I
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.
II
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.
We had 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.
Reading Robinson Jeffers as a freshman in college changed my life. Before Jeffers, I had thought of poetry as boring words by long-dead, boring people. Jeffers was vital and and his words were precise. He did not force language into unnatural rhyming patterns. I was fortunate to have Bill Hotchkiss, an important Jeffers scholar, as my teacher, and later, as my friend.
Jeffers was born on January 10, 1887. His father taught Old Testament Literature and Biblical History at Western Theology Seminary in Pittsburgh and supervised Jeffers's early education. After a varied and well-traveled education, Jeffers married Una Call Kuster in 1913 and moved to Carmel, California. In 1919 he began building Tor House, a 40 foot stone tower next to his home.
From the Academy of American Poets:
Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche's concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation. Many of Jeffers's narrative poems use incidents of rape, incest, or adultery to express moral despair. The Woman at Point Sur (1927) deals with a minister driven mad by his conflicting desires. The title poem of Cawdor and Other Poems (1928) is based on the myth of Phaedra. In Thurso's Landing (1932), Jeffers reveals, perhaps more than in any of his poems, his abhorrence of modern civilization. His many other volumes include Solstice and Other Poems (1935), containing early use of the Medea story, to which he later returned.
Jeffers is often thought of as an extension of the transcendentalist movement of Emerson. But his view of nature is less as a vehicle of transcendence and more as a source and destination of human meaning. Jeffers rejected much of the "civilized" world and felt more at home in wild nature. He disliked the impact of civilization on human morality, which does not stand out as terribly unique among the modernist writers following WWI.
However, one key phrase in the above poem set Jeffers apart from his peers--it made him an outcast to some and a hero to others. "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk," a statement that became the foundation for Inhumanism, Jeffers's philosophy that places those closer to nature as morally superior to civilized, "communal people." For Jeffers, the hawk is more worthy of life in that it lives by its natural instincts, uncorrupted by culture, expectations, rationalizations, or any other "humanizing" force.
"Hurt Hawks" is one of the most widely anthologized poems from Jeffers' vast collection. The inherent duality in the speaker's behavior makes it a poem that readers come back to again and again. It is not the statement of Inhumanism that makes it a great poem; it's that the speaker makes such a claim and then kills the suffering bird anyway. The second half of the poem is his attempt to rationalize what he has done.
Jeffers believed in a very primal idea of God. In this sense, it is a prerational, prepersonal conception of the Divinity. Jeffers did not hold much hope for humanity in its evolution, especially after the unleashing of the atom in WWII. He chose to advocate a return to a more primitive, authentic life close to nature--living with and within the fluidity of natural forces.
Many of Jeffers's greatest poems were long narratives. "Tamar," Roan Stallion," "The Women at Point Sur," and "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" are among the best-known of these poems. As a bit of context, "Tamar" was written at about the same time that T.S. Eliot wrote "The Wasteland." Where Eliot goes back to the Greek and Roman for imagery and themes to express an intellectualized desire for humans to return to the cycles of nature, Jeffers goes back to the Old Testament story of Tamar, daughter of King David, and resets the story in the California landscape that Jeffers found so powerful. In Jeffers's version, Tamar is the seductress, not the victim--a primal force of nature.
As his career progressed, Jeffers became more and more misanthropic. He rejected U.S. involvement in WWII, favoring an isolationist approach that would allow Europe to destroy itself. He lost much of his literary support because of his political and philosophical views. His last great moment came with his hugely successful rewriting of Medea for the Broadway stage.
Jeffers died in 1962, having influenced a whole new generation of poets, including Bill Hotchkiss, William Everson, Czeslaw Milosc, and Mark Jarman. Jeffers was one of the few poets ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
There are limited online resources, but there are many books about the man and his poetry. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Random House) remains the best collection of his poetry still available.
For further reading:
William Everson, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968)
Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism (1971)
Robert Brophy, Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems (1973)
Bill Hotchkiss, Jeffers: The Sivaistic Vision (1975)
William Everson, The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (1988)
James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990)
Robert Zaller, ed., Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991)
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