Jeffers’s Heavenly Meditations
Robert Zaller
Volume 3, Number 4
Robert Zaller
Volume 3, Number 4
1. Jeffers’s antecedents in the Anglo-American literary tradition remain relatively unexplored. Notice has been taken of his link to Romantics such as Words-worth and Emerson, and of his debt to Hardy. An older and equally critical connection to the Puritan meditation tradition of the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries has been all but overlooked, however, and with it an important source of Jeffers’s craft, sensibility, and religious vision.
2. The Puritan meditation, as exemplified in the sermons of such figures as Richard Sibbes and Richard Baxter as well as in the epics of Milton and Bunyan and the poetry of a host of lesser figures, is typified by a structure in which vanity and vice is revealed, deplored, and rejected, and in which the power of God to strengthen and console is gradually disclosed. Jeffers was the heir of the meditation tradition both through his father, the Presbyterian minister and Old Testament scholar William Hamilton Jeffers, and through his famous ancestor, Jonathan Edwards. Many of his shorter poems are cast in a form analogous to the classic meditation or play with elements of its structure. Jeffers’s use of this form culminates in a longer poem, “The Inhumanist,” perhaps the closest approach in his oeuvre to a fully-developed sermon of the kind a Sibbes or Baxter would have recognized.
3. The meditation tradition has been traced most persuasively by Louis L. Martz in his classic study, The Poetry of Meditation. In its canonical form it stretched from Origen and Augustine to St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. 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 1650. As Martz defines the distinction, the Catholic tradition 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 meditation, especially as defined in St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, was a powerful means to that end. For the Puritan, however, salvation was available to the elect alone, 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 signified only privation and the certainty of hell (Martz 158– 63).
Meditation was not a means of comfort alone to the elect, but of 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 the surest 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” (Martz 153).
4. “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 other power of the soul. Indeed, it is the highest duty, as it involves the highest power, or rather 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. (Baxter 142)
5. 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 reject or ignore any part of the banquet that God spreads before him, for, as Baxter continues, “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” (Baxter 143). To fail to embrace any part of God’s creation with heart as well as mind was to refuse it all.
6. 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 aesthetic. The theme of spiritual ravishment had been central to the 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 at worst 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, the Puritan aesthetic 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.
7. It is only within the past generation that the Puritans’ positive valuation of the natural world has been given its due. Earlier scholarship, failing to consider the background of Protestant iconoclasm from which the Puritan tradition emerged, took its paucity of visible representation 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 treated as a gift of God’s grace, albeit an abused one; as the site of the saint’s necessary spiritual travail; and as the prefigurement of his ultimate comfort.
8. These topoi were common to Puritanism both in Old and New England, but confrontation with the American wilderness sharpened the issues involved in dealing with the natural landscape. After England’s green and pleasant land, the savage Eden of America 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,9. A harsh land, yes, and populated by predators, but “Princely” and royal ones, the signature of a sovereign God.
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,
The storm presaging Porpus, Herring-Hogge,
Line shearing Sharke, the Catfish, and Sea Dogge. (Daly 10)
10. The core elements of the Puritan imagination—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’s verse. There remains an even more direct link, however: the man who may be regarded as the last in the apostolic succession of the New England ministry, Jeffers’s maternal ancestor Jonathan Edwards.
It was Frederic Ives Carpenter who first suggested the connection between Jeffers and Edwards.1 Their affinities were temperamental as well as typological. Edwards’s nature, like Jeffers’s, was softened by matrimony; he described his wife Sarah as having a sociability and a 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, her wit and charm to close the distance” (Lesser 7). More substantively, Edwards sought to incorporate the Newtonian science of his time into his theology, as Jeffers would the Darwinism of the late nineteenth century and the cosmology of Hubble in his own thought and verse. Both men pursued scientific studies in their youth, Edwards in entomology and Jeffers in medicine. Thus, Edwards did not come to his science as a theologