said, “No escape.” If you had not been beaten beforehand, hopelessly fatalist, You might have spoken louder and perhaps been heard, and prevented something. I? Have you never heard That who’d lead must not see? You saw it, you despaired of preventing it, you share the blood-guilt. Yes. (“The Blood-Guilt,” CP : )

The thanklessness of the prophet’s task—thankless, above all, to himself—did not absolve him of the necessity to pursue it, a point Jeffers affirmed in “Cassandra,” whose protagonist remained a heraldic figure in his verse. In the apocalyptic landscape of the postwar world, however, Jeffers thought prophecy no longer a sufficient discharge of his responsibilities. In such poems as “Meditation on Saviors,” “Return,” “The Answer,” and “Hope Is Not for the Wise,” he had insistently counseled a measured detachment from events and the purifying effects of an 328



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exposure to the natural sublime. Now, in The Double Axe, he put this counsel forward programmatically, not only in verse but in the form of a prose preface to the volume. The “burden” of the poems it contained, he said, was: to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again.5 It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty. (CP : )

The reader who has followed the argument of this book thus far will recognize in this text a convenient summary of the attitudes expressed not merely in The Double Axe but in all of Jeffers’ mature poetry. There are, nonetheless, a few points worthy of emphasis. Jeffers appeals to adult deportment in contrast to the “solipsism” that is characteristic of infantile egoism. The infant confuses the world with itself, whereas adult consciousness is predicated on distinguishing the difference between itself and the objects of its cognition. From this standpoint it is possible to consider the human situation ‘objectively,’ as based both on a sense of the world’s concrete, independent, “transhuman” existence and on the human need to find oneself in it, which (apart from the requirements of material sustenance) is grounded in the aesthetic faculty and, as its sublime corollary, “the religious instinct.” That is, humanity is a part of the cosmos, even, as Jeffers sometimes suggests, a pivotal part, but human consciousness can realize this participation only by a process of separation (“detachment”) and reintegration. When this process is incomplete, either through willed immaturity or fantasy substitution (“fanaticism and wild hopes”), man gropes in a mist of his own devising, and “slippery times”—a nice understatement for world war and the threat of nuclear holocaust!—ensue. The preface as Jeffers published it was a drastically shortened version of an original draft, which read in part: A man whose mental processes continually distort and prevent each other, so that his energy is devoted to introversion and the civil wars of the mind, is an insane man, and we pity him. But the human race is similarly insane. More than half

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The Cosmological Sublime its energy, and at the present civilized level nine-tenths of its energy, is devoted to self-interference, self-frustration, self-incitement, self-tickling, self-worship. The waste is enormous; we are able to commit and endure it because we are so firmly established on the planet; life is actually so easy, that it requires only a slight fraction of our common energies. The rest we discharge onto each other—in conflict and charity, love, jealousy, hatred, competition, government, vanity and cruelty, and that puerile passion the will to power—or for amusement. Certainly human relationships are necessary and desirable; but not to this extent. This is a kind of collective onanism, pathetic or ridiculous, or at best a tragic incest, and so I have represented it. (–)

Man’s very material success—his civilization—has the consequence of turning his unused powers and energies toward introversion. Apart from material sustenance, civilization, at least as a mass pursuit, is introversion. Jeffers does not think much of common endeavor; all genuine artistic creation and scientific discovery, he asserts, is a solitary enterprise that involves an individual pitting himself against the problematic of existence (ibid.). Few persons, he concedes, are equipped for such tasks, but a life of quiet, intense observation—that of a Thoreau, he suggests, or of Lao-tze—is honorable. For the rest, there is only the hard discipline of moderation: of loving, but not to excess; of striving, but not for dominion. Jeffers did not think it likely that many would embrace such a discipline. Mass culture in all its forms was the dominant social paradigm, in the capitalist no less than the communist collective. “We are now completely trapped,” he wrote, “in the nets of envy, intrigue, corruption, compulsion, eventual murder, that are called international politics. We have always been expansive, predatory and missionary; and we love to lie to ourselves. We have entered the period of civil struggles and emerging Caesarism that binds republics with brittle iron; civilization everywhere is in its age of decline and abnormal violence” (ibid.). In such circumstances, men would seek security, not independence, and still less the free thought from which alone truth could emerge. Yet the capacity for such truth would remain, however difficult and rare; and the exercise of it was the moral possibility of each individual.

III Jeffers would not again attempt to express himself to the general public in prose, apart from a last attempt at a poetic, “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thou330



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sand Years,” published in . In this brief essay, he attempted to describe how greatness in poetry might yet be expressed in an age of decline. The poet of such a day would not consult learned or Gongórist models: His poetry would be natural and direct. He would have something new and important to say, and just for that reason he would wish to say it clearly. He would be seeking to express the spirit of his time (as well as of all times), but it is not necessary, because each epoch is confused, that its poet should share its confusion. . . . then whom should he speak to? For poetry is not a monologue in a vacuum; it is written in solitude, but it needs to have some sort of audience in mind. . . . It may seem unlikely that [the poet] will have readers a thousand years from now, but it is not impossible if he is really a great poet; and these are the audience whom he will habitually address. If the present time overhears him, and listens too—all the better. But let him not be distracted by the present; his business is with the future. (CP : –, at , –)

These lines, too, strike familiar notes. Almost thirty years earlier, in “To the Stone-Cutters,” Jeffers had observed that “stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey of peace in old poems” (CP : ). In “The Answer,” he had counseled his readers (and himself) to love the cosmos as a whole, lest they “share man’s pitiful confusions” (: ); and in “Prescription of Painful Ends,” he had spoken of writing “poems for treasuries, timeconscious poems.” Yet he himself, in the preface to his  collection, Be Angry at the Sun, had lamented “the obsession with contemporary history that pins many of these pieces to the calendar, like butterflies to cardboard.” Poetry was in general “the worse for being timely,” he thought, offering only the excuse “that a man’s views [must] be expressed, though the poetry suffer for it” (: ). The verse he wrote during the war years was, if anything, even more preoccupied with immediate events, albeit of great weight, and even “The Inhumanist,” in which Jeffers labored mightily to recover his sense of philosophical perspective, was set in a future that directly projected the newly-dawned atomic age. The largely negative response to The Double Axe on its appearance in , even from formerly sympathetic critics, may have persuaded Jeffers that his efforts to reach a contemporary public were futile, and perhaps suggested to him that his poetry had suffered for it. In the same year, he was felled by a near-fatal attack of pleurisy while traveling in Ireland, and his health never fully recovered. Two years later, Una died after a struggle with cancer.6 The Jeffers’ marriage had often been troubled—Una had attempted suicide during a period of infidelity, and in a draft poem entitled “Phoenix and Turtle” (CP : –), 331

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Jeffers depicted himself and Una in hell (cf. the monologue, “Wilson in Hell,” which may have drawn upon the form if not the content of this poem).7 Nonetheless, their attachment was profound, and in “Whom Shall I Write For?”, he spoke, after her death, of a wound that was “bleeding-new and will never heal” (CP : ; cf. , ). Jeffers did produce a last narrative, “Hungerfield,” and an adaptation of Euripides’ Hippolytus, “The Cretan Woman,” but he completed no other work of length in his final decade.8 His shorter poems, however, showed no slackening of creative power, and, although some of them were retrospective in nature, they project as a whole a fresh attempt at instating the sublime. These poems are, in contrast to those of the years defined by the war, undated. They shed, as rigorously as the young Jeffers had the “rhyme-tassels” of his early verse, all that was didactic, hortatory, and prophetic. The purpose of this mode in the pre-war decade had been to warn against the coming conflict and the folly of America’s participation in it. That task was done, and, with “Hungerfield,” the long reckoning with both world wars as well as the Oedipal saga of the narratives. What now remained was to give free rein to the contemplative imagination.9 Lucretius and Dante had long been models for Jeffers, because they, too, had engaged the cosmography of their time, and sought to represent it in poetic synthesis. Both men, in Jeffers’ view, shared as well the consciousness of riding the downward slope of an age, Lucretius in the twilight of the Roman republic and Dante in the crisis of the medieval respublica Christiana. Lucretius was a particularly sympathetic figure, as the last of the philosopher-poets of antiquity in whom the most advanced science could still be expressed in verse of the highest standard. Such a feat was no longer possible with the mathematized physics of the modern world. But poetry would be a mere language game if it did not engage science, the dominant episteme of modernity as theology had been of Dante’s time. Jeffers was so engaged of course, as we have seen, and some of his minor protagonists—Walter Margrave, and Howard Howren in “Such Counsels You Gave To Me” (CP : –)—had been aspiring scientists.10 Science would serve as the template for his late work, however, more directly than ever before. The poem that announces Jeffers’ final phase is “De Rerum Virtute,” which he placed at the head of the shorter poems in Hungerfield and Other Poems (H –; CP : –), the last volume published in his lifetime and the last whose contents were fully authorized by him. Jeffers took great care with the selection and placement of verse in each of his books, with the longer poems 332

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(in this case, “Hungerfield” and “The Cretan Woman”) placed first, and the shorter ones—fourteen in all for this volume—forming a tertiary unit. The initial poem in this last group was typically invested with thematic significance for the unit as a whole: thus, in Be Angry at the Sun, “That Noble Flower” (“Oh, noble, rich, glowing color of blood, / Too strong for the modern world to admire”) both reflects the masque that had preceded it, “The Bowl of Blood,” and anticipates the war-obsessed poems that would follow; while in The Double Axe, “Cassandra” meditates on the function of prophecy. “De Rerum Virtute,” of course, references Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, as Jeffers acknowledged in a brief headnote to the volume. His earlier description of the poem in “Prescription of Painful Ends” (“Lucretius / Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct”) sets up the design of “De Rerum Virtute” as well, whose five sections proceed from a Yorick-like contemplation of a human skull to a sweeping description of the God-infused universe, pause in Sections III and IV to offer a general consideration of the human condition that might be considered a pocket revision of “Ode on Human Destinies,” and conclude with an affirmation of the world’s beauty as a basis of serenity, acceptance, and praise. In few of Jeffers’ poems is his ambivalence toward the phenomenon of humanity more marked. In Section I, he contemplates the thought and emotion that moved “under the thin bone vault like clouds / Under the blue one,” tossed by “Thunderclouds of wrath and white gales of fear,” but moved also—most contingently but also most mysteriously—by “the curious desire of knowing / Values and purpose and the causes of things.” This odd, vagrant impulse (Jeffers does not give it the dignity of a faculty) is both what separates the human mind from animal instinct and seeks relation to the outer world. The key idea is that of relation, or translation, because the animal participates in the world directly in a way that reflective consciousness, which traps man in the second-order reality of language, art, philosophy, and science, cannot. These constructs, it is true, are tools for penetrating the world of phenomena that is all the animal intellect may consider. But, Jeffers suggests, the individual mind will not have “discovered much” among the array of images that fills it; “And now all’s empty, a bone bubble, a blown-out eggshell.” This last image leads directly into the poem’s second section, opening on a world in which accident and chance play their role, but design finally governs: That’s what it’s like: for the egg too has a mind, Doing what our able chemists will never do,

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The Cosmological Sublime Building the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins: These for the young wing-muscles, these for the great Crystalline eyes, these for the flighty nerves and brain: Choosing and forming, a limited but superhuman intelligence: Prophetic of the future and aware of the past: The hawk’s egg will make a hawk, and the serpent’s A gliding serpent:—but each with a little difference From its ancestors—and slowly, if it works, the race Forms a new race: that also is a part of the plan Within the egg. I believe the first living cell Had echoes of the future in it, and felt Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, But feels and chooses.

The vision is Darwinian, but purposive. Evolution proceeds by trial and error, by quest and remembrance. Victory is encoded; defeat is forgotten. Jeffers posits a kind of demiurge, “a limited but superhuman intelligence” that feels its way forward ‘prophetically,’ as if toward ends not of its own devising. This demiurge does not manifest itself, but rather seems contained in what it does, as natural process exists only as a sum of interactions among phenomena. It might be thought of—perhaps must be—as a detached aspect of the divine mind itself, for the Galaxy, the firewheel On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dustgrain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe Is not blind force, but fulfils its life and intends its courses. “All things are full of God. Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.”

It is sometimes forgotten that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is ultimately a teleological work, rejecting not the ultimate purposiveness of nature but the singularity of species, and with it a biblical literalism that had long been scientifically untenable. Certainly, Jeffers’ mature panentheism entailed a divine selfactualization that precluded the “blind force” of nineteenth-century mechanics, or the blind Fate that, via Hardy, had found its way into “The Alpine Christ.” Instead, it wavers between the ancient conception of the universe as kosmos, entity, and the notion of it as an actual embodiment, both sufficient in itself 334



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and a part of something larger (“this giant atom”). For this, Jeffers reached back beyond Lucretian atomism to the vivified flux of Heraclitus, the source of the quotation that ends the second section of the poem: “All things are full of God. Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.” The seven lines that constitute the poem’s third section ponder this universal dynamic from the human perspective: Thus the thing stands; the labor and the games go on— What for? What for?—Am I a god that I should know? Men live in peace and happiness; men live in horror And die howling. Do you think the blithe sun Is ignorant that black waste and beggarly blindness trail him like hounds, And will have him at last? He will be strangled Among his dead satellites, remembering magnificence.

“The labor and the games” reduces natural process to human commerce, but even on that level it remains incomprehensible except to a presumptively suprahuman intelligence (“Am I a god that I should know?”). History precludes theodicy from the human perspective, and none other is available. But human death, terrible as it is, pales before solar extinction, which Jeffers inferentially likens to the death of a great king in lines that sharpen the original meditation of “To the Stone-Cutters” (“For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun / Die blind and blacken to the heart”). In the earlier poem, the lines proceed from human to terrestrial to solar extinction, a sequence that, from the ‘Inhumanist’ perspective, inverts their significance. The more elaborate personification of the sun in “De Rerum Virtute” uses pathetic fallacy to distance the reader from the fate of his species, which is silently comprehended in the sun’s flaming end. And whereas the only consolation offered in “To the StoneCutters” is “the honey of peace in old poems,” Section III of “De Rerum Virtute” concludes with the sun ‘remembering’ (i.e., affirming) the magnificence it has enjoyed and of which it remains part. Section IV begins with a simple declarative sentence: “I stand on the cliff at Sovranes creek-mouth.” The location is significant, for it is associated with Arthur Barclay’s assumption of his prophetic role. The old poet stands with his staff broken, however, because westward beyond “the bent shoulder of the world” another war has broken out in Korea, as senseless as “an idiot prophesying.” This image, with its Shakespearean echo and its suggestion of the prophet’s words being cast back in his face, leads to a sweeping rejection of the human problematic as such: “Indeed it is hard to see beauty / In any of the acts of man: 335

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but that means the acts of a sick microbe / On a satellite of a dust-grain twirled in a whirlwind / In the world of stars. . . .” The “sick microbe” image is a locus classicus of Jeffers’ alleged misanthropy, but the attentive reader will recognize in it a typical strategy of distancing (let us recall, once more, the “insect size” to which the woman punishing the horse is reduced in “Apology for Bad Dreams”). The microbe is far beneath the threshold of perception; the galaxy is vastly beyond it. The extreme disproportion of the comparison suggests the insignificance of man against the cosmological sublime; it does not, however, dispose of the human predicament, but oddly accentuates it. In “The Inquisitors,” the human subject is simply a greater puzzlement to the giant who has pricked its skull open, for it reveals “Only a drop of marrow. How could that spoil the earth?” In “De Rerum Virtute,” the earth itself is merely the “satellite of a dust-grain,” but the “microbe” that infects it is still, as Jeffers had only half-jestingly suggested in “Margrave,” a contagion that could set the stars in flight. This is theodicy in reverse, for whereas the traditional question seeks to reconcile a just God and an ordered cosmos with the human experience of evil, the issue for Jeffers is rather to reconcile such a God with evil as a uniquely human product. That issue was not trivial for Jeffers; indeed, he wrestled with it more closely than any other one in his work.11 He does not resolve it in the remaining lines of the section, but searches for a context that can contain it: Something may perhaps come of [man]; in any case He can’t last long.—Well: I am short of patience Since my wife died . . . and this era of spite and hate-filled half-worlds Gets to the bone. I believe that man too is beautiful, But it is hard to see, and wrapped up in falsehoods. Michelangelo and the Greek sculptors— How they flattered the race! Homer and Shakespeare— How they flattered the race!

The tentative nature of these lines, and indeed of both inner sections of the poem, contrasts sharply with the typically firm and self-assured statement of the first two. Humanity remains a predicament to itself, its discords, as Jeffers says in “Going to Horse Flats,” resolved only “by other discords”; but it remains part of the universal harmony, even if the ultimate resolution is beyond man’s ken. The Inhumanist maintains his balance not by turning away from his fellows but toward the natural sublime, where the Darwinian struggle for existence and the Pascalian emptiness of the cosmos is refigured as the manifestation of divine 336



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order and value. This is the burden of the fifth and final section of the poem, one of Jeffers’ most eloquent statements of the intrinsic “virtue of things”: One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men; The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful? These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks Stopping the somber stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos rocks off the shore, With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind, And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream— But in the sagebrush desert, all one sun-stricken Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest, Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful? Nor the great skies over the earth? The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it.

The beauty of humanity is deeply problematic, though Jeffers has affirmed it—more as an article of faith than of experience—in Section IV. To trust it is to court disaster; to portray it is merely to idealize and ‘flatter.’ The beauty of the world, set off rhetorically by a series of questions that are meant to be their own answer, is, to the undeceived eye, immediately apparent, boundless, and all-pervasive. Jeffers chooses no merely obvious or well-worn examples from his own armament, but extends them to that which is “sun-stricken,” “reeking,” and “intolerant” (i.e., inhospitable). All places and climes are part of the great virtue, and none to be preferred before any other. Such an assertion is hardly self-evident, since there are conditions and circumstances that are far from immediately attractive, not to say repellent. As we have seen, the concept of beauty in Jeffers is a complex one, involving not merely the aesthetic faculty but moral and reflective ones. It is thus a choice as well as an apprehension, for certainly the decision to find beauty not merely in a given object or class of objects but in all phenomena (save, at least from a local perspective, certain human ones) is radical in the most literal meaning of 337

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the term. Indeed, ugliness exists for Jeffers in much the same way that evil did for medieval theologians, as a condition of privation or dissociation.12 To perceive the world as a whole is necessarily, for him, to perceive it as beauty. Beauty is thus for Jeffers a holistic product of what appears in other contexts as a highly problematic faculty, consciousness itself. Here again, the dialectical relation of humans to their experience sets out the terms of engagement. The conscious mind abstracts the sense-data the world presents to it as percept and concept so that it may, to recall Jeffers’ terms, ‘feel and choose.’ It may choose, moreover, not merely to act but to value, and in this the aesthetic faculty—the normative sense of pleasure or disgust, attraction or aversion—comes into play. This faculty represents the full ripening of consciousness, the basis of moral response. It is not necessarily invoked; Tom Birnam in “The Wind-Struck Music” is perfectly, indeed admirably human despite his indifference to the beauty that surrounds him. When it does come into play, it can remain unexamined, a simple pleasure or delight in sound, form, or color. Carried further by cognitive reflection, however, it becomes, first, a category of experience as such, and, finally, an ontological conclusion about experience: “The beauty of things means virtue or value in them.” At this point, the aesthetic experience transcends the sensual altogether. It is here that Jeffers asks the last question of the section, the only one that is not rhetorical: “[Beauty] is in the beholder’s eye, not the world?” His answer is prompt: “Certainly.” Our capacity for aesthetic response is both dictated and limited by the sensorium; it is a human mediation in the world, a “translation.” What it translates—most comprehensively in the sublime—is “the transhuman / Intrinsic glory.” This category, too, is a translation; but it is one beyond which human language cannot go. Jeffers suggests that we can rest content in that, for, in one of the homely turns of phrase with which he so often drops anchor after a raid on the sublime, “It means that the world is sound.”

IV The other short poems in Hungerfield and in the posthumously collected poems of The Beginning and the End reflect in large part the themes and tropes deployed in “De Rerum Virtute”: macrocosm and microcosm; the continuum of being, and, within it, the (relative) notion of the perishable and perdurable; natural process and divine experiment; the human situation in the context of a cosmological sublime. These poems reflect and extend the creative vision, 338



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insights, and tensions of a lifetime. In the absence of an establishing narrative, they are both more tentative and more exploratory, and many present textual and editorial questions, particularly as Jeffers left no table of contents or other order of arrangement for the forty-eight poems published as The Beginning and the End, not to mention the poems and fragments excluded from the book or unknown to the editor.13 Bearing these issues in mind, we may proceed with our own exploration of these texts. As we saw in Chapter 2, Jeffers’ maturation as a poet was critically entwined with his incorporation of the Darwinian perspective in his worldview. This meant accepting and finally valorizing the struggle for existence and the predatory nature of life. Jeffers’ verse is filled with incidents and descriptions of predation, and his iconic adoption of the great winged raptors sometimes has an uncomfortably imperial ring. The symbols of eagle and hawk are of course closely tied up with the idea of crucifixion, most notably in the image of the crucified hawk in the Prelude to “The Women at Point Sur,” who, tortured by two Mexican cowhands, “flies on two nails” (CP : ). This in turn leads to the culminating vision of the self-hanged God, whose suffering both saturates and vindicates the creation through which it is enacted. Since the divine agon is both immemorial and fully present in every moment of the cosmos, it suffices Jeffers to instate a Darwinian ethos without engaging the specifics of evolutionary theory or biological history. The hawk and the hare are simply present in their eternal relation, and for the purposes of describing that relation a biblicist theory of creation is as good as an evolutionary one—or, rather, both are equally superfluous. When Jeffers took up his Lucretian project in “De Rerum Virtute,” however, the question of species origin became critical, and the progression of terrestrial life a significant theme in his verse. It may be that the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse prompted his reflections, although his pre-war vision of biological extinction in “Hope Is Not for the Wise” (“But if life even / Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven”) suggests that the subject had been previously and perhaps long contemplated.14 Whatever the case, the recapitulation of biological genesis that appears in Section II of “De Rerum Virtute” was not only the first of several such meditations, but also an opportunity for Jeffers to reflect on a subject hitherto unaddressed in his work, the relation between a purposive deity and a self-regulated cosmos. Jeffers had touched on the problem in the final lines of “Apology for Bad Dreams,” which it may be convenient to recall: 339

The Cosmological Sublime Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no thought apparent but burns darkly Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: no thought outside: a certain measure in phenomena: The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn.

Jeffers states his paradox here without attempting to resolve it. The cosmos exhibits every sign of a limitlessly purposive and capacious intelligence without any direct evidence of it except what “burns darkly” in “the human brainvault,” in the regular patterns of natural process, and in the beauty from which divine activity and value may be inferred. The question that remains is what relation divine intention bears to the working of the cosmos itself, and, from a Darwinian standpoint, to biological evolution. In “De Rerum Virtute,” the guiding image of intention is that of the “egg,” to which is imputed “mind,” a “limited but superhuman intelligence.” This intelligence is superhuman because it does “what our able chemists will never do,” namely, produce and reproduce life with an unerring exactitude of design. It is limited because, while purposive, it cannot produce itself, and it appears to lack at least one attribute of human intelligence, namely reflective consciousness. It is not, however, merely to be identified with force or instinct, because it possesses time-consciousness (“Prophetic of the future and aware of the past”), and—here Jeffers has extended the image of the egg to embrace the “globed earth”—because it “feels and chooses.” This sounds very much like a fully creative intelligence, but Jeffers checks and qualifies the idea before expressing it: “this globed earth / Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, / But feels and chooses” [emphasis added]. ‘Chance’ and ‘fortune’—random variation in Darwinian theory, the chaos of contemporary physics—is the limiting factor which keeps the system from closure, and makes creation an open-ended enterprise. Jeffers says that creative intelligence is “prophetic” of the future— not constitutive or determinative—and, if we remember the ironic emphasis he places on the idea of the prophet as one who can foresee events but not forestall them, this constraint would seem to be considerable. What appears on the surface to be a fairly straightforward exposition of intelligent design thus contains a great deal of ambiguity. If one were to characterize the kind of intelligence Jeffers discusses, one might, as we have suggested, fall back on the idea of a demiurge, a potent but limited being who possesses contingent control over a certain arena or process. There is no suggestion of 340



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such an idea in his work, however, and it would be quite foreign to the strict monism that permeates it. The intelligence that pervades natural process can be none other than a divine one, just as the world itself is a direct projection of the divine essence—“All things are full of God,” as Heraclitus says, or, as Jeffers might amend him, “all things are God.” We are left then with the idea of an absolute but self-limiting deity, who chooses to explore himself as a man might feel his way through a lit room with closed eyes, the better to understand its contours and objects. As the divine being is coextensive with his creation rather than separate from it, so his intelligence is distributed throughout it, but never finally actualized in any of its phenomena. Terrestrial evolution may thus be seen as an aspect of this informing, searching, experimental intelligence, and one particularly suited to display its activity. It proceeds purposively, but also creatively and playfully, and not always in a single direction. This latter point is made by Jeffers in “Ocean” (H –; CP : –). The aquatic mammals who ranged the Pacific coast fascinated Jeffers no less than his beloved aerial raptors, and in this poem he considers the phenomenon of evolutionary reversal, in which creatures adapted to the land return to marine life. Watching the slow procession of gray whales headed south for their mating season off Lower California, he wonders at the instinct that drives them, for “There is no April in the ocean” to tell them spring is at hand. Their memory, he concludes, is encoded: “They remember their ancestors / That crawled on earth: the little fellows like otters, who took to sea / And have grown great.” A greater memory, it seems, has driven them back to their primordial ocean home, but they must compensate with bulk and blubber to protect the warm blood that courses through them: “Go out to the ocean, little ones,” Jeffers apostrophizes, “You will grow great or die.” In the same poem, Jeffers suggests another cause for evolutionary ‘regression.’ The trout that flicker in clear mountain streams are “Little quick flames of life,” but occasionally “One of them goes mad” and returns to the sea where “The long sharks wait.” This ‘madness’ is the desire for “room and freedom” beyond the restraint of land. If such a one lives he becomes a steelhead, “grown great beyond nature in the ocean.” To him Jeffers says also: “Go out to the great ocean, / Grow great or die.” Jeffers almost always privileges the elements of air and ocean above the land, which provides security and through cultivation abundance, but sacrifices a kind of aspiration that is ultimately associated with the sublime. The antidote 341

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for this is voyaging, which frequently requires migration to an inhospitable element, and is often the result of a mysterious and half-grasped imperative. The sea mammals and the steelhead trout have made their migration; but man, the supreme voyager, makes it too: O ambitious children, It would be wiser no doubt to rest in the brook And remain little. But if the devil drives I hope you will scull far out to the wide ocean and find your fortune, and beware of teeth.

Wisdom lies in temperance, and Jeffers the Inhumanist counsels it. But he does not expect it of the species, whose destiny lies in its Imitatio Dei, the unwitting or at best half-perceived participation in the divine agon. This—and Jeffers savors the paradox—is the “devil” that drives it. “Will you grow great, or die?” he asks “the ambitious ones” at the end of the poem, only to reply that: It hardly matters; the words are comparative; Greatness is but less little; and death’s changed life.

From a cosmological perspective, the universe pulses forever with divine life; from a Darwinian one, extinction is the fate that awaits all species. Man too will run his course, whether he elects to hasten it or not. Life itself is the premise, varied, passionate, voracious. In the latter part of “Ocean,” Jeffers vividly describes the deeps where the great squid and kraken lie with their “whip-armed hungers,” and, on the muddy floor, the giant worms, “Mindless and blind, huge tubes of muddy flesh” that “move a yard in a year,” and live only to suck “drippings and offal.” These creatures are, as it were, the Id-like underside of the “whale’s-track sea,” monsters that live where the unaided eye will never see and under conditions no land animal could endure for an instant. In “Animals,” another poem from the Hungerfield set, Jeffers takes his imagination a fanciful step further: I think about the lives in the sun: They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with oxygen and salted water; they would look monstrous If we could see them: the beautiful passionate bodies of living flame, batlike flapping and screaming, Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the storm-tides Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There are many other chemistries of animal life Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids. (H ; CP : )

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This is obviously a very stretched definition of “animal life,” although no greater a continuum, perhaps, than that which Dante asks us to imagine between the Inferno and the Paradiso. We must recall, too, that for Jeffers the inspirited cosmos itself is alive, and all being is to a greater or lesser degree sentient. To put this in more philosophical terms, the perception of value is rooted in specificity, and all things perceived in the uniqueness of their specificity are, to a sufficiently heightened consciousness, alive. This is the burden of “Oh Lovely Rock,” in which the poem’s speaker, as we will recall, apprehends a cliff-wall by firelight as if the rock were “bodily / And living.” We can see in this passage, too, how Jeffers will make the leap, a decade later, of imagining three hills assuming the form of gigantic Indian tribesmen moving among the Ventana mountains (“The Inquisitors”). Even in “Oh Lovely Rock,” however, there is no timeless mystical suspension, but an accompanying awareness of the rock as “Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods,” that is, as the product of geological activity. The historicity of the cosmos is built into the post-Copernican and post-Darwinian perception of it, the sense of an unfolding, open-ended process. This reinforces teleology by humbling it, since if the cosmos appears to exhibit the obscure purposiveness we might call destiny, it is no longer a humanly defined or even a humanly comprehensible one. The givenness of the pre-Copernican world, with its exact design, has been replaced by a massive contingency to be sifted for its clues. In Jeffers’ late project, the cosmological sublime is partly to be interrogated by a Darwinian one. Although the cosmos itself is ‘alive’ in the sense we have canvassed in his work, biological life is the kind we share, and can best construe. In the late poem titled by Bennett “The Beginning and the End” (BE –; CP : –), the longest text completed by Jeffers after “Hungerfield” and “The Cretan Woman,” he ponders the emergence of earthly life, and humanity as its latest and most idiosyncratic product. The poem begins with an extended passage that, speculating on the origins of life on the planet, expands on Section II of “De Rerum Virtute.” This life emerges out of what appears to be a random agglomeration of elements, fiercely lashed together in the primitive early atmosphere: [from] impossible molecules, amino-acids And flashy unstable proteins: thence life was born, Its nitrogen from ammonia, carbon from methane, Water from the cloud and salts from the young seas,

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The Cosmological Sublime It dribbled down into the primal ocean like a babe’s urine Soaking the cloth: heavily built protein molecules Chemically growing, bursting apart as the tensions In the inordinate molecule became unbearable— That is to say, growing and reproducing themselves, a virus On the warm ocean.

At the same time, however, Jeffers figures the earth as “a female thing,” “Screaming for life in the womb” like a mare at the “stallion” sun, and the sun as answering with its generative powers. As the earth cooled, the “virus” of life—a portent already ironic—“labor[ed] to maintain itself ” in a hostile environment, enclosing its cells with walls. Jeffers asks why, or rather how this would come about, since the earliest life was “nothing but a dirty scum on the sea / Dropped from the foul air.” His answer is implicit in the description of the earth as a mare in heat, an unconscious force whose violent activity, worked out over aeons, nonetheless tended toward a predestined end. This end is incomprehensible and as yet unfulfilled, but the processes by which it accomplishes itself may be discerned. The forms of life fed at first on chlorophyll and sunlight, but certain assassins among them Discovered that it was easier to eat flesh Than feed on lean air and sunlight: thence the animals, Greedy mouths and guts, life robbing life, Grew from the plants; and as the ocean ebbed and flowed many plants and animals Were stranded in the great marshes along the shore, Where many died and some lived. From these grew all land-life, Plants, beasts and men: the mountain forest and the mind of Aeschylus And the mouse in the wall.

This Darwinian tour d’horizon suggests several points. The earliest, protozoan life, “cradl[ing] in peace / On the warm waves,” had been (relatively) secure in its womb-like existence after developing its protective shell. Its ‘birth’ into motility and consciousness had begun as the awareness of prey. This awareness was primitive but deadly; it engendered the capacity to kill, and thus created, at the most critical juncture of life’s development, its first truly differentiated kind, the predator. Jeffers uses the more striking phrase “assassins” to emphasize the radical nature of this departure. The greatest leap of consciousness in the chain of life was the discovery of the other, perceived as a source of nutrition. From this came all else, including the magnificently specialized eagle, “Monstrously beautiful, eyes and claws, dawning / Over the rock-ridge,” 344



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and the “passionate human intelligence” that, “Straining its limits,” took like Cawdor’s eagle the cosmos itself for its prey. For Jeffers, death entered the cosmic calculus when the relationship between predator and prey emerged from the phenomenon of life. It is difficult to speak of protozoan death; dissolution seems a more appropriate term for the fate of the first multicellular organisms. Jeffers was intrigued, as we have seen, by spectacular stellar extinctions, figuring them as “deaths” that presaged the cyclical retraction of the heavens. In “Shiva,” he had described this process in terms of predation—“the hawk that picks out the stars’ eyes”—but also as a process of cleansing and renewal that would “Hang new heavens.” This was the final vision of the Heraclitean flux that Jeffers had invoked in “De Rerum Virtute,” the ceaseless transformation of natural process. ‘Death’ might be construed as a metaphor for certain localized events within that context, but as a term of existential weight it required an oppositional, deliberative character, a design upon some other. It required, in a word, killing. This was the significance of Jeffers’ choice of the term ‘assassin’ to describe the most primitive act of “life robbing life.” Death thus appears for him not as a simple biological destiny, but the condition of evolved life as such. We are all, he suggests, and from the beginning, the heirs of Cain. Death, then, is both the price and the very spur of evolution, which proceeds from simple differentiation to final individuation. This process “feels and chooses” its way, as Jeffers says in “De Rerum Virtute,” exhibiting an intelligence that transcends the mere vagaries of chance and circumstance while still enacting itself in a realm of contingency. The nature of such a process is its prodigality; “many” species die and some live. Nor does the flood of life confine itself to a single pathway or necessarily privilege a certain outcome; whatever exists asserts its own character and value, “the mountain forest and the mind of Aeschylus / And the mouse in the wall.” Biological life occupies a unique realm both for its exotic variety and its exfoliated consciousness. Pondering again the growth (and declension) of mind—“pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror”—Jeffers asks again how such phenomena could have emerged from mere chemical processes, and answers as before: I think they were here [i.e., present in potentiam] already. I think the rocks And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and galaxies Have their various consciousnesses, all things are conscious;

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The Cosmological Sublime But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire: It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth From which it came. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . all things have their own awareness, As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all, Like the cells of a man’s body making one being, They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God. (“The Beginning and the End”)

Once again, the Lucretian calculation (Lucretius is invoked in this poem, too) produces the Heraclitean conclusion; the atomized world finds its final unity as the material incarnation of a supreme being. In relation to such a being, humans stand, Jeffers says, as “martyrs,” that is, as suffering witnesses, witnesses through suffering.15 Human awareness is different from that of other sentient (and insentient) entities only in degree, but the degree is significant, and so is its result. Only man offers not merely praise to creation but witness and, brokenly—through tragic or religious transgression—as divine imitation. This is paid for by cruelty and evil, traits endemic to humanity and virtually unique to it. The human paradox is to exhibit both what is most noble and most base; it makes man both the most interesting and odious of creatures, and certainly the most problematic. The subject of man leads Jeffers to the last part of his poem, in which he ascribes a fanciful Nordic genealogy to the human race—the Olduvai gorge had not yet been discovered, and with it the African origins of homo sapiens—but centers his description on the notion of a primal trauma caused by climatic changes that forced man’s arboreal ancestors to compete with powerful predators for sustenance. An exacerbated consciousness, formed by “shock and agony” and the necessity to devise tools, language, and organization for survival, left man with a “wound” that “has never healed,” and from which “trembling religion and blood-sacrifice,” the basis of all human culture, issued.16 Jeffers places critical emphasis on this latter point. The essential elements of religion—fear, propitiation through sacrifice, and magical control—derived from a world whose terrors inspired hatred. This hatred is primary, but cannot be expressed directly for fear of offending the powers that rule the 346



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world; instead, “the great religions of love and kindness,” in a kind of reaction-formation, assert an ideal of benevolence and trust to “conceal” it. From this perspective, the contradictory impulses that compose the experience of the sublime—awe on the one hand, terror and revulsion on the other—suggest this fundamental, irresolveable conflict. Humans shun it, papering their sky with the “striding and feasting” gods of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and creating a sheltered, self-referential, and sterile world of inversion. The Jeffersian project was ultimately to recall men to the sublime, for only in the experience of its power and immediacy could they ground themselves in a reality beyond themselves, and find their way beyond the maze of illusion that led not to security but ultimately to self-destruction. It was in this sense that civilization was, as Jeffers so often insisted, “the enemy of man,” for its very success in ameliorating the material conditions of life denied outlet to atavistic fears and passions that, bred in the bone, could only seek release in collective violence. In essence, this had been Freud’s response to the Great War, and in the speculative anthropology of his Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism he sought, as did Jeffers, to find a primal cultural root for modern warfare. The Second World War confirmed Jeffers’ sense of a slow descent into barbarism, with the advent of nuclear weapons suggesting that it might be much hastened. Like Freud, Jeffers saw no solution to the dilemma of modern civilization, but only accommodation for the exceptional individual who, whether through the ‘talking cure’ or the stoic refusals of Inhumanism, might find realistic acceptance of the terms of life. Unlike him, however, he saw a general destiny for humanity, although one whose end could not be foreseen or guaranteed. “The human race,” he wrote in “The Beginning and the End,” “is one of God’s sense-organs, / Immoderately alerted to feel.” Its capacities, that is, exceeded its material requirements, and could not rest content in their satisfaction. In part this was apprehensive, the result of the “wound” that left man perpetually insecure and terror-stricken in the core of his being; but in part it reflected a feeling-toward-truth that Jeffers could not but believe to be responsive to a divine purpose, however partial and obscured. Man was the immoderate animal, an exacerbated “nerve-ending” in nature. One could learn something about the circumstances that had formed him, the “ancient wound” that, never healed, “lets . . . the stars / Into the animal-stinking ghost-ridden darkness”; beyond that, however, one could only conjecture. As Jeffers wrote in the concluding lines of “The Beginning and the End,” man 347

The Cosmological Sublime has mind And imagination, he might go far And end in honor. The hawks are more heroic but man has a steeper mind, Huge pits of darkness, high peaks of light, You may calculate a comet’s orbit or the dive of a hawk, not a man’s mind.

That man might “end in honor” might be thought an unusual, even a start­ ling sentiment in Jeffers, but it is consistent with his lifelong meditation on the human condition. In “Monument,” another poem from his posthumous volume, he speaks of the “honor and hardship” of being human (BE 25; CP : 419), and the two are inseparably connected. Man’s mind is “steeper,” that is, more capacious than that of other creatures, but this scope derives from racial memories of terror, the open wound that leads back to the “ghost-ridden darkness” where the relapse into superstition, barbarism, and even savagery awaits. It is precisely the constant threat of atavistic regression that drives human endeavor, and haunts man’s noblest achievements—“no great poem, / ” as Jeffers says, “Without the blood-splash” (“The Beginning and the End”). It haunts, too, the sublime, which lets more world in, and thus by definition more terror, than any other experience. As these reflections remind us, Jeffers owed a considerable debt to German Idealism, particularly to Kant but also to Herder: the former for his conception that man’s development had been compelled by the challenge of a hostile environment he was ill-equipped, except by wit, to master, and the latter by his sense of humanity as a project of self-transcendence. The cold shock administered to these proto-Darwinian conceptions by Darwinism itself inspired the neo-Kantian revival whose milieu the young Jeffers shared; in Jeffers’ own case, however, the shock was taken for salutary, and his work would strive, to quote him a little out of context, to “keep the spot sore.” Man needed continual reminder of his origins, the order of things to which he belonged and by which he was bound, in exact proportion to his desire to escape and transcend them. This caution was the burden of “Passenger Pigeons” (BE –; CP : – ). The passenger pigeon, a species still abundant in historical time, had gone inexplicably extinct: “They became too many, they are all dead, / Not one remains.” The explosion of their numbers was as mysterious as their subsequent disappearance, for as the ordinary means by which nature kept its populations in check—predator relationships, habitat limitations, pestilence, climate change—could not restrain their growth, so their multitude did not spare a single one when the time for harvest came. All one could say was that the excess 348



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of their abundance appeared to be connected to the totality of their extinction, as if a basic measure were being reasserted. Now a new species was dominant in nature—“In spite of wars, famines and pestilences we are quite suddenly / Three billion”—and its distinguishing characteristic was its rejection of measure: we have bridled the cloud-leaper lightning, a lion whipped by a man, to carry our messages And work our will, we have snatched the live thunderbolt Out of God’s hands. Ha? That was little and last year—for now we have taken The primal powers, creation and annihilation; we make new elements, such as God never saw, We can explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left but pure energy . . .

Jeffers distinguishes here between the acquisition of knowledge and its exploitation. The position he had taken in “Curb Science?” was still the one he defended, namely that new understanding could not be held back except by a willed obscurantism that was simply a barbarism without the grace of adventure or hope. It was not the fact that men could now wield and in a manner comprehend powers once reserved for the gods that was at issue, but that they should have brought them down into the “stews” of human vanity. Yet it was no longer clear to him that the pursuit of knowledge could be separated, even intellectually, from its abuse. Addressing the interlocutor of “Passenger Pigeons,” Death, its speaker says: You watched the dinosaurs Grow into horror: they had been little efts in the ditches and presently became enormous, with leaping flanks And tearing teeth, plated with armor, nothing could stand against them, nothing but you, Death, and they died. You watched the sabre-tooth tigers Develop those huge fangs, unnecessary as our sciences, and presently they died. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We have minds like the tusks of those forgotten tigers, hypertrophied and terrible . . .

Man’s instrumental control of the earth coincided with his increasing divorce from it, and hence from sanity and survival; his ability to wield ‘divine’ powers with a violence turned inward against himself. In a Darwinian sense, his distinctive capacity—mind—had grown dysfunctional, as the dinosaur’s size 349

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had been, or the ancient tiger’s teeth. Jeffers had thought that “bitter nature” might “cure” him of his fevers and sicknesses (“What of It?”); in “Staggering Back Toward Life,” he suggested that man needed “a new dark-age, five hundred years of winter and the tombs for dwellings” (CP : ). These poems reflected the Second World War and the nuclear apocalypse that seemed to impend in its wake, but at a decade’s distance from “The Inhumanist,” Jeffers now suggested that mere historical calamity and enforced regression could not alter the fatal flaw in man’s makeup. The individual might still “make his health in his mind” and “love the coast opposite humanity” (“Meditation on Saviors”), but the race seemed bent on suicide. As the biological destiny of the individual was death, so, of course, the destiny of the species was extinction. In that sense, ‘Life’ as a perdurable phenomenon was an abstraction, and ‘Death’ a point in a process. Nonetheless, as his own mortality approached, Jeffers found the personification of Death both a subject for meditation and a heuristic device. In “Hungerfield,” the struggle between the protagonist and a hypostatized Death provided the core of the narrative, and in a poem from the same volume, Jeffers rang various changes on the idea of Death: I think of you as a great king, cold and austere; The throne is not gold but iron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I think of you as a mean little servant, but steward of the estate, Pale and a hunchback, shuffling along the corridors, Tapping at every door. You have the keys of the treasury. (“To Death,” H –; CP : )17

Death is both master and servant in this poem, as he is in “Hungerfield”: the master of living organisms and species, whose term he declares, but the servant of natural process, whose workings require an endless cycle of birth, decay, and dissolution. When Hungerfield temporarily defeats Death, disaster ensues: This was the time—it was near midnight here—for a quarter of an hour Nobody died. Disease went on, and the little peripheral prophetic wars, the famines and betrayals, Neither man nor beast died, though they might cry for him. Death, whom we hate and love, had met a worse monster And could not come. (CP : )

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In “Passenger Pigeons,” Death plays the straight man to the speaker of the poem, who tells him to “turn your great rolling eyes away from humanity, / Those grossly craving black eyes.” Death, the speaker declares, must “respect” humanity; he may cull the weak and old, but the race itself is too powerful, and near to godlike in the powers it can wield. It has, the speaker says, “enormous privilege”; and the final privilege is, of course, exemption from death, whose powers, too, it claims in “the jet-plane and the death-bomb and the cross of Christ.” These are, respectively, the powers to inflict death and annul it, and control of death, as the speaker (uneasily) suggests, is the goal of all man’s striving, the driving force of his science and culture. Death has listened in almost complete silence to the speaker’s catalogue, but the poem’s last lines are his: “Oh,” he said, “surely You’ll live forever”—grinning like a skull, covering his mouth with his hand— “What could exterminate you?”

Jeffers’ own last poems are a working-toward-death, as Yeats’ are; in “Oysters” (BE –; CP : –), he even suggests that death is the proper passion of age: “For old men death’s the fire, / Let them dream beautiful death, not women’s loins.” The sense of his own approaching death is mixed, however, with the premonition of species extinction, of a humanly futureless world. His labor is thus two-fold, rage at the dissolution of personal ego mingling with a massified humanity moving blindly toward planetary suicide. It is almost a race toward death: Heavy and yellow with the clay wrack from the flooded valley The river forces itself into the sea Not mixing in it, a long crude ochre-serpent outlined with foam Splitting the blue ocean. Thus a man through the mass of men Forces his way, savagely individual, It is only saints and idiots forget themselves. (“Savagely Individual,” BE ; CP : )

The river is Jeffers, spending himself mindfully; it is also the mass, flowing heedlessly, in and from which he struggles to distinguish himself. Both metaphors complete themselves in the ocean. The valley river renews itself, and so too does the human one, in which death is balanced by birth. The nuclear specter, however, threatened to render birth monstrous and sterile (“The Beautiful Captive,” BE –; CP : –, and cf. n.  above), and thus destroy the equation. The aging poet would not survive his race, of course, but there was 351

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every possibility that they would perish together. This, it seemed to Jeffers, was the ultimate ignominy: to be immured in the mass, to perish in its folly, to be denied the imprescriptable dignity of one’s own death: When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War, We used to take it for known that the human race Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks, And the earth flourish long after mankind is out. (“End of the World,” BE ; CP : )

The common fantasy of being the world’s last survivor is an obvious ego defense mechanism, and an anti-Darwinian one as well. In some respects, Jeffers was loth to give it up (“I [am] the last living man / That sees the real earth and skies,” he says in “Thebaid”), but in “The End of the World,” he consigns the ‘faceless flocks’ of mankind to the order of the passenger pigeons. There seems neither value nor purpose in being the last representative of such a species. At most, as he writes in “An Extinct Vertebrate,” its ruins might suggest a former dignity as they aged “Into the stone-eyed honor of tragedy” (CP : ).

V “When man stinks, turn to God,” Jeffers wrote in the wartime poem “Teheran” (CP : ). God was in a sense the final personage; at the same time, he was one from whom no reply could ever be expected, the God who, as Jeffers commented in “The Great Explosion,” did not care and would never cease (BE –; cf. CP : –). The qualities of persistence and (from the human perspective) ruthlessness were necessarily linked in the divine nature. Unlike any aspect of his creation, God would never “cease”—cease to be, and cease to work his will, a condition which, for his creatures, meant the unending round of birth and death. It meant, too, the vast cycles of stellar and galactic existence, all subject to the abrupt explosions and grinding pulverization of natural process; and it meant the primary process of cosmic absorption and re-emission that Jeffers had described in “Night” and “Shiva,” and in the pitiless theodicy of “At the Birth of an Age”: 352



The Cosmological Sublime Every discovery is a broken shield, a new knife of consciousness Whetted for its own hurt; pain rises like a red river: but also the heroic beauty of being, That all experience builds higher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I know not that I shall choose to cease; I have long strength and can bear much. (CP : )

God withholds mercy even from himself. The moments of cosmic resumption—“the outer nothing and the wandering infinite night”—are his “peace,” but, of course, they are coexistent with the pain of creation and process: I am tortured against the summit of my own peace and hanged on the face of quietness. (Ibid.)

This ‘peace’ is present to Jeffers’ God as a cup of water might be to the thirsty man who refuses it, or, perhaps better said, both refuses and drinks at the same time, the better to savor the ultimate extremes of thirst and repletion. “These are my mercy and goodness,” his theophanic deity announces; this is what will not “cease.” His mercy does not however extend to his creatures, for whom death is the only savior, nor to his creation, which can only await dissolution. This is the process we are invited to observe, and, in observing, praise: The universe expands and contracts like a great heart. It is expanding, the farthest nebulae Rush with the speed of light into empty space. It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust-clouds and nebulae Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they stick in one lump And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no way to express that explosion; all that exists Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into all the sky, new universes Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like charging spearmen again Invade emptiness. (“The Great Explosion,” BE –4; CP : 471)

Divine value is self-constituting and ontologically complete; there is no existence, no conception, and thus no perspective beyond itself by which it could be measured. Validation—theodicy—is a human problem; and the answer Jef353

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fers gives to it, both in the formal and aesthetic properties of his verse and the external world it affirms, is beauty. When Jeffers speaks of the new universes that “Jewel the black breast of night,” he both describes and creates beauty—a secondary beauty, because derived from and dependent upon a perceived one, which in turn is the mere translation of an ineffable “magnificence.” The poet has no other manner of speaking or perceiving. It is his “virtue,” his way of participating in divine value. The philosopher’s mode of description, or the scientist’s, is necessarily different. For them, aesthetic valorization is a by-product of their specialized study; for the poet, it is both the primary datum of experience and the final expression of it. As Jeffers declares in one of the Hungerfield poems, “The Beauty of Things” (H ; CP : ): to feel Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Jeffers includes in this poem’s catalogue of beauty the natural elements, but also “Beast, man and woman,” and “The blood-shot beauty of human nature.” No object is too small to be praised and none too large; none too faulty or too flawed. Thus it is that tragedy itself is praise, in all its extremes of pain, suffering, and terror. Indeed, it is these very elements that give us our closest communion with divinity, our privileged glimpse of the sublime: He is beautiful beyond belief. And we, God’s apes—or tragic children—share in the beauty. We see it above our torment, that’s what life’s for. (“The Great Explosion”)

For Jeffers, the writing of tragedy and the writing of lyric had been two aspects of a single project, a single duty of praise. As was suggested at the beginning of this study, critics who decouple the narratives from the lyrics misrepresent that project, or at any rate fail to see it in its full unity and complexity. Jeffers lamented the waning of his narrative impulse (“But I Am Growing Old and Indolent” [BE ; CP : ]), but the praise of creation and of God—one and the same thing, of course, in his panentheism—remained deeply imperative. In the lines just quoted from “The Great Explosion,” Jeffers declares that God is beautiful “beyond belief.” As in the terminology we parsed earlier in our discussion of Jeffersian superlatives in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” this apparently worn and cliched phrasing has a quite precise significance. God’s beauty 354



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is ‘beyond belief ’ because it is beyond any human power to hold, affirm, or express it—“Oh cracked and twilight mirrors,” as Jeffers had written in “Love the Wild Swan,” “ever to catch / One color, one glinting flash of the splendor of things”;—it is beyond the substance of things seen and unseen in any conception or creed. “The heart-breaking beauty [of things] / Will remain,” Jeffers wrote in “Credo,” “when there is no heart to break for it” (CP : ). The duty of praise begins in the recognition of its superfluousness and inadequacy, and it is on that sense of humility that it is predicated: —This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game, Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast, Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. (“Love the Wild Swan”)

The duty of praise, which is clearly set out in “Love the Wild Swan,” is in no way lessened by the poverty of expression to which it is condemned. Its exercise, a form of prayer and at the same time a species of redemption, ideally occupied what Jeffers had called in “Fire on the Hills” ‘the whole mind,’ for it encompassed both the local Darwinian world of pain, suffering, and death, and the immeasurable splendor of cosmological process. This vision had been unavailable to Aeschylus or Dante, whose greatness had been circumscribed by the epistemological limits of their time; it had been rejected by the successors of Tennyson and Arnold, who had retreated from the labor of incorporating the post-Copernican and post-Darwinian cosmos in their verse into an arid and sterile aestheticism. The vast responsibility—and, inevitably, the vast ambition—that Jeffers expressed was a tasking of poetry to engage the world disclosed by science, and to resynthesize the sublime. Copernicus and Darwin had not shrunk from their task; the modern poet could not shrink from his without dooming poetry itself to irrelevance. Such were the stakes that Jeffers presented; such was the career he had consciously undertaken, and the vision that, in his last poems, he still sought to elaborate and extend. As we have seen, Jeffers extended the cosmological range of his Darwinian meditations in the late poems, speculating about planetary formation and the origins of terrestrial life. Some of these speculations were fanciful; in “The Great Wound” (BE –; cf. CP : , , ), he imagined the moon as formed by the gravitational pull of a passing “star” on the primordial molten surface of the earth, thus scooping out the Pacific basin. That the earth should have suffered such a sacrificial ‘wound’ was a very Jeffersian conceit; but, as the “mathematicians and physics men” had their mythology, constructing and 355

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discarding theories as occasion served, so too the poet had his, launching the moon on a great tide or a thousand ships on the face of a woman. Like the scientists, the poet also worked “alongside the truth, / Never touching it” in his wilderness of metaphors. It was thus not to the beauty near at hand that Jeffers now increasingly turned, however rooted in lyric impulse his work remained, but to the ultimate mystery of the cosmological vista, a world beyond sensation, beyond calculation, and almost beyond thought: I strain the mind to imagine distances That are not in man’s mind: the planets, the suns, the galaxies, the super-galaxies, the incredible voids And lofts of space: our mother the ape never suckled us For such a forest: The vastness here, the horror, the mathematical unreason, the cold awful glory, The inhuman face of our God: It is pleasant and beautiful. (“Pleasures,” CP : )

Each colon seems another check of the mind, another impassable barrier, until we reach the final and by now conventional affirmation: “It is pleasant and beautiful.” Perhaps so, the reader may rejoin; but to whom? Presumably to the inhuman God, whose self-inflicted torture the universe represents, and who smiles at it nonetheless; possibly to the poet himself, praising like Tertullian what passes understanding precisely because it does so, and embracing horror because it is horrible. To see beauty in the local and the obvious—“dawn / Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel Valley to meet the sea,” or “the ocean horizon, smoked amber and tender green” (“The Great Explosion”; “The Ocean’s Tribute,” CP : )—is one thing, and difficult enough to render; but to see it in the unseeable and the all but inconceivable might strain the mind indeed. At times Jeffers confesses defeat, and as in “Pleasures” merely states the case. But the poet’s task remains to express all things in terms of beauty, to find the lucid metaphor, as he does in “Fire,” where he proceeds from the flicker of fire in a hearth to The fire of the sun and stars and the pale sheet fire Of a far-off nebula, a mist-fleck at midnight In the infinite sky; a sworl of a million million suns, dragging their satellites Like dark women by the hair Through the wild acre. (H ; CP : )

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The image vivifies, and is not reductive; rather, it unites disparate entities, and, in the mysterious way of the right image, clarifies them. The most clarifying image is that of God, the thought that shapes and contains all the rest, and brings high and low together. God can be found in the humblest of phenomena; his beauty, says Jeffers, is “high, clear, and visible, / Hauteclaire like Roland’s sword” (“Animula,” BE ; CP : ); it is his “signature” (“Look, How Beautiful,” BE ; CP : ): but its distances and disparities make too great a claim on us. There may seem no transition more seamless and familiar than that between a sunset and the night sky, but if one sees it with the Copernican eye, the bright tapestry dissolves and the void that appears is all the more profound for the show that has preceded it (“but presently come the stars, and we are too small” [“Animula”]). It is not that both are not beautiful, but that the gap between them is too great for us. We bridge it by metaphor, as the “wandering Hebrew poet” Jesus (BE ; CP : ), to whom Jeffers was imaginatively closer than any other historical figure, made a metaphor of himself to describe God. That was a terrible if necessary error—as Jeffers never tires of repeating, “To see the inhuman God is our health” (“See the Human Figure,” BE ; CP : )—but in “He Is All,” he permits himself the conceit of clothing God for a moment in human form: There is no God but God; he is all that exists, And being alone does strangely. He is like an old Basque shepherd, Who was brought to California fifty years ago And has always been alone, he talks to himself, Solitude has got into his brain, Beautiful and terrible things come from his mind. God is a man of war, Whom can he strike but himself? God is a great poet: Whom can he praise but himself? (BE ; cf. CP : )

The statement that begins this short poem (“There is no God but God; he is all that exists”) echoes the quotation from Heraclitus in “De Rerum Virtute”; both affirm Jeffers’abiding panentheism. The poem’s second line recalls for us yet again the comment from “Apology for Bad Dreams”: I have seen these ways of God. I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings. He being sufficient might be still.

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Both passages reflect a cold wonder at the fact of creation, of a kind that subverts the normal temper of Jeffers’ theodicy. There is an implicit rebuke in the terse observation, “He being sufficient might be still”—that is, that divinity need not have created or perpetuated a world of ceaseless transformation and suffering—and a further one in the remark that “being alone” [he] “does strangely.” Jeffers develops this thought into the central image of the eccentric Basque shepherd, who, far from being a creator, is rather a sufferer who himself was merely “brought.” There are two suggestions here, neither of which Jeffers chooses to resolve: that God indeed may not choose to be ‘still,’ but that dynamism inheres in his nature; and that some dynamic principle precedes him, “the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining” that he alludes to in “Night.” One may see in this a remnant of the old idea of an impersonal force that manifests itself as a “purposeless eternity” of power (AC ), and for which the notion of ‘God’ is merely a counter, a manner of speaking. At the end of the poem, Jeffers shifts gears again, describing God as a “poet” (that is, not an ultimate creator, but one who plays with the facets of creation) and as “a man of war” who finds only himself to strike. This returns us to the imagery of “The Great Explosion,” in which Jeffers posits the universe as a “great heart” whose contractions never cease and which, being immortal, knows no repose. The ubiquity of process is finally all we know, and “faceless violence,” he concludes, “is the root of all things” (BE ; CP ). This is not surprising, for in a world of flux nothing is stable, least of all the metaphors that must describe it. God, for Jeffers, is that within us that compels us to praise and that which is to be praised, the sum and substance of all. We know that he is life; we personalize him to be able to name and speak of him. He is as distant as the farthest galaxy—the ultimately unreachable Oedipal Father toward whom we forever strive—and as close to us as flesh and breath. He devours us in each instant; and in each, we consent to be devoured. This consent, Jeffers suggests, is our own essence, our participation in divinity, our place in the terrible Yes; and the poet, too, to recall his grim phrase, “cannot feed on this time of the world / Until he has torn it to pieces, and himself also” (“Tear Life to Pieces,” BE ; CP : ).

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Jeffers’ project of the sublime, if one may call it that, was to embrace both experience and existence in a single vision. Such a project was waiting for an American poet of sufficient capacity and ambition. Many streams fed into it: Kantian idealism, its Emersonian variant, and the Nietzschean response to it; the Romantic construction of the sublime, particularly in Wordsworth and Shelley; the models of American identity proposed by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; the romance of the American West as depicted by several generations of painters, photographers, and explorers, and epitomized in the grand natural formations of the Pacific coast and its ranges. At the same time, the picture was complicated by the philosophic pessimism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the challenges posed by Darwinism, entropy, and the cosmological implications of the new physics and astronomy. All these elements, finally, were annealed in the crucible of the Great War, whose devastation added a new and grotesque dimension to the sublime that seemed to mock all received value, not to say any attempt at cultural synthesis. Among the victors, the defining text of the hour was The Waste Land; among the vanquished, The Magic Mountain. If the sublime was invoked at all, it was as Heidegger’s existential void, a place not full but empty of meaning. It was against this current that Robinson Jeffers strove. Jeffers had sensed his own belatedness even before the war. His disaffection with the verse tendencies of his time had left him with nothing, as he put it, but the music of “dead men,” and perhaps, since new wine could hardly be poured into such bottles, with their ideas as well. To be an American Tennyson or Swinburne was, as he knew, absurd; to be the American Mallarmé was no more enticing. The war stimulated Jeffers to attempt a vast poetic epic in “The Alpine Christ,” which would, although rejected, remain the matrix of his career. At the same time, his enforced distance from the fighting left him with a purely imaginative experience of it. In the isolation of Big Sur, these imaginings, mixed 359

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with the grandeur of the region, instated for him a problematic of the sublime at a moment when it had ceased to exist for almost everyone else except the new Western photographers who would find themselves drawn to Jeffers in the s and s. Jeffers’ project was of course intellectually wider than theirs, but the pictographic elements of his verse, particularly the technique of tight and long focus that was so distinctive an element of it, showed a deep and strategic affinity to the work of such men as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.1 The result was a unique voicing that, going back to the oldest Saxon roots of the language for meter and tone, partook as well of the most technically advanced artistic medium of his own time. Quite as much as any philosophical or religious quest, the forging of that vocal resource created an expressive capacity for engaging the sublime such as none of Jeffers’ contemporaries possessed, or indeed sought. Backed by the biblical cadences that mixed with it, it formed a style vatic, authoritative, and candid: what Robert Boyers memorably called Jeffers’ “sovereign voice.”2 Jeffers sounds unlike any of his Modernist contemporaries because, virtually alone among them, his project was not merely to report on the fragmentation of his time but to offer a holistic alternative to it oriented toward the external world. The sublime was his vital context. He employed tragedy because it was the form most appropriate to the human encounter with it, and because, in the Great War’s aftermath, satire was the only other available trope for general commentary. He used the figure of cosmic recurrence, not, as in Nietzsche, as a token of despairing finitude, but of perdurable value: “things temporally / Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present.” Jeffers’ God was a God of innovation, ceaselessly experimental; but also a God of order, whose canvas was so vast and whose design so cohesively intricate—“magnificent” was his preferred term for it, in the quite literal sense of a specular enlargement—that human intelligence could repose in it, and decipher it as beauty. Jeffers knew that his project was in certain respects backward-looking, an attempt to recover cultural and ontological coherence in a time that had largely abandoned the quest for either. He knew he could make no sentimental gestures, or appeal to any outworn creeds; his stance was perforce a rigorously Modernist one, using the facts and materials of his time, and facing its confusions—together with his own—as honestly as possible. Poetry was his chosen medium because it, too, was both experimental and orderly; indeed, his very first concern was to arrest what he perceived as its derangement at the hands of 360



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the Symbolists and Imagists, and to make it again a virile instrument. To do this was partly a matter of finding proper metrics and form, but beyond all else of refocusing attention on the external world, including man’s physical and moral presence in it. This was its virtue and essence, its own moral duty. To declare the world again was the first task of repair, but mere lyricism would not suffice. To reinstate a theism without dogma was both a primary step and a final conclusion, the peg that anchored all perception and grounded all knowledge. Jeffers had spoken in the preface to The Double Axe of the “religious instinct”; William James, the reigning American philosopher of his youth, had called God “the normal object of the mind’s belief.”3 Jeffers ‘slew’ the traditional deity in “The Alpine Christ,” only to find the Hardyesque bugbear of Fate behind it, an image that, entwined with the pulverizing aspects of natural process, remained a negative template for him, the believer’s equivalent of doubt. His initial experience of a Pacific sublime, one mediated by literary and pictorial expression and first naïvely expressed in Californians, gradually deepened into a religious awe, but one exposed to the elemental violences of the coast and the surmise of process behind it. This was not the nature worship of the Romantics, with its graceful shudders, but something more akin to a primitive terror, albeit informed by a sophisticated post-Darwinian, post-Nietzschean sensibility. To forge a modern conception of divinity from these elements—rough intuition, cultural pessimism, scientific determinism—was the task Jeffers took upon himself. William Everson, who thought longer and more deeply about Jeffers’ religious affirmation than anyone else, identified another element in this compound, the sensual. Comparing him to D. H. Lawrence, another poet for whom sensuous response to the natural world was critical, Everson observes that Jeffers’ “nature is colder, and he brings the sensual permeation to bear in a much more abstract way, as a kind of metaphysical, teleological obsession.” He speculates that Jeffers sublimated and internalized his own sensuality in his religious quest—a suggestion that accords with the Oedipal interpretation of it I have put forward elsewhere4—and “made it function as a specific dynamic toward a transcendental and religious end.” This enforced a radical separation between the perceiving intelligence and the perceived entity, one that could not be bridged through traditional erotic mysticism but appeared “as an abstract element shot through the whole of reality.”5 In effect, as Everson suggests, in repressing (or, perhaps better, reorienting) his own sensual energies, Jeffers projected them outward, as a kind of cosmological property. This tribute, too, 361

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belonged to God, who was All in All, creator and creation at once, from whom nothing could be hidden and nothing reserved. Everson’s account of Jeffers’ religious development is unexcelled, but he understated its specifically Calvinist element, and the ways in which a sternly magnificent deity—experienced as punitive, but released from blame by his own self-laceration—became the defining image of Jeffers’ quest. All such images and such fables were, of course, provisional and inadequate means of describing an ineffable totality, as Jeffers fully recognized. In answer to the question posed in “Apology for Bad Dreams”—“I know of no reason / For fire and change and torture and the old returnings”—his deity himself replies, simply and beyond appeal, “they are the ways of my love.” Similarly, his God shows the blank visage of his glory in “The Great Explosion” as a “faceless violence.” This is, indeed, “the God who does not care and will never cease”—a Calvinism à l’outrance. Such a vision alone, Jeffers felt, was frank and capacious enough to deal with the world bequeathed by Darwinism and modern cosmology, with its ruthless, frequently random, and unexempted violences. The alternative was a retreat into trivial aestheticism or a closed universe of willed artifice and devised value, whose most compelling exponent would be Wallace Stevens.6 That supreme and ultimate value inhered in the outer world was signified, for Jeffers, by beauty, the garb of process. Before this beauty, rightly perceived, all cultural contrivance was at best a soothing fable, and at worst a species of incest that could not but lead to calamity, despair, and civilizational collapse. To Jeffers’ eye, that was precisely where it had led in his own time. Man’s choice, however, was not so simple for Jeffers. The laws of process that governed him physically might be, to a degree, mitigated by creaturely comfort and technological advance, but his nature, formed by trauma, could never rest secure. Thus it was that he was driven to look outward, whether for protection in or from a deity; thus too he conceived the sacrificial portion, which in the Old Testament had fallen upon the innocent son and which, in the New, was viewed as the Son’s own elective choice. The notion of a salvific God operating through an earthly representative and offering not particular bounty or shelter but eternal beatitude was the culminating stage of propitiatory religion; as such, it belonged, Freud had suggested, to the childhood of the race. But Jeffers saw something more in the scandalous figure of the Christ, a human Jesus whose aspiration to the divine, however flawed and clouded, represented an ineradicable element in man’s nature, and ultimately the defining 362



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one. Necessity had led man out of animal darkness and limitation, but the prick of consciousness, unsatisfied by the provision of material wants, moved him uncertainly toward an ever-refined conception of divinity, James’ “normal” (or normative) object of belief. This was not, in Freud’s terms, an illusion, but the obscure summons that defined the horizon of the species. It was what Jeffers meant when he called man the ‘ape’ of God—the fumbling imitator of the selfwilled divine passion—and what he signified when he described him in “The Beginning and the End” as “one of God’s sense-organs,” a nerve that searched not only rawly in the welter of creation, but backward toward its own origin. In this sense, the crucified Jesus might be regarded as a valid symbol, and Jesus himself as a culture hero. What needed to be clarified in the image and example he had left was that postmortem survival or return, however tempting a wish, was a dream to be overcome, and that the notion of a sympathetic divine personality, which James had identified as an essential element in man’s conception of the divine, had similarly to be abandoned. Although Jeffers repeatedly declared the universe to be not only alive but conscious, and although he had in several poems engaged his God—or an epiphanic figment—to ‘speak,’ he was agnostic on the subject of whether a transcendent consciousness might be imputed to God, or of what nature it might be. Still less did he imagine it cohering into a personality that might harbor a preference for the particular members of any species; this was the hard lesson that Darwin had taught. Rather, man’s redemption lay in setting aside any such claim, and accepting the duty to praise that from which he could have no expectation of love, mercy, or even notice. If we adopt Jeffers’ figure of the sense-organ or nerve, man’s error lay in attempting to double back toward the divine origin, rather than following the hard road of external truth, the task of exploration in the created world. In seeking a salvific return, he had merely created a deity in his own image, a projection of desire, fantasy, and need. Such an image was bound to collapse on the brute facts of existence, but it was those facts with which he had to deal. The alternative was to quit on reality, and to retreat into the even more unsustainable illusion of a humanly sufficient world in which man was not merely the measure of his own value but of cosmic value itself. It was here that Jeffers parted company with his Modernist contemporaries most decisively. Not only was God to be sought in the world that was his body, but human peace and sanity as well, for, as Jeffers said in a hundred ways from the beginning of his verse career to its end, “To see the inhuman God is our health” (“See the Human Figure,” BE ; CP : ). This could be done only indirectly; a myriad of 363

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paths led to the divine vision, but no creaturely consciousness could encompass it whole: for any finite mind to “touch truth,” he said, would “unsky the world” (“The Silent Shepherds”). For Jeffers, then, the varieties of the sublime were modalities of a truth that would lie beyond comprehension, the divine being that “flows out of mystery into mystery,” and for which there was neither beginning nor end but only “the spray of a wave / Rushing to meet no shore” (“How Beautiful It Is,” BE ; CP : ). “This,” he said, “is God’s will; he works, he grows and changes, he has no object. / . . . / He destroys all that stands” (“Look, How Beautiful,” BE ; CP : ). The ceaseless dynamic of divine praxis had nothing to disclose but itself, an absence of purpose that was the ultimate mystery. On one of the stormy days Jeffers loved, he observed sea gulls soaring amid desolate heights where neither food nor repose was to be sought, but as it seemed “For [the] pure beauty of the storm” alone (“Storm Dance of the Sea Gulls,” BE ; CP : ). So too did man stand his station, and for the same reason. Death, suicide, and postmortem survival were themes that had always preoccupied Robinson Jeffers. “[W]e are willing to love the four-score years / Heartily;” he wrote in “Night,” “but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for the harbor.” Yet he also alluded repeatedly in his work to suicide, the “drowned tower in all human minds” (CP : ), and the suicides, real or symbolic, that culminate the majority of his narratives can hardly escape the attention of the most casual reader. In “Suicide’s Stone” (CP : ), he admonishes himself that, however death may tempt him, “you shall not reach a finger / To pluck it unripe before dark.” Thirty years later, mourning Una’s death, he asked why he should “wait ten years yet, having lived sixty-seven, ten years more or less, / Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping, like a wolf / Who has lost his mate” (“The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” CP : –). His answer was that he was “bound by my own thirty-year decision: who drinks the wine / Should take the dregs.” Was this the “covenant of courage” he referred to in “Suicide’s Stone,” perhaps the echo of a crisis in his early life? It is in any case reasonable conjecture that a man who forced himself to face an annihilating void as few have ever done should have more than once felt the undertow.7 A similar ambivalence marked Jeffers’ attitude toward a possible afterlife. “To live for seventy years is a burden,” he wrote in “Animula”; “To live eternally, poor little soul— / Not the chief devil could inflict nor endure it.” Yet his narratives and even his shorter poems are replete with revenants and resurrected figures, and the whole of his cycle, Descent to the Dead, evokes a world in which 364

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the dead usurp the place of the living. There is an Oedipal dimension to this, too, and the late poem “Ode to Hengist and Horsa” (BE ; CP : ), which describes a seven-foot Saxon warrior whose companions broke his bones after death “Lest he come forth and walk” again, might not unreasonably be taken to bear some relation to his father, about whom Jeffers thought much again in his last years.8 In “Post Mortem,” a poem of the s, Jeffers imagined himself as ingrained with his beloved coast, a “long sunset shadow in the seams of the granite . . . / a spirit for the stone” (CP : –). In the contemporaneous “Soliloquy” (), he describes himself as “laired in the rock”—a rather more Oedipally pregnant figure, with its suggestion of vital seclusion—; and, in a late poem, “Ghost” (BE ; CP : ), he returns, more humorously, as a “mist-gray” apparition to examine his former property and confront its present owner. Stone, as we have seen, had always been a balance for aerial imagery in Jeffers’ art, just as the great raptors who rode the sky’s currents remained for him a mediating quantity between the two. These were the poles, too, of the sublime, the cosmic stage that figured it and the platform on which its observer bore witness. Death, the final act of the sublime, was in effect a choice of lodging. Jeffers is perhaps unique in modern letters in his preoccupation with postmortem states of being and consciousness, and in his at times clinical descriptions of decay and dissolution. At one extreme lay depictions of ecstatic release and final consummation, as in “Hurt Hawks” and the eagle’s death-dream in “Cawdor”; at the other, a willed refusal of death altogether, resulting in more or less pathetic or horrific states of resurrection. The Jesus of “Dear Judas,” who remains suspended between life and death in company with the other significant figures of his passion, falls into the former category; Carson Pierce, Hoult Gore, and Alcmena Hungerfield represent the latter. Animal deaths are natural and unproblematic, “strict and decent” as Jeffers says in “Orca”; it is only man who must anticipate mortality, “always wakeful, steering through hell” before his time (“Nightpiece,” BE ; CP : ). In “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” Jeffers expresses the wish that “my bones [would be] with theirs,” and in “My Burial Place,” he repeats the sentiment: . . . if the human animal were precious As the quick deer or that hunter in the night the lonely puma I should be pleased to lie in one grave with ‘em. (BE ; CP : )

As Jeffers had said in “Oysters,” death was the final passion of old men; but 365

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also the final indignity. Pain could be borne, or even a passive senility, but, as he had worried in “Ante Mortem,” a companion piece to “Post Mortem,” “if the striped blossom / Insanity spread lewd splendors,” or “intolerable pain work its known miracle, / [and] Exile the monarch soul,” a man might survive himself in a state of utter degradation (CP : ). Since Jeffers had renounced the Stoic act of suicide, he had to contemplate himself in such a condition. Human life was a perhaps dubious proposition at best; the human passage was uniquely difficult. Yet, if death were the last relation to the sublime, it was also uniquely important. The death that the aging Jeffers was obliged to confront first was that of Una. Cancer took eight years to claim her. Jeffers was almost wholly unable to write while caring for her in her last illness, and for some time after (SL ). When he was able to describe the experience, it was with a rare self-exposure, but also with a deep affirmation of the sublime. The elegy for Una is in three parts, the first two of which precede “Hungerfield,” the poem dedicated to her, and the last of which forms its coda (CP : –; –). “Hungerfield” is not merely a separation between the bookends of the elegy, but a part of it, the ‘dreamwork,’ to cast it in Freudian terms, through which the poem achieves its resolution. Jeffers begins with an act of defiance: If time is only another dimension, then all that dies Remains alive; not annulled, but removed Out of our sight. Una is alive.

The “If ” is the poem’s trigger, the willed conjecture of a postmortem survival, a dimension in which the affirmation can be made: “Una is alive.” The mind’s ordinary fourth dimension, however, is memory, and it is with this that Jeffers proceeds, evoking the youth of lovers “greedy as hawks” for each other’s body; the labor of house-building and child-rearing; iconic moments of travel when Una, brimming with the beauty of Irish and Scottish landscape, rewarded Jeffers for the separation from his own coast; and finally the homecoming to “the loved rock over the gray and ageless Pacific.” It is a splendid appreciation, but, for the poet, spent in the telling: “It is no good. Una has died.” The dimension in which such moments notionally exist is useless in the present in which he must actually live, and the images of distant contentment and joy are mocked in the supervening memory of his helpless witness of Una’s final illness that constitutes the elegy’s second part. This vision is mere “torment,” and to 366



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“drug” it and make memory “sleep for a moment,” Jeffers undertakes the poem he will call “Hungerfield.” Jeffers’ description of “Hungerfield” as a soporific suggests to us its function as a means not only of distracting painful memory but of working through it by fantasy and wish-fulfillment. Normally, this takes the form of dreaming, but the poem is very much a waking fantasy in which Hungerfield observes with pity and mounting rage his mother Alcmena’s death agonies, and ‘rescues’ her by laying Death low. Alcmena, however, never a sympathetic parent, is even more furious to have been forced back to a life she was ready to quit, and watches with hatred as Death returns to claim vengeance. The structure of the fantasy is clear enough, but its moral is more equivocal. Hungerfield has his victory, but he wins a stay of mortality only for himself; Death does not try him a second time, but goads him into suicide by turning his own strength against him. Yet his act is not in vain, nor does it simply reveal the futility of any attempt to reverse nature. All transgression is foredoomed, but Hungerfield, the last of Jeffers’ transgressive heroes, attains a grandeur in his fall that speaks for the human protest against fate—the protest that Jeffers, in his own mourning, could not leave to the merely pathetic utterance of the elegy. In short, “Hungerfield” was cathartic, a working-out of grief that, through defiance, enabled Jeffers to win through to the acceptance and triumphant release of the elegy’s last lines: Here is the poem, dearest; you will never read it nor hear it. You were more beautiful Than a hawk flying; you were faithful and a lion heart like this rough hero Hungerfield. But the ashes have fallen And the flame has gone up; nothing human remains. You are the earth and air; you are in the beauty of the ocean And the great streaming triumphs of sundown; you are alive and well in the tender young grass rejoicing When soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds float on the dawn.—I will be with you presently.

For Una, there would be no salvaged remnant, no ghostly return, no immurement in rock: “nothing human remains.” Instead, Jeffers joins her to the ever-renewed cycles of life, and to an image of the sublime as the earnest of that life. If in death she seemed “defeated,” she now shares in what is permanently enduring. These lines indeed close the circle of the sublime for Jeffers, as scene and spectator at last become one. 367

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Jeffers pledges in the elegy: “I will be with you presently.” But he could hardly have conceived such a consummation to his own relation to the sublime. “No cemetery,” he wrote in “My Burial Place,” “no necropolis, / And for God’s sake no columbarium”—Una’s ashes had been scattered, but could his own take wing? Una, as he said, had been a “falcon,” but his passage would need mediation. He found it in “Vulture,” the one poem in the canon in which the word ‘sublime’ actually appears: I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven, And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the naked red head between the great wings Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here. These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” But how beautiful he’d looked, gliding down On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly That I was sorry to have disappointed him. 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. (BE ; cf. CP : )

Robinson Jeffers died on January , , ten days after his seventy-fifth birthday. Like Una, he was cremated, and his ashes were buried beneath a yew tree in the courtyard of Tor House, where Una’s had been laid twelve years before. “Yesterday’s sundown was very beautiful,” he wrote in what were not his last lines but might well have served for them, “—I know it is out of fashion to say so” (“The Ocean’s Tribute”). He was secure in the knowledge of himself as a great poet, but not, despite his many protestations to the contrary, indifferent to his reputation. “I have a little . . . not fame, call it reputation—for writing verses,” he says in “The Old Wolf My Father” (CP : ); “My books get published, even read a little, / These forty years. A reputation by that time should be forgotten, / Or else established. But no, neither happens. / . . . / . . . the plant survives.” So indeed it does. Jeffers has been likened to the great Greek tragedians, and denied the status of a poet at all. “Homer and Shakespeare,” said the 368



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distinguished critic Mark Van Doren, after a lifetime of pondering Jeffers. “In what better company can we leave him?” Czesław Miłosz could both affirm that Jeffers was “too hopeless to attract anyone” and that his work would “endure as long as the English language endures.”9 It has not been the task of this book to settle such questions, if they are capable or deserving of being settled. It suffices the present author to have suggested that Jeffers’ art of the sublime engaged the most compelling issues of his time—issues that remain ours—with high seriousness and purpose. If in some respects his reinstatement of Romantic sublimity seemed a backward-looking enterprise, it was because modernity had abandoned the problematic it represented without resolving it. In returning to it, however, Jeffers brought to bear a consciousness fully seized of its cultural moment, and the collective tragedy in which, twice in his lifetime, it had resulted. He thereby discharged what Miłosz defined as the genuine vocation of art, to reach “the highest threshold” available to the mind of one’s time.10 “[F]ar greater witnesses / Will take our places,” Jeffers wrote in “How Beautiful It Is.” Robinson Jeffers, it may be said, was the great witness among us.

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Abbreviations

AC

Robinson Jeffers. The Alpine Christ and Other Poems. Edited by William Everson. Cayucos, Cal.: Cayucos Books. .

Alberts

S. S. Alberts, A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House. .

BA

Robinson Jeffers. Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems. New York: Random House. .

BE

Robinson Jeffers. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. New York: Random House. .

Bennett

Melba Berry Bennett, The Stone Mason of Tor House: The Life and Work of Robinson Jeffers. Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press. .

Brophy

Robert Brophy. Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. .

C

Robinson Jeffers. Californians. Cayucos, Cal.: Cayucos Books. .

CE

Robert Zaller, ed. Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press; Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses. .

CL

James Karman, ed. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers; with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers.  vols. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, –

CP Tim Hunt, ed. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.  vols. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. –. CS

Robert Zaller. The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; reprint edition, .

DA

Robinson Jeffers. The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Liveright. .

DJ

Robinson Jeffers. Dear Judas and Other Poems. New York: Horace Liveright. 29. Reprint edition: Liveright, 

371

Abbreviations EG

William Everson. The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. .

EL

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America. .

H

Robinson Jeffers. Hungerfield and Other Poems. New York: Random House. .

JE

Edward W. Emerson, ed. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson,  vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press. –.

JS

Jeffers Studies.

JT

Henry D. Thoreau. Journal. Ed. John C. Broderick et al.  vols. to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press. –

Karman

James Karman. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press. .

PAV

Point Alma Venus by Robinson Jeffers. Versions and fragments antecedent to The Women at Point Sur. Transcribed by Robert Kafka from manuscripts at the University of Texas.

SL

Anne N. Ridgeway. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, –. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. .

SP

Robinson Jeffers. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House.  [].

Vardamis Alex Vardamis. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliographical Study. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books.  WE

Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, eds. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. .

WCPP

Walt Whitman. Complete Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America. .

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Notes

Introduction . Albert Gelpi, ed., The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, ), . . On New Englanders’ conception of themselves as new Israelites, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). . Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: The Library of America, ), –. . Ibid., –. . Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, – (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). . Kevin Avery, Church’s Big Picture: “The Heart of the Andes” (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, ); Gerald F. Carr, In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, ). . Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (), in John W. McCoubrey, ed., American Art, –: Sources (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, ), –; Ellwood C. Parry, III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, ); William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Art Museum, ); Franklin Kelly, Thomas Cole’s Paintings of Eden (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, ); Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire,” Prospects  (): –; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, – (New York: Oxford University Press, ). . Yosemite was first entered by non-Indians in , and first photographed in : see Lafayette H. Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite (El Portal, Cal.: The Yosemite Association, ). . Wilton and Barringer, .

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Notes to the Introduction . On Bierstadt, see Nancy K. Anderson, Albert Bierstadt: The Path to California, – (Ph.D. Diss., University of Delaware, ); Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Brooklyn Museum, ); Gordon Hendrick, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harrison House, ). . Cf. Jeffers Country: The Seed Plots of Robinson Jeffers’ Poetry, with photographs by Horace Lyon (San Francisco: The Scrimshaw Press, ); and James Karman, ed., Stones of the Sur, with photographs by Morley Baer (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, ). . On the ethos of the national parks, see Linda Flint McClelland, Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Baltimore: Diane Publishing Co., ). . Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey (New York: Liveright,  []). . The Cliffs of Solitude; and see also my “Tamar’s Oedipal Transcendence” (Robinson Jeffers Newsletter  []: –).

Chapter  . Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. . Ibid., . . Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, ed. John T. Wilkinson (London: The Epworth Press, ), . . Ibid. . Ibid., . . William Wood, New Englands Prospect (), cited in Robert Daly, God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Cf. Peter N. Carroll, Puritans and the Wilderness: The Significance of the New England Frontier, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ). . Daly, ; John Harvard Ellis, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, ), . . Daly, . . Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), . . Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . . Ibid., . . Frederic Ives Carpenter, “The Radicalism of Jonathan Edwards,” New Eng-

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land Quarterly  (): – (at –). Jeffers wrote to Carpenter (who had sent him an offprint) that he had read his essay “with much interest, and some profit . . . feeling a new sympathy toward your subject” (SL ). . Miller; M. X. Lesser, Jonathan Edwards (Boston: Twayne Publishers, ), . . Lesser, . . Miller, . . William J. Scheick, The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style (College Station: Texas A & M Press, ), . . Ola Elizabeth Winslow, ed., Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings (New York: New American Library, ), . . Ibid., –. . In the last year of his life, Edwards was appointed President of Princeton College. He died within a month of taking up the position. . Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), . . SL –, . . Everson, EG. . SL . . Ibid., . . Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), – (but see p. ). . Cf. the Inhumanist’s comment: “God does not judge. God is. Mine is the judgment” (CP : ). . “No doubt, alas, that more wasting / Wars will bleed the long future” (“Invasion,” CP : ). . “Fourth Act,” CP : –. . For a discussion of this poem, “The Love and the Hate,” see below, Chapter , and CS –. . For further discussion of the significations of the axe, see James Karman, “The End of Prophecy: A Response,” JS ,  (Fall ): –, a reply to my “The End of Prophecy: ‘The Double Axe’ and the Nuclear Sublime,” idem, –. . DA ; cf. “Birth-Dues,” CP : . . “[It] occurs to me that section  of Part II of ‘The Double Axe’ might be read as a preface to this volume. It seems to me to express quite briefly the intentions implicit in these poems and previous ones” (DA ). . The Saturday Review of Literature, July , , reprinted in James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. . Ibid. . See below, Chapter , for further discussion of this poem.

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Notes to Chapter 1 . BE ; cf. CP : , which prints a different version of this poem, “The Great Explosion.” Tim Hunt suggests that the BE version may reflect a conflation of disparate manuscripts. For a discussion of this issue, see below, Chapter . . Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (New York: Alfred Knopf, ), .

Chapter  . Emerson, from “Nature” on, takes the sublime as a given reality of experience: “One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. . . . The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance.” (“Nature,” EL ; emphasis added) As defined here, the Emersonian sublime suggests core elements of Jeffers’ construction of it: it is continually present as a spectacle, and thus as a token of value; it inspires religious sentiment (“a certain reverence”); it is not confined to stellar or other imposing displays, but is presented by “all natural objects”; it inheres in nature as beauty (“Nature never wears a mean appearance”). For a perceptive analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of “Nature” with particular reference to the Kantian sublime, see David Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), Chapter . . Bill Hotchkiss, Jeffers: The Sivaistic Vision (Newcastle, Cal., ). The Transcendentalists, of course, were deeply interested in Hindu and Buddhist thought, particularly Emerson and Thoreau: Arthur Christy, Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (New York: Octagon Books, ); Richard F. Teichgraber III, Sublime Thoughts / Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ), Chapter . Thoreau had a substantial library of Hindu works; he bequeathed twenty volumes to Emerson at his death, and the remainder to Harvard. . On this incident—still insufficiently studied—see Bennett, –. . SL ; Bennett, –; Karman, –. . Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), . . Alberts, –. . AC –. Una indicated Shelley as a source, a point discussed by Everson (xv–xvi); for other possible influences, see CS –n. . Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (New York: AMS Press,  []), .

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. On the evolution of Emerson’s thinking about slavery, see Leon Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ). In “Man the Reformer” (), Emerson had already spoken of “the abominations of slavery,” and of “our dreadful debt to the southern negro” (EL ), but still only in the context of general labor exploitation. . Cf. “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones” (CP : –), where Jeffers recalls the image of the lone wolf meeting his death. Jeffers’ ambivalent attitude toward public recognition recurs repeatedly in his work, and is intimately bound up with his self-construction as a prophet fated to be rejected or ignored. Posthumous fame, he thought, was certainly a worthy goal, and contemporary reputation was an important though not critical step toward it. The notoriety brought him by the success of Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems revealed its negative side in the chilly reception of “The Women at Point Sur,” a check to which Jeffers reacted strongly in “Birth-Dues” and “The Bird with the Dark Plumes” (CP : , ). Cf. “Let Them Alone” and “The Old Wolf My Father” (CP : , ); and see below, Chapter . . The temperamental kinship between Emerson and Jeffers is clear in their responses to the critical events in their respective careers, in Emerson’s case the scandal of his Divinity School Address, and in Jeffers’ the reception of “The Women at Point Sur.” As Gay Wilson Allen notes, “Emerson’s greatest fear was that both the blame and the praise would draw him ‘out of equilibrium,—putting me for a time in a false position to people, & disallowing the spontaneous sentiments . . . . Therefore I hate to be conspicuous for blame or praise. It spoils thought.’ Actually, he found it easier to bear criticism than praise. When he was defended in a newspaper, he felt ‘as one that lies unprotected before his enemies’” (Waldo Emerson: A Biography [New York: The Viking Press, ], –). Jeffers’ comment in “The Bird with the Dark Plumes,” “Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize their blame?” suggests a similar manner of dealing with controversy. . Alberts, –. . Cf. CP : , and the discussion of this text above. . Cf. “Going to Horse Flats” (CP : –): “Man’s world is a tragic music and is not played for man’s happiness, / Its discords are not resolved but by other discords.” On the trope of music in Jeffers, see also “Natural Music” (: ); “The Wind-Struck Music” (: –); “October Week-End” (: ).

Chapter  . Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, eds., Correspondence of Charles Darwin,  vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, –), : . . T. Watson Street, “The Evolution Controversy in the Southern Presbyterian Church with Attention to the Theological and Ecclesiastical Issues Raised,” Journal

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Notes to Chapter 3 of the Presbyterian Historical Society  (): –; Clement Eaton, “Professor James Woodrow and the Freedom of Teaching in the South,” Journal of Southern History  (): –. . Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, – (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. On Fiske’s thought and career, see H. Burnell Pannill, The Religious Faith of John Fiske (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ); Milton Berman, John Fiske: The Evolution of a Popularizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). . Roberts, –. . Ibid., ff., and cf. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). For more on Le Conte, see Lester D. Stephens, Joseph Le Conte: Gentle Prophet of Evolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ). . On this understudied subject, see Arthur Cushman McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas (New York: Macmillan, ). Thoreau’s pantheism is well discussed in Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ). . Roberts, . . Introduction to Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems [Modern Library edition, ]; CP : –, at . . The best general account remains Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, – (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,  []). . It is important to note that Jeffers does not valorize insanity in “Theory of Truth,” but merely notes it as a negative consequence of sublime aspiration that “twist[s] the great answers” and “Muddles the finding” of religious vision. To challenge the sublime—the terrain on which fresh vision alone is to be obtained—is necessarily, in his view, to suffer partial blinding. . Jeffers’ intellectual break with Christianity was part of the necessary break with his father; yet his poetic construction of a God-suffused cosmos was in some sense a continuation of the latter’s project. As he noted to Hyatt Howe Waggoner, “My father was a clergyman but also intelligent, and he brought me up to timely ideas about origin of species, descent of man, astronomy, geology, etc., so that [my] progress was gradual, none of the view-points of modern science came as a revelation” (SL ). . Cf. “Tamar” (CP : ). . The observer’s participation in the scene constitutes it as a scene, rather than as a succession of events governed by necessity. This adds nothing to the materiality of the events, or to their constitution as value, which is a divine preroga-

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tive. Rather, it is a secondary, superadded value, a form of reflexivity. Insofar as it is a creative act, it transcends necessity, but only by unqualified immersion in it (“the whole mind”). Here as elsewhere, Jeffers insists on the reality of the plenum and the moral duty to come to terms with it. This is a difficult task; even, as for the observer of “Fire on the Hills,” an agonizing one, but in this alone, as Jeffers says repeatedly, may “health” be found. Cf. “Return” (CP : ): “A little too abstract, a little too wise, / It is time for us to kiss the earth again, / . . . / I will touch things and things and no more thoughts, / That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky.” In this exquisite sonnet, the world is unproblematic, and the speaker renews himself by dipping his arms in “the lovely Sur Rivers.” The “thoughts” that distract him—fantasy unmoored from reality—are not only disturbing to him, but, as “insect clouds,” they derange the natural order, “blind[ing] our passionate hawks / So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.” Jeffers rarely attributes such powers to human imagination, and it will be noted that what is valorized is the predatory act of a raptor, the very act that horrifies the observer in “Fire on the Hills” and which requires all the poet’s powers to accept. Natural process is value, and any thought or idea that fails to proceed from that is, as Emerson says in his own context, “struck with death.” The speaker of “Fire on the Hills” is unquestionably present in the scene he creates; that is, his status is ontologically valid, even if he does not affect the unfolding events of natural process. But cf. the discussion of “Orca” (pp. 119–122), where Jeffers takes a considerably dimmer view of human presence. . This, of course, is precisely what Jeffers’ transgressive heroes do; but, unlike his fantasts (see above, n. ), they do not seek to evade reality but to defy it. . CP : , . . Ibid., , . . Mary B. Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ); P. M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Steven N. Shore, Forces in Physics: A Historical Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, ); Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), Chapter . . Martin, chapters ff. . The war is explicitly referenced three strophes later: “The promise-breaker war killed whom it freed / And none living’s the cleaner” (: ). . For comparisons with Sophocles and Shakespeare, see, e.g., Mark Van Doren: “Imitators of Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare are usually ridiculous, but Jeffers is not because he is of their company” (The Nation, January , , quoted in Vardamis, ). Unlike some other early admirers who were to retract

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Notes to Chapter 3 or qualify their initial praise, Van Doren’s verdict was unchanged forty years later (SL ); below, pp. 368–369. For the mixed response to The Women at Point Sur, see Vardamis, – and passim; and James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –. . In terms of Jeffers’ construction of the tragic protagonist, Oedipus is the only figure in Western literature who may be regarded as fully realized both as a hero of transgression and of endurance, although not in the same work but rather in the two halves of a cycle. Only Shakespeare’s Hamlet attempts to depict such a double-aspected hero in a single drama. Hamlet’s transgression consists in his desire to appropriate Gertrude, and his endurance in the self-deferred revenge against Claudius that would make her available. The problematic nature of the play—it is less a matter of character than of situation—is that Hamlet cannot both possess Gertrude and avenge his father, for he would then be guilty of the very crime he is charged to punish. In the event, he consummates neither act, and the actual slaying of Claudius—his one unimpeded act—exacts vengeance not for his father’s death but for his own. Jeffers makes no effort to reconcile the two aspects of the Sophoclean hero, but rather presents two distinct prototypes. His transgressive hero strains at human limits, although his tragedy lies not in his (more typically her) aspiration but in a Romantically foredoomed failure. The hero of endurance, by contrast, falls into conventional sin without actual intention, and suffers the moral sentence he passes on himself. In neither case may we speak of genuine hubris; it would make more sense to speak of an ontological snare, since man, as Jeffers notes, must be “fooled” out of his limits to suffer tragedy. . Cf. the discussion of this passage in CS –. Barclay’s momentary lapse of consciousness mimics, or possibly involves, a stroke. Jeffers, who often draws upon his medical training in the narratives, leaves the matter open, and therefore the interpretation of Barclay’s vision in general. If insanity “twists” his answers, as Jeffers suggests in “Theory of Truth,” it is possible that his initial vision is distorted as well (although not invalidated as such) by physical dysfunction. It is also possible to consider such an event as the hero’s defining impediment, as in the lamed god marked for sacrifice noted by Brophy as a recurrent trope in Jeffers (Robinson Jeffers,  and passim). For further discussion, see below, pp. 230–231. . Like Tamar, Fera is proud and ruthless, but she is rather an agent of tragedy than a subject for it. When Cawdor proposes marriage after rescuing her from destitution, she responds: “There is nothing under the sun worth loving but strength: and I / Had some but it’s tired, and now I’m sick of it” (CP : ). She bears physical pain poorly (), and lacks final belief in her own will: “For it’s known beforehand, whatever I attempt bravely would fail” (); “we came from the fire only to fail, / Fail, fail” (); “I fail in everything, like my father” (), “to

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fail is the very soul of my soul” (). Like Fayne Fraser in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” she can talk a fine game of tragedy, but there is a fundamental insincerity in her—Jeffers speaks of her “false earnestness / Of passionate life” ()—that fits her only to be a provocateur. . Fera, interestingly, perceives the same quality in the Hippolytus figure of Hood: “[W]hen I saw your face,” she tells him, “I knew it was the pure rock. I loved him for that” (). But what she perceives is rather coldness than strength; she mistakes (at first) the victim for the hero. Fera’s own imagery is aerial; she emerges from a fire at the poem’s beginning, and tells Hood that “after hundreds of years . . . something from me [will] be crying to something from you / High up in the air” (). . Prometheus Unbound, .. (Carlos Baker, ed., The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley [New York: The Modern Library, , ]). . Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), .

Chapter  . Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individualism (London: Routledge, ), . . Ibid. . Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), . . John Muir, Our National Parks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,  []), . . Direct sunlight is almost always negatively associated in Jeffers, e.g., in his description of civilized decadence in “Summer Holiday” (“When the sun shouts and the people abound,” CP : ). Reave’s quest for his faithless wife, Helen, takes him through a landscape of “sun-rotted hills” in “Thurso’s Landing,” where, too, “the shameless sun / Blared from the east” (CP : , ). In “An Artist,” the sun is “merciless,” and the sky it lights is, in an inverted version of the sublime, “abominably beautiful.” The Whore of Babylon is faintly suggested here, and more specifically in “To Death” (CP : ), where life (associated with the sun) is called “blonde and a harlot.” Whereas Emerson embraces a solar Eye in his vision of the egotistical sublime, for Jeffers the prospect suggests instead a primal scene of exposure, “when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline” (“Continent’s End,” CP : ). The Oedipal resonances here are unmistakable, the sun being both the desired object from which the son’s eye must be blamefully averted and the threatening paternal eye before which his sin stands disclosed. In “Noon” (CP : ), a rare poem about facing unmediated sunlight, the description of Oedipal prostration and surrender is manifest: “the terror of noon, the

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Notes to Chapter 4 eyes / That eagles die at, have thrown down / Me and my pride, here I lie naked / In a hollow of the shadowless rocks.” These associations are for the most part casual, but prolonged drought is integral to the structure of “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” where Lance Fraser’s unconfessed filicide seems to parallel the arrest of nature: The rain held off; for two hundred and forty days there had been no rain But one sun-drunken shower. The creek was dry rock and weary gray roots; the skin of the mountain crumbled Under starved feet; the five carcasses of hawks that Lance had hung on the fence-wire dried without odor In the north wind and rages of the sun. (CP : ) Fayne Fraser, too, whose red hair is associated with harlotry and “flame,” remarks, “It is horrible to be nearing New Year’s / And still the dust and the sun” (). Lance draws blood, and finally, Ajax-like, butchers a herd of cows in his delirium, but only his own sacrifice can renew life. The sun is never valorized in Jeffers, even as it is acknowledged as the source of life; compare this to the preferences he indicates for darkness and shadow in poem after poem: “Night,” “Fog,” “Boats in a Fog,” “Evening Ebb,” “Hooded Night,” “Distant Rainfall,” “Gray Weather.” Dawn must come, but this too is preferably gray: “At least my eyes can see dawn graying”; “the gray boils over the mountain” (“The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” CP : ). Only sunsets win Jeffers’ approbation, for here alone the merciless solar (and paternal?) eye is bated, and its powers dissipated in harmless, even admirable scenic display. . As Thomas Weiskel notes, the question of voice is crucial to the Romantic problematic: “It is widely admitted that it is difficult to specify the formal status of the ‘I’ in Romantic lyric poems. . . . The problematic is that the Romantic ‘I’ so often seems to escape from its contained, dramatic determination and become itself a container. It is as if the ‘I’ were aware of its own presentation in the poem; its progress becomes the successive assimilation or rejection of its former states, so that in the end only a purely theoretical line, not any differential of consciousness, separates it from the present of the maker. Poet, speaker, and reader are merged into one adventure of progressive consciousness” (Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, , –]). Jeffers’ deployment of authorial voice, as I will argue, is both more direct and more oblique than in Emerson and Jeffers’ other Romantic predecessors, and accounts for both the schematic resolution and the persisting tension in his work. . Rudolf Otto’s term in his influential study, The Idea of the Holy, used foundationally for Jeffers in William Everson’s The Excesses of God.

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. Weiskel, . . But also the subject of “Hurt Hawks,” in which the poem’s speaker anguishes over whether to kill a wounded hawk. In “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” the progress of Lance Fraser’s derangement is marked by his propensity for shooting hawks out of the sky. . Jeffers explained in the Foreword to The Selected Poetry that “[t]he omission of Cawdor is purely arbitrary and accidental; I had finally to choose between this and Thurso’s Landing; and there was no ground for choice; I simply drew lots in my mind.” It may be, however, that his decision was also partly dictated by the fact that the two dream sequences in “Cawdor” could be more viably excerpted than any comparable passages in “Thurso’s Landing,” and could make a more programmatic statement printed side by side than separated, as in the original, by sixty-odd pages of narrative. They are immediately preceded in The Selected Poetry by the twelfth chapter of “The Women at Point Sur” (the only material reprinted from that work), thus forming a small unit (pp. –). “Cawdor” followed immediately upon “The Women at Point Sur” in Jeffers’ sequence of narratives, and The Selected Poetry hews closely to the chronology of composition in its order of presentation; but it seems highly unlikely that the juxtaposition of texts in this unit reflects no other intention. . Cf. the synoptic vision of Cassandra’s prophecy in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” in which she foresees the history of Greece and Rome in a manner analogous to the eagle’s encompassment of space: “O vulture- / Pinioned, my spirit, one flight yet, last, longest, unguided . . .” (CP : ). . Cited in Everson, –, with a forceful rebuttal. . Weiskel, . . Ibid., . . AC . Cf. Barclay, who also wanders three days without water (and presumably food) at the end of “The Women at Point Sur.” . Jeffers was schooled in Zurich, Vevey, and Lausanne (as well as Leipzig) between the ages of four and fifteen: Karman, –; Bennett, Chapter . . Cf. again Barclay’s final three days of wandering in “The Women at Point Sur,” which ends in what the authorial voice calls his “dying,” but which he himself proclaims as a resurrection in the poem’s final words: “I am inexhaustible” (CP : ). . CL , ; Alberts, –; AC xv–xxi, reprinted in CE –. . Robinson Jeffers, Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (New York: Modern Library, ), , . . Jean-François Lyotard’s comment on the despotic and filicidal nature of the sublime encounter is à propos here: “The sublime is the child of an unhappy encounter, the encounter of the Idea with form. This encounter is unhappy be-

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Notes to Chapter 4 cause the Idea reveals itself to be unwilling to make concessions, the law (father) so authoritarian and unconditional, the respect that it commands so exclusive, that this father will undertake nothing to arouse the consent of the imagination, not even a delicious rivalry. He scatters all forms, or forms scatter themselves, tear themselves asunder, and become unmeasured in his presence. He fertilizes the virginal devotee of forms with no regard for her favor. He demands that all have regard only for himself, the law, and its realization. He needs imperatively a violated, exceeded, exhausted imagination. She will die in giving birth to the sublime, or at least she will think she is dying.” Lyotard, “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Jean-François Courtine, ed., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, tr. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), –, at . . CS, Chapter I. . Alberts, . Cf. Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Romantic Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), which makes the case for an atheistic sublime in Shelley which is focused on the revelation of natural process and its implications for social construction. Jeffers, too, insists on a thoroughly material cosmos, although one in which divinity is immanent. His heroes of endurance, however, particularly Reave Thurso and Lance Fraser, clearly embody the Shelleyan perspective. They may represent, too, the residual trauma of Jeffers’ own journey from credal Christianity to his mature conception of the divine—one in which, as his abiding preoccupation with the figure of Jesus makes clear, there remained a good deal of personal strain. Duffy argues that Shelley’s sublime was closely related to his politics, not to say an enfiguration of them; so, also, the hero of endurance may reflect, albeit indirectly, Jeffers’ sense of impending war and the deeply problematic political future it portended. In “Contrast” (CP : ), a poem contemporary with “Cawdor” (), the new war already darkens the horizon, and, surveying the age, Jeffers concludes, “There is not one memorable person, there is not one mind to stand with the trees, one life with the mountains.” Perhaps his heroes of endurance, like the age incapable of transcendence but endowed with tragic fortitude, were his response to this circumstance. See below, Chapter . . CP : –. For a discussion of the eye imagery in the poem, see CS –. . Cf. the comment on Barclay in “Theory of Truth”: “[He] touched his answers . . . / But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.” . Orestes in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” may be regarded as a precursor of these heroes, as he is indeed Jeffers’ first fully realized male protagonist: successful both as a mature literary creation, and in escaping Oedipal retribution for an assertion of personal autonomy, although the price he pays for it is high. See the discussion of this point in CS , and below, pp. 216ff., especially 226–228.

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. Lance will later rake his own palms open against barbed wire, a Christological gesture as well as an act of self-punishment. . See Jeffers’ statement in “The World’s Wonders” (CP : ) that “pain gives importance” (italics in the original). . For a Heideggerian account of Jeffers, see Tadeusz Sławek, Robinson Jeffers and His Philosophy of Earth, Time, and Things (Katowice, Poland: Uniwersytet Słaşki, ).

Chapter  . See my “Hardy, Jeffers, and the Hero of Endurance,” JS ,  (): –. . “His focussed will / Forgot to control the outthrows of bodily pain, / He ended groaning, with convulsed lips” (CP : ). . Everson’s date is plausible, but, as he acknowledges, conjectural (AC ). Alberts dates the poem , presumably on Jeffers’ or Una’s authority (Alberts, ). Jeffers, however, was careless about dating his early manuscripts. My preference for Everson’s dating is based on the absence of any reference to the United States as a participant in the Great War, which presumably would have affected the status of the Young Man Who Is Mourning His Father in the text. . Cf. Old Fraser’s vision in “Give Your Heart to the Hawks” of “the godless hills of America / Like vacant-eyed bison lying toward the sea, waiting for rain” (CP : ). . Jeffers left the  Boni and Liveright Roan Stallion volume unchanged in the  Modern Library edition, but added fifteen shorter poems (including “Apology for Bad Dreams,” but not “Meditation on Saviors” or “The Broken Balance”), and concluded with “Credo.” Both volumes begin with “Roan Stallion” and “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” and “Tamar” is printed only a little more than two-fifths through the earlier edition and one-third through the later one, to be followed by a series of earlier poems, including “Mal Paso Bridge,” “The CoastRange Christ,” and “Fauna.” Jeffers (and Random House) may not have wanted to compete with editions of more recent poetry still in print, and Jeffers declined an offer to revise the  text (CP : ). It was not until the Selected Poetry of  that he changed his order of presentation, placing “Tamar” at the beginning, with a selection of shorter poems separating it from “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and “Roan Stallion,” their orders now reversed. “Mal Paso Bridge,” “The Coast-Range Christ,” and “Fauna” (about which Jeffers had expressed reservations as early as  [CP : ]) were all deleted, as were all but a dozen or so pages of the pre- poetry. The privileging of “Tamar” became canonical in the subsequent critical literature and in Tim Hunt’s edition of the Collected Poetry, whose first volume begins with “Tamar” and which, proceeding chronologically, does not pick up the pre-“Tamar” verse until Volume Four. Hunt’s new Selected

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Notes to Chapter 5 Poetry (Stanford University Press, ) places a group of shorter poems before “Tamar,” while both Robert Hass’ Rock and Hawk (New York: Random House, ) and Albert Gelpi’s In This Wild Water (Stanford, ), both mid-sized anthologies, omit it. The very short Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poetry (New York: Vintage, ), for many years the only Jeffers volume in print (the  Selected having had no further printings after ), contained only one narrative poem, “Roan Stallion,” and Colin Falck’s Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poetry (Manchester, England: Carcarnet Press, ), none at all. The paucity of narrative poems in these latter anthologies reflects the relative decline in their reputation, although they made Jeffers’ first fame. Gelpi does devote nearly half of his anthology to “Cawdor.” “Tamar” remains nonetheless the cornerstone of the canon, and is unlikely to be displaced. “The Coast-Range Christ” was not reprinted between  and . . Cf. the New Testament account of the earthquake that accompanies the Calvary. In characterizing David’s vision as blinded by “lightnings” issuing from the “feet” of an inferred but unseen Father, Jeffers suggests a naturalistic explanation for it, while allowing scope for the psychological reality David experiences. . At the same time, birds are a mediatory element in the Jeffersian construction of the sublime, freely inhabiting its spaces but linked as well to earth and sea by the necessity to perch and feed. The raptors—eagle, hawk, vulture—are particularly privileged, not only for their dominant position in the food chain, but for their solitary habits; good Protestants of the air, they do not flock together (and, as in the late “Passenger Pigeons” [CP : –], perish together). The caged eagle in “Cawdor,” who flies at the sun after being released by death, suggests the full span of the sublime. Cawdor, in contrast, attempts as we have seen to shut out the stars, and Lance Fraser, feeling similarly exposed to judgment, shoots hawks from the sky (CP : ). . Cf. the discussion in Brophy, . David Carrow, too, is lamed in the ascent of his “Calvary,” another sign of the sacrificial victim. . Agamemnon, in Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, tr. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ), ll. –. . The Choephori, ibid., ll. ff. . Ibid., l. . . Ibid., ll. –. . The sexual (and political) connotations of this phrase are also critical, however; the leader suggests that Orestes’ act has in effect extinguished his line. Although Electra tries to persuade him that it is his duty to rule (below, p. 223), she can only offer herself as a consort, and therefore a perpetuation of the incest that Orestes will reject on both the sexual and ontological level.

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. Cf. Brophy, –; CS –; and my “Spheral Eternity: Time, Form, and Meaning in Robinson Jeffers,” in James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), –, at – and –. . “David is dotard” is Jeffers’ notation on a worksheet for “Tamar” (Jeffers Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University; CP : ). . The drafts are in the Jeffers collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Austin. Rob Kafka and Tim Hunt are preparing a critical edition for Stanford University Press. See the discussion in CP : –, and CS –. . “Error” in the original published version (Boni and Liveright, ); “horror” in the autograph manuscript. Tim Hunt prints “horror” as the term likelier to express Jeffers’ intention: “While Barclay’s understanding of his symptom is an ‘error,’ the passage does not critique his delusion but instead tries to evoke his experience of it, its horror” (CP : ). But “error” can also mean errant, wandering, from the Middle French errer and the Middle Latin iterare. Hunt introduces the idea of “delusion” into the passage, which seems to lack warrant in the text on either reading. Barclay is not deluded but confused, and if the subsequent conclusion he draws from the episode is indeed delusive, it is not present in the original experience as expressed by the text. This leaves us with a choice between lexical effects. “Horror” is preferable if we read Barclay’s experience as a horror vacui, a response to a perception of radical emptiness; but such a degree of self-consciousness seems excessive for what appears (on a physiological level) to be a fainting-fit or a stroke, and it obliges us to read the remainder of the text as an existential recoil from it. “Error” suits the passage without imposing such burdens on it. 18. Onorio Vasquez is meant. 19. EG –. 20. Bennett,  (the commentary is Jeffers’ own). 21. CP : –. In this highly compressed version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, King Pentheus spies on the orgy of the devotees of Dionysos, whose number includes his mother, Agave, and is torn to pieces when the God makes her perceive him as a wild beast. Pentheus’ apparent sin is trespass; he witnesses passion while refusing to participate in it. His real sin, however, is pride, his fastidious aversion to compromising his dignity and “collectedness.” Jeffers employs this latter term and its variants (“collectible,” “recollecting”) repeatedly in this short poem to indicate not only (illusory) composure and self-command but the human collective, turned inward upon itself as a means of avoiding contact with an unmasterable but also vitalizing reality. Dionysos himself concedes that his worshippers “Are indeed somewhat wild, somewhat too drunken,” but notes the obligation to divine exposure:

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Notes to Chapter 5 Wine and lawlessness, art and music, love, self-torture, religion, Are means but are not needful, contemplation will do it. Only to break human collectedness. Orestes is, of course, Jeffers’ contemplative, but he too must undergo trial and purgation. Contemplation, in Jeffers’ sense, is not an avoidance of passionate action or tragedy, but a mode of experiencing it. See below, Chapter , and cf. CS n. 22. CS –, especially at . Note, too, in this earlier discussion, the homoerotic element in Judas’ attachment to Jesus, and Jesus’ own observation that the “daughters of Jerusalem . . . stir not up nor awaken my love” (CP : ). The absence of Mary Magdalene from “Dear Judas” (indeed, her covert replacement by Judas) is also significant in this context. Jeffers does not, I believe, intend to suggest any active homosexual component in Jesus’ relationship with Judas—this would weaken the poem considerably, and divert us from its core issues—but rather focuses us on the (suppressed) intensity of his attachment to his mother, and the corresponding fantasy of his identification with a hypostatized Father. 23. Alberts, . Jeffers appended this note to the manuscript of the poem. 24. Bennett, . 25. Cf. CS . 26. Brophy, –. 27. See also my “A Sketch for an Aesthetic: Process, Value, and Moral Beauty in Jeffers” (JS ,  []: –). 28. Cf. “Natural Music,” CP : . 29. Cf. CS n. 30. CS passim. 31. For further discussion, see my “The Theme of Resurrection in Jeffers’s Later Narratives,” JS ,  / , ,  (Fall ; Spring and Fall ): –. 32. Manuel Ruegg in “The Alpine Christ” should be regarded as reincarnated rather than resurrected, since he appropriates the form of a living person. 33. Jeffers’ last verse drama (and last long poem), “The Cretan Woman” (H –; CP : –) is, like “Cawdor,” a retelling of the Hippolytus legend, this time in its original Greek garb. Although it is, like Jeffers’ version of “Medea,” compelling in its own terms as an adaptation of classic drama, it does not add materially to our perception of the sacrificial son; nor does Theseus, as the slayer of his son, rise to the tragic stature of Cawdor. For a general consideration of Jeffers’ use of verse drama as a poetic form, see my “Jeffers as a Dramatic Poet: Incorporating the Sovereign Voice” (JS ,  []: –).

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Chapter  . Sacvan Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). . J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Robert Zaller, “Melville and the Myth of Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism ,  (): –. . American exceptionalism had deeply pietistic roots in the Puritan millenarianism of the late Tudor age, which conveyed the sense of England as a redeemer nation to the soil of the New World. We have canvassed this in Chapter , but it remained implicit in Emerson’s call for a distinctive American voice in the world; in Thoreau’s rustic individualism, with its insistence on rootedness in a quasisacralized place; in Whitman’s restated vision of Americans as an elect nation; and in the wider politics of Manifest Destiny. As Garry Wills has emphasized, it underlay Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union as well, and therefore his unique significance for Whitman (Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America [New York: Simon and Schuster, ]). . WCPP –. All subsequent references to this volume are by page number in the text. . Jeffers’ own comment was laconic: “Emerson interested me; Whitman never did” (SL ). . Several of Jeffers’ mature characters are veterans of the Great War: Edward Barclay, perhaps the most nakedly representative of Jeffers himself, in “The Women at Point Sur”; Carson Pierce in “Resurrection”; Hawl Hungerfield in “Hungerfield.” Lee Cauldwell wishes to enlist in the war in “Tamar,” as Jeffers did; Bull Gore is also a veteran of the Great War in “The Love and the Hate.” Only Hemingway, an actual veteran of the war, wrote about it as obsessively as did Jeffers. . Cf. my “Robinson Jeffers and the Uses of History,” in Robert Brophy, ed., Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet (New York: Fordham University Press, ), –. . SP xv–xvi; CP : . . See Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). . The anxiety of waiting for newscasts and the figure of the newscaster—inevitably, a disseminator of lies rather than truth—will be a prominent theme in Jeffers’ poems over the next several years, and he clearly describes himself in the image of the “man caught in the net of the world / Between news-cast and workdesk” (“The Sirens,” CP : ; cf. , , ). Jeffers does not merely mean that his attention is distracted, but that his capacity to transcend immediate and transitory

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Notes to Chapter 6 events is compromised, and thus his verse as well: a point he conceded directly in the prefatory Note to his  volume, Be Angry at the Sun. Yet he added, “[It] is right that a man’s views be expressed, though the poetry should suffer for it. Poetry should express the whole mind; if part of the mind is occupied unhappily, so much the worse” (CP : ; and see above, p. 331). . With the exception of “All the Little Hoof-Prints” (CP : –), no other speaker in one of Jeffers’ dramatic vignettes introduces a spouse, and, although his major female characters clearly owe much to Una, these appear to be the only scenes in which she is (perhaps) alluded to in her own right. . This schematic breakdown does not of course include the whole of Jeffers’ output and interest during this period, including narrative and dramatic poems thematically linked or contrasted with the major works I have here identified. I have considered some of this work in The Cliffs of Solitude and “The Theme of Resurrection.” Walter Margrave in “Margrave” is, as we have noted, a failed hero of endurance, and Howard Howren in “Such Counsels You Gave to Me” is, like Margrave, a failed medical student. The Greek theme in Jeffers’ verse is pursued in “Solstice,” a modern retelling of the legend of Medea, and in his  stage adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, commissioned by Judith Anderson. “The Loving Shepherdess” is a narrative pendant to “Dear Judas,” but a significant work in its own right. These works remain understudied; but see R. W. (Herbie) Butterfield, “Loving to Death: A Consideration of ‘The Loving Shepherdess,’” in CE –. . I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper Torchbooks,  []), xxix. For a general overview of the new agrarians, see William H. Major, Grounded View: New Agrarianism and the Academy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ). . Ibid., xxvii. . Berry’s eloquent calls in both prose and verse for sustainable, small-farm agriculture that is shaped to the contours of the land and preserves a maximum of biodiversity, clearly echo Jeffers. Not (as is Berry) a farmer himself, nor one to sentimentalize the difficult work of farming, Jeffers nonetheless indentured himself through his work as a stonemason, and took due note of the satisfactions of a life connected to the land. . CP : –, and see above, n. . See also Jeffers’ own comments on the poem in Alberts, –, and SP xvii; see also SL , . Jeffers wrote in February  to Lawrence Clark Powell (ibid., ), “I agree with you in preferring Cawdor to the Shepherdess,” but it was the latter and not the former poem he chose to reprint in the Selected Poetry (SP –). . Cf. “Hands” (CP : ), a contemporary poem in which Jeffers imagines the Indian predecessors of the Anglo migrants: “You people with the cleverer hands,

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our supplanters / In the beautiful country, enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down / And be supplanted.” . Cf. Jeffers’ late poem, “End of the World” (CP : ). . Livy, The History of Rome, : .–.. . Alberts, –. . Cf. the fuller version in Bennett, –, and, for the textual issues, CP : –. See, too, Edward Nickerson, “Freedom, Democracy, and Poetry: What Robinson Jeffers Said at the Library of Congress,” The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin (New Series, , ). . Cf. “I Shall Laugh Purely” (CP : –), in part a response to the Battle of Britain: “Count the glories of this time, / . . . count England, / Bleeding, at bay, magnificent, / At last a lion.” . See “Themes in My Poems” (CP : –), a lecture pendant to “The Poet in a Democracy” and prepared for the same tour. For the circumstances of this lecture and for textual commentary, see CP : –. For further discussion of Jeffers’ use of the concepts of the historical cycle and culture ages, see Radcliffe Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), Chapter , and my “Robinson Jeffers and the Uses of History.” . The (prophetic) trope of “future children” first appears in “Mediation on Saviors,” Section VI, in which Jeffers considers the temptations of power (“For power / After the nerves are put away, to lighten the abstract unborn children toward peace . . . // A man might have paid anguish indeed” [CP : ]), and sounds through several poems of the pre- to post–World War II period, where it is both a means of addressing an audience beyond the present and of imagining the human condition at the end of the age’s long decline. Section XLV of “The Inhumanist” is an address to the “children,” and concludes, in the voice of Jeffers’ protagonist: “How strange that I cannot see them: but my voice carries / A long way off.” Cf. the variant in “Flight of Swans” (CP : ): Sad sons of the stormy fall, No escape, you have to inflict and endure: surely it is time for you To learn to touch the diamond within to the diamond outside, Thinning your humanity a little between the invulnerable diamonds, Knowing that your angry choices and hopes and terrors are in vain, But life and death not in vain; and the world is like a flight of swans. The “children” Jeffers feared for were of course not merely “abstract” and “unborn,” but his own as well, as “Contemplation of the Sword” makes clear. Cf. too the address to his sons in “Shine, Perishing Republic.” . Cf. “Moments of Glory” (CP : ) and “Teheran” (); but also “Three

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Notes to Chapter 6 Men” (: ), where Churchill is accorded the virtues of courage and eloquence at least. . Jeffers develops this point in “Ethical Note,” an unpublished poem dated “May , ’” (CP : ), in which he counts “twenty million Russians . . . deliberately starved” and a further ten million enslaved in camps. He then proceeds to the crimes of the West (European empires, the extermination of the American Indian), before laconically concluding, “—As I was saying, Germany too is guilty of great crimes.” The liberation of the Nazi death camps was still eight months in the future, but it would not annul the atrocities of the victor nations for Jeffers. . On Jeffers’ response to the Four Freedoms, see his  letter to Herbert Carlin, quoted in Bennett, . . EL  (“The American Scholar”).

Chapter  . Cf. Jeffers’ image of the Pacific as “the staring unsleeping / Eye of the earth,” trained perpetually on the outer immensity of the sublime: “what it watches is not our wars,” i.e., the human prospect (“The Eye,” CP : ). . That the old man is called “Father” in this passage is also apposite. . But Jeffers adds, in a parenthetic phrase, “Expose yourself to it: you might learn something.” . The reference is to “Flight of Swans” (CP : ); see above, p. 328n4. . Myself among them; see my “Jeffers and Pessimism,” a paper presented to the Robinson Jeffers Association Conference in Aptos, California, February , in which I link Jeffers to the rich tradition of philosophical pessimism that derives from ancient Stoicism and proceeds through such figures as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, all of whom have been dealt with in connection with Jeffers in the critical and scholarly literature. For the connection to Freud, see my own The Cliffs of Solitude and “Tamar’s Oedipal Transcendence” (Robinson Jeffers Newsletter  []: –); for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ); for Heidegger, Tadeusz Sławek, The Dark Glory: Robinson Jeffers and His Philosophy of Time, Earth and Things (Katowice: Uniwersyte Słaşki, ). On the tradition itself, with its stress on human limitation and the tragic nature of the human condition, see, most recently, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). . Karman, –; Bennett, –, –. Cf. Jeffers’ own account of his illness in the unpublished poems “Descent to the Dead” (not to be confused with the  volume of the same title) and “Fever and Vision” (CP : ; –). . The relevant lines read (in couplets): “Perpetual faithfulness wears / The

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very heavens to tears. // A little infidelity / Lights stars in the sky. // Great love you’d not suffer that. / Now we walk, sleep and eat. //We live, but have you guessed where? / Deep, deep in hell my dear.” . Jeffers did make extensive notes for another narrative, “Christane” (Bennett, ), and notes exist for several other projected ones from his last decade (CP : –, passim). Hunt also prints a brief fragment in : . It would thus appear that Jeffers’ narrative impulse was far from spent with “Hungerfield,” and that he hoped to include at least one narrative in a new book of poems. At the same time, as Hunt observes, his conception of narrative was changing, and he planned interpolated meditations in both prose and verse as part of it. “The Inhumanist” may be regarded as a model for this new, composite narrative, with its alternations of meditation and action, both “real” and symbolic (or supernatural). The opening stanzas of “Margrave” can also be seen as a precursor of this more open and philosophical form, and Arthur B. Coffin traces Jeffers’ experimentalism back to the s in his “‘Something New Is Made’: Bricolage and Jeffers’ Narrative Poems of the s,” in CE –. In general, Jeffers’ very distinctive formal structures, particularly in the narratives and verse dramas, have received little attention. See my “‘A Terrible Genius’: Robinson Jeffers’s Art of Narrative,” ,  (Spring ): –. . An exception to the critical undervaluation of Jeffers’ late work is Steve Chapman (“Jeffers’s Evolutionary Muse: A Reading of ‘The Unformed Volcanic Earth,’” JS ,  []: –), who also sees Jeffers’ final period as distinctive and important to the corpus. I concur too with Chapman’s judgment that Bennett’s ordering of the poems in The Beginning and the End is “closer to [Jeffers’] original intention” than that of the Collected Poetry, which is arranged chronologically rather than thematically as was Jeffers’ wont in assembling his volumes. Since Bennett did collaborate with Jeffers in preparing her text, I have in general accepted her versions (and titlings) of the poems her volume contains, although final certainty about Jeffers’ intentions cannot be had. . CS – and passim. . See my “Punishing Horses: Animal Cruelty and the Symbolism of Evil in Jeffers,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment ,  (): –. . See particularly “The Answer” (CP : ). For the Scholastics, privation was being cut off from God by sin. Since, for Jeffers, the world is God, privation can only consist in a deliberate rejection of the nonhuman world in favor of its human component (a part of the world too, but, like the severed hand in “The Answer,” one rendered ugly—i.e., shorn of the value imparted by divine unity—in its detachment from the whole). . See above, n. . How much collaboration there was between Jeffers and

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Notes to Chapter 7 Bennett in preparing The Beginning and the End—or, conversely, how much latitude he gave her, and how much liberty she herself may have taken—is not clear. Hunt (CP : ) cites three poems as “amalgams” of disparate fragments. Bennett herself offered no comment on her procedure, and Random House published the volume as simply by Jeffers himself, with only the most cursory acknowledgment of Bennett’s role in its jacket note. According to the same note, Donnan and Garth Jeffers had a hand in it as well, suggesting active oversight if not collaboration. Jeffers himself could no longer decipher much of his handwriting by the end of his life. . CP : , and cf. “Shells” (: –), which imagines “A man . . . moving by a perished sea / In the starlight of the end,” and, similarly, “The Song of Triumph” (: –), which envisions “The agelong struggle of human evolution” coming down to a final extinction in which “only the old mother, gone mad, is left on earth.” Many of the poems in The Beginning and the End presuppose the inevitability of nuclear apocalypse and mass extinction, especially the series grouped under the subheading “Do You Still Make War?” This prospect shaped Jeffers’ late meditations in general, but a shade of skepticism in the old prophet made him doubt the conventional wisdom: “It is curious I cannot feel it yet / ” he wrote in “The Beautiful Captive.” “To pile up weapons on both sides of the ditch makes war as certain as sunrise / Yet I can’t feel its approach.” “However,” he mused, “—if not thus—God will find other means. The troublesome race of man, Oh beautiful planet, is not immortal” (CP : –). . The Greek root of “martyr” is witness (martiras), a term still used in contemporary Greek to describe one who testifies in a court of law. As Jeffers uses the term here, it has both the connotation of its modern English meaning and the abiding Greek root. It will be remembered that Jeffers intended “The Alpine Christ” to be part of the much longer poem to have been called “Witnesses” (Alberts, ). . A similar argument is propounded in Stanley Burnshaw’s The Seamless Web (New York: George Braziller,  []), which contends that the distinctive creature consciousness found in humans is the product of “evolutionary shock” and trauma. See too my comments in “The ‘Creature Poetry’ of Stanley Burnshaw” (Agenda [], –) and “Stanley Burnshaw and the Body” (idem. []: –). . Cf. the description in “Margrave” of “Death, the gay child with the gipsy eyes” (CP : ), and, similarly, in an untitled fragment, “Dear little sister whom men call Death, / . . . / That little gipsy” (: –).

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Post Mortem . The photographers themselves reciprocated, finding not only in Jeffers’ verse an analogue of their own techniques and concerns, or in what soon became known as “Jeffers Country” an apt subject for their cameras, but in Jeffers himself a physical embodiment of the quest-hero implied in their art. Such an epiphanic moment was described by Morley Baer, who came to photograph Jeffers in : All of a sudden, the nose—the profile—went up against the rocks. I saw one of the most beautiful outlines of a human head I’ve ever seen. It had a dignity, a force, an appreciation of this world, all encased in sinewy, gaunt lines that I can’t today forget. (Quoted in James Karman, ed., Stones of the Sur: Poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Photographs by Morley Baer [Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, ], .) Jeffers was by this time a practiced (if never a very comfortable) sitter, and perhaps what impressed Baer was, at least in part, a subject who understood the attitudes expected of him. Baer’s reaction, though striking, was not atypical; Weston, too, wrote that “[Jeffers] belongs to stormy skies and heavy seas,” as if he were himself an element of landscape (ibid.). What is certain is that no American literary figure of the period attracted more attention from photographers, both to himself and his environment. The enthusiasm was reciprocal. Vanity apart (and it cannot be discounted, any more than in the case of such notoriously “aloof ” yet oft-photographed figures as Yeats and Beckett), Jeffers found in the photographers a respect for the phenomenal world akin to his own: “I thought of the cant we have heard about art—cant that no one has to believe in, but it seems to be generally voiced, if not accepted—that art must not be representational; it should not, if that were possible, even suggest nature; it should reject nature and produce its own forms, follow its own laws. For a moment I felt meanly suspicious: is it possible that photography has driven the doctrinaires into this sterile corner?” (CP : ). For further discussion of the relationship between Jeffers and his photographers see the essays by Nicholas Bradley, James Baird, and Robert Brophy in JS : ,  (Spring and Fall, ). . Robert Boyers, “A Sovereign Voice: The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,” in Jerome Mazzaro, ed., Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism (New York: McKay, ), –; reprinted in CE –. . William James, Essays on Faith and Morals (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, ), . . CS passim. . EG .

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Notes to Post Mortem . See my “Jeffers, Stevens, and the Decreative Sublime,” Boulevard ,  (): –. . This, too, may have been among the “horrors” Jeffers wished to “magic” away from his house in “Apology for Bad Dreams” (cf. his recollection of this image in the late poem titled by Bennett “But I Am Growing Old and Indolent” [BE ; CP : ]). . For references, see “Birthday (Autobiography)” (CP : ); “It was good of my father” (); “After Lake Leman” (); and “The Old Wolf My Father” (). . Czesław Miłosz, Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections, tr. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), , . . Ibid., .

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Adams, Ansel,  Aeschylus, , , , ,  Agee, James,  Alberts, S. S.,  Alcott, Bronson, ,  American sublime: absent in contemporary verse, ; and Calvinism, , , ; concept and tradition of, ff.; and divine revelation, ; as Eden, –, , ; and Israel, , ; and Puritanism, , ; in Whitman, –. See also Sublime; Jeffers, Robinson—the sublime Arnold, Matthew, , ,  Baer, Morley, n Barclay, Arthur, character of, , , , , , –, , , , , , , ff., , , , , n Baudelaire, Charles,  Baxter, Richard, –, ,  Bellarmine, Robert Cardinal,  Bennett, Melba Berry, –, , n, –n Bentham, Jeremy,  Berry, Wendell,  and n Biely, Andrei,  Bierstadt, Albert, – Blake, William, 

Index

Bloom, Harold,  Boyers, Robert,  Brophy, Robert, , , ,  Bryant, William Cullen,  Buber, Martin,  Burke, Edmund, – Burnshaw, Stanley, n Caesar, as typological figure, , , , ff. California, character of, , , –, , n Calvinism, , , , , –, , , , ; and Jeffers, , , , , ,  Cassandra: in Jeffers, , , , , , , , ; mythical construction of, ,  Cawdor, character of, –, , , , , , –20,  Chapman, Steve, n Church, Frederic Edwin, ,  Churchill, Winston S. See under Jeffers, Robinson Clausius, Rudolf,  Clytemnestra, character of, –, , ff. Coffin, Arthur B., n Cole, Thomas, –, ,  Comte, Auguste, 

397

Index Cooper, James Fennimore,  Copernicus, Nicolas, , , , ,  Course of Empire, The. See Cole, Thomas Covenant theology, ,  Dante, , ,  Darwin, Charles, , , –, , , , ; and Emerson, . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Democracy, , , . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Descartes, René,  Double axe, as symbol, , – Dreiser, Theodore,  Edwards, Jonathan, , , , , , , . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Eliot, T. S., , . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Emerson, Ralph Waldo, , , , –, ff., ff.; and Calvinism, ; dualism of, ; and William Emerson [father], –, ; failing powers of, ; and “Fate,” –, , , , ; and God, ff., –, – , ; and Hamiltonian principles, ; influence on Whitman, ; and nature, , , , , , , ; and the Scholar, –; and slavery, –, n; on solitude and vocation, –, , , n; and the sublime, , , , , n; theodicy of, ; and Thoreau, , , , , n; and value, –. See also under Jeffers, Robinson Euripides, , –n, n Everson, William, , , , ,

398

–, n Evolution, concept of, ff., passim, , ff. Falck, Colin, –n Ferguson, Frances,  Fiske, John, ff. Force: concept of, , , –, , ; and Jeffers, . See also “strain,” under Jeffers, Robinson Fraser, Lance, character of, , , –, , –20, , n, n Freud, Sigmund, , , , , , n. See also under Jeffers, Robinson Frost, Robert,  Gelpi, Albert, , –n God: Christian conception of, , , ; in Emerson, , ; in nineteenth-century Western thought, , ff. See also Jeffers, Robinson—and God Hamlet, character of, n Hardy, Thomas, , ,  and n, , ,  Harrington, James,  Hass, Robert, –n Hawthorne, Nathaniel, –,  Heart of the Andes, The. See Church, Frederic Edwin Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,  Heidegger, Martin, , , n Helen of Troy, character and figure of, – Hemingway, Ernest, n Heraclitus, ,  Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 



Hitler, Adolf, . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Hotchkiss, Bill,  Hubble, Edwin,  Hunt, Tim, n, –n, nn, , n, –n Huxley, Thomas Henry,  Immanentism, ; in Jeffers, , n Inhumanism, , , , ,  Inhumanist, the, character of, , ff., , , , –,  James, William, ,  Jeffers, Donnan, –n Jeffers, Garth, –n Jeffers, Hamilton,  Jeffers, Maeve, –, – Jeffers, Robinson: and agnosticism, –, ; and American exceptionalism, ; antiurbanism of, , –, ; and apocalypse, , , , , , , –, ; and Athens, ; and authorial voice, –, , , , n; aversion to sunlight, n; and beauty, , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, ff., ; and biogenesis, ff., ; and bird imagery, , , , , ff., , , , –, , , , , –, , , , –, –, n, n; and the Buddha, ; and Buddhism, ; and Byzantium, ; castration imagery in, , , , , , ; and Winston Churchill,  and n, ; and consciousness, –, , , , , , –, , , , , , –, , ,

Index –, ; and cosmic cycles, ; critical reputation of, , , , –, nn, ; critique of Transcendentalism, ; and cruelty, , , , , , , ; and Darwin, –, , ; and death, , –; and Death, personification of, –, ; death of, ; and democracy, –, , –, , –, –, , , , , ; and design, –, –, , ; and desire, ; and “discovery,” , , ; and ecology, –; and Jonathan Edwards, , , ; and T. S. Eliot, , ; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, , , –, , –, , , , , , –, – , –, –, n, n, –n, –n, n, n; and entropy, –, ; and eternal recurrence, ,  –, , , , , , , ; and fascism, , ; and Fate, , –, –, , , , , , ; father of, , –, , –, , n; father as figure in, –; fire imagery in, , , , , , , , ; fountain, image of, –, , , , ; and freedom, ff., –, , , , ; and Sigmund Freud, , , ; and function of poetry, –3; and hate, , , ; and Hawk Tower, ; and heroes of endurance, –, ff., –20, , n, n; and heroes of transgression, –, , –, , –20, , , n; and historical cycles, ff., ; and Hitler, , –; and humanity, –,

399

Index (Jeffers, Robinson—cont.) –, –, , –, –, – –, –, , ff., , –; extinction of humanity, –, n; illness of,  and n; and incest, , , , –, , , , n, –, , , , ; and the individual, , ; and isolationism, ; and the Korean War, ; and landscape, ff., ff., , ; and love, –, –, –, – , , , –, , , , –; and Martin Luther, –; meditation form in, , , ; and mercy, ff., –; and Modernism, , , , , ; monism of, , , ; moral beauty, concept of, , , , , –; music, trope of in, n; and Mussolini, ; and narrative construction, –, n; and natural process, , , , , , , –, , , , , , ; and nature, , , –; Oedipal construction in, , –, , , , , ff., , ff., ff., , , , –, , , , , –n, n; and Oedipus cycle, ; and pain, , , –, , –, , , , , ff., , , , n; and pastoralism, –; and pathetic fallacy, –, , ; and pessimism, n; and photography,  and n; and pity, , , , , –, –; and poetic vocation, –, –, –30, ff., –, –; politics of, –, , ff.; and postmortem survival, ff., and praise, –,

400

; and prophecy, , , , , –, , , –, , n; and the origin of religion, –, ; religious quest of, –; and resurrection, , , , , ; and revenants, , , , ff., ff., ; and Romanticism, –, , n; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, –, –; and sacrificial hero, ff., –, ; and saviors, , –, , ; and science, , , –, , –, ff., , , , n; and Scripture, , , , , , , ; and Sparta, ; and Stoicism, , ; stone imagery in, , , , , ; and “strain,” , –, , , , –, , , , ; and subjectivity, –, ; and suffering, , , , , , , , , , ; and suicide, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , ; and Tacitus, ; and Thoreau, –, , , , , , ; and Tor House, , , –, , , ; and tragedy, –, , , –, , –, –, , , , –, ; and truth, –; vitalism of, , , , ; and war, –; and George Washington, ; and Woodrow Wilson, , –; and William Wordsworth, , –, , ; and World War I, , ff., –, , –, , , –, , , , , –, –, , , –, , , –; and World War II, , –, , ff., –, ff., , , 



— and God: acceptance of, –; affirmed within the cosmos, , –, , , –, , –, , , –, , , , , –, ; conflicted vision of, n; and consciousness, –; dramatized, –, –, –, ; Emersonian vision of in “The Truce and the Peace,” ff.; experimentation of, , ; by figure of Jesus, ff.; human aspiration toward, , , –, , , –, , , –; identification with by Barclay, –; inaccessibility of, ; Inhumanist conception of God, – ; nature of, ff., –; Oedipal projections of, , ff., ff., ; opposition to, –, –; privation from, n; rejection of as ontological entity, –, ; rejection of as paternal deity, ; relation to humanity of, –, ; self-hanged, , ff., ,  — the sublime: agnostic sublime, , , ; apocalyptic sublime, ; aspiration toward by tragic protagonists, , , , , n; and California, , ; cosmic dimension of, , ; and death, –; dialectic of, ; disclosure by transgressive action, ; divine disclosure in, ff., ; and divine relation, , , , ; early conception of, –; enacted through landscape, , ; influence of Kant on, , ; internalization of by Cawdor, ; and inversion, ; liminal threshold of, ; mature depiction of, ff.;

Index and Oedipal regression, , ; omnipresence of, ; and persona of Jesus, ; and the poet, ; poetic modifiers of, ; problematic of, –, , –; purifying effects of, –, , ; as refuge, ; and the self, –; shared vision of with Thoreau, ; as site of resistance, –, ; terror of, ; and tragedy, ,  — Works of: “After Lake Leman,” n; “All the Corn in One Barn,” , ; “The Alpine Christ,” –, –, , –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , ; “Animals,” –; “Animula,” , ; “The Answer,” –, , , , , , n; “Ante Mortem,” ; “Apology for Bad Dreams,” , , , –, – [quoted], –, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , –n, n; “An Artist,” –, , –n; “At Lindsay’s Cabin” [quoted], ; “At the Birth of an Age,” –, , , –, , , –, , , –; “At the Fall of an Age,” – , , , ; “Ave, Caesar,” ; Be Angry at the Sun, , ; “The Beaks of Eagles,” ; “The Beautiful Captive,” , n; “The Beauty of Things,” ; “The Beginning and the End,” n, , , , –, ; The Beginning and the End [volume], , – and n, n, n; “The Bird with the Dark Plumes,” , n; “Birds,” ;

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Index (Jeffers, Robinson: Works—cont.) “Birds and Fishes,” , –; “Birthday (Autobiography),” n; “Birth-Dues,” ; “The BloodGuilt,” , ; “The Bloody Sire,” , , ; “Boats in a Fog,” –, , , , , , –n; “The Bowl of Blood,” , ; “The Broken Balance,” , , , , , –, , –, , –, , , , –n; “But I Am Growing Old and Indolent,” , n; Californians, , , , , ; “Calm and Full the Ocean,” ; “Cassandra,” , , , , ; “Cawdor,” , ,  [quoted], , –, –, , , , , , , , –n, n, n, n, n, n; Cawdor [volume], ; “Christane,” n; “The Coast-Range Christ,” , , –, –, , , , , ; Collected Poetry, –n, n; “Contemplation of the Sword,” , –, n; “Continent’s End,” , , , – n; “Contrast,” , n; “Credo,” , –n; “The Cretan Woman,” , , , n; “Curb Science?,” –, , ; “Dawn,” ; “The Day Is a Poem,” ; “De Rerum Virtute,” , –, –, , , ; “Dear Judas,” , , , , –, , , , , , , ; Dear Judas [volume], ; “Decaying Lambskins,” , , ; “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones,” , , n; “Descent to the Dead” [unpublished poem], n; Descent to the Dead, ,

402

–; “Diagram,” , –; “Distant Rainfall,” –n; “Dorothy Atwell” [quoted], , ; “The Double Axe,” ,  , , ; The Double Axe [volume], ,, , , , –,, , n; “Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind,” ; “End of the World,” , n; “Ethical Note,” n; “Evening Ebb,” , , , –n; “The Excesses of God,” , ; “An Extinct Vertebrate,” ; “The Eye,” n; “Fauna,” –n; “Fever and Vision,” n; “Fire on the Hills,” –, – passim, , , , , –n; “Flight of Swans,” n, n; “Fog,” , , – n; “Fourth Act,” , , ; “Ghost,” ; “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” –, –, , , –n, n, n, n; Give Your Heart to the Hawks [volume], ; “Give Your Wish Light,” ; “Going to Horse Flats,” –, , , n; “Gray Weather,” – n; “The Great Explosion,” –, –, , , , n; “The Great Sunset,” ; “The Great Wound,” , –; “Hands,” – n; “He Is All,” ; “Hellenistics,” , , ; “Historical Choice,” –; “Hooded Night,” –, , –n; “Hope Is Not for the Wise,” , , ; “How Beautiful It Is,” , ; “The Humanist’s Tragedy,”  and n; “Hungerfield,” , –, , , , , –; Hungerfield [volume], –, , , ; “Hurt Hawks,” , –, , , n; “The Inhumanist,”

Index



, –, , , –, , , n, n; “Ink-Sack,” ; “The Inquisitors,” , , ; “I Shall Laugh Purely,” , n; “Invasion,” , –, ; “It was good of my father,” n; “The King of Beasts,” ; “A Little Scraping,” –, , –, ; “Look, How Beautiful,” , ; “The Love and the Hate,” , , –; “Love the Wild Swan,” , , , ; “The Loving Shepherdess,” ; “Mal Paso Bridge,” –n; “Margrave,” ,  [quoted], –, –, , – , , n, n; “Medea,” n; “Meditation on Saviors,” , –, , , , , –, , , , , –, –, , , ,  –n, n; “Moments of Glory,” , –n; “Monument,” ; “Moon and Five Planets,” ; “Moral Beauty,” –; “My Burial Place,” , ; “Natural Music,” , , , ; “Nerves,” ; “Night,” , , , , , , , , , ; “Night Without Sleep,” ; “Nightpiece,” ; “Noon,” –n; Not Man Apart, ; “November Surf,” ; “Ocean,” – ; “The Ocean’s Tribute,” , ; “October Week-End,” n; “Ode on Human Destinies,” , , , ; “Ode to Hengist and Horsa,” ; “Oh Lovely Rock,” –, – , , ; “Old Age Hath Clawed Me,” ; “The Old Wolf My Father,” , n; “On an Anthology of Chinese Poems,” –; “Orca,” –, , , –n; “An

Ordinary Newscaster,” ; “Oysters,” , ; “Passenger Pigeons,” , –; “Pearl Harbor,” , ; “Phoenix and Turtle,” – and n; “The Place for No Story,” –; “Pleasures,” ; “The Poet in a Democracy,” –, –; “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” –; “Point Joe,” , , –; “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,” – ; “Post Mortem,” ; “Pourvou Que Ça Doure,” ; “Prescription of Painful Ends,” , –, , , , , ; “The Purse-Seine,” –; “Quia Absurdum,” ; “Rearmament,” –, , ; “A Redeemer,” , , , , –, , , ; “Resurrection,” ; “Return,” , , –n; “Roan Stallion,” , – [quoted], , , –, , , , , , , n; “Rock and Hawk,” –; “Salvage,” ; “Savagely Individual,” ; “See the Human Figure,” –, ; Selected Poetry (), , , , , , , , , n, –n, n; Selected Poetry (), –n; Selected Poetry (), –n; “Self-Criticism in February,” , , ; “Shells,” n; “Shine, Empire,” –, ; “Shine, Perishing Republic,” –, , , , , , , , n; “Shine, Republic,” –, –, , ; “Shiva,” , , ; “Sign-Post,” –; “The Silent Shepherds,” , , ; “The Sirens,” , ; “So Many BloodLakes,” –; “Soliloquy,” ; “The Song of Triumph,” n; “The

403

Index (Jeffers, Robinson: Works—cont.) Soul’s Desert,” ; “Staggering Back Toward Life,” ; “Storm Dance of the Sea Gulls,” ; “Such Counsels You Gave to Me,” , , ; “Suicide’s Stone,” ; “Summer Holiday,” , –n; “Tamar”  [quoted], , , –, –, , , –n; “Tear Life to Pieces,” , ; “Teheran,” , – n; “That Noble Flower,” ; “Thebaid,” , –, , ; “Themes in My Poems,” n; “Theory of Truth,” , , , , , –, , , , n, n; “Thoughts Contingent to a Poem,” ; “Three Men,” – n; “Thurso’s Landing,” , – , – passim, –, , , , –n, n; “To Death,” , –n; “To His Father,” , –, , ; “To Kill in War Is Not Murder,” ; “To the Stone-Cutters,” , , , ; “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” , , , , –, , –, , , , –n, n, –n; “Tragedy Has Obligations,” –; “The Trap,” –; “Triad,” ; “The Truce and the Peace,” –, , , ; “Vulture,” ; “War-Guilt Trials,” ; “Watch the Lights Fade,” ; “We Are Those People,” , ; “What Is Worthless?,” ; “What Odd Expedients,” , ; “What Of It?,” , ; “Whom Shall I Write For?,” ; “Wilson in Hell,” –, ; “The Wind-Struck Music,” , –, , n; “Winged Rock,” –; “Witnesses,” , ; “The

404

Women at Point Sur,” , , , – , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , – , , , ; “Woodrow Wilson,” ; “The World’s Wonders,” , ; “The Year of Mourning,” –, –, –, ,  Jeffers, William Hamilton, –, , , –, , – Jeffers, Una, , , , –, –, n Jefferson, Thomas,  Jesus: assumption of suffering by, ; in “At the Birth of an Age,” ff.; as avenger in “The Love and the Hate,” –; and Barclay, –, , –; in “The CoastRange Christ,” –; in “Dear Judas,” –, , , , ; enfigurement of in “The Alpine Christ,” , , –, –; figure of, , , ; as historical personage, –, , , ; in “Meditation on Saviors,” ; in “A Redeemer,” ; will to power in, ,  Jung. C. G.,  Kafka, Rob, n Kant, Immanuel, , –, , , , –,  Kazin, Alfred,  Keats, John,  Kierkegaard, Søren,  King, Clarence,  Lao-tze,  Laplace, Pierre-Simon,  Lawrence, D. H.,  LeConte, Joseph, , , 

Index



Lincoln, Abraham,  London, Jack,  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,  Lucretius, , , , , , ; atomism of,  Lyotard, Jean-François, –n Mallarmé, Stéphane, , , ,  Martin, Ronald E.,  McCosh, James,  Meditation, as literary form, – Melville, Herman, –, ,  Miłosz, Czesław,  Milton, John,  Muir, John, , ,  Mussolini, Benito. See under Jeffers, Robinson Natural process: and beauty, ; and consciousness, ; as divine praxis, , ; as dynamic equilibrium, ; necessity for acceptance of, , –; as negative template, ; and storm, ; as strain, , ; transfigured,  Nature: and humanity, ; process glimpsed in, ; as value, – Newton, Isaac,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , , – , , , , , n Norris, Frank,  Nuclear sublime, , , , n Oedipus, character of, –,  Orestes, character of, –, , , , , –, , , , , , n, n, –n Orestes, classical figure of, –,  Orwell, George,  Otto, Rudolf, n

Pascal, Blaise, ,  Plato,  Porte, Joel,  Pound, Ezra, , ,  Powell, Lawrence Clark, n Power, Sister Mary Jane, ,  Prometheus, figure of, –, , , , ff. Puritans: and American exceptionalism, , n; and apocalypticism, , ; and divine encounter, ; and heavenly meditation, –, , ; and natural world, –; sin and redemption in, ; theology of, ,  Rilke, Rainer Maria, ,  Rodman, Selden,  Roosevelt, Franklin D.,  Rorty, James, , ,  Scaevola, Mucius, ,  Schopenhauer, Artur, , n Second Law of Thermodynamics, , , ,  Shakespeare, William, ,  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, , , n, n Sibbes, Richard,  Sierra Club, the,  Sophocles, , – Southern Agrarians,  Spencer, Herbert,  Spengler, Oswald,  Spinoza, Baruch,  Stalin, Joseph,  Stevens, Wallace, , ,  Sublime, the: apocalypse and, ; and Emerson, , , n; and Lyotard, –n; nuclear sublime, ;

405

Index as Oedipal figuration, ; postKantian sublime, ; problematic of, –, –; Puritan sublime, , ; –; and Romantics, ; and Thoreau, , . See also American sublime; Jeffers, Robinson—the sublime; Nuclear sublime Swinburne, Algernon,  Tamar, character of, , , , –, , , , , –, , –, ,  Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, ,  Tennyson, Alfred, , , ,  Tertullian,  Thoreau, Henry David, , ff., ; and Emerson, –, –, , n; and Jeffersonian principles, , ; monism of, ; persona of, ; and the sublime, . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Thurso, Reave, character of, –, , – passim, , ,  Tocqueville, Alexis de, –,  Transcendentalists, American, , –, 

406

Van Doren, Mark, –, –n Vasquez, Onorio, character of, , ,  Vico, Giambattista,  Weiskel, Thomas, , , , n Weston, Edward,  Whitman, Walt, , –, –, , ,  Williams, William Carlos,  Wills, Garry, n Wilson, Rob, ,  Wilson, Woodrow. See under Jeffers, Robinson Winters, Yvor,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig,  Wood, William, ,  Woodrow, James, ,  Wordsworth, William, , . See also under Jeffers, Robinson Wright, George Frederick, ,  Yeats, William Butler, ,  Yosemite Valley, –, n Zola, Emile, 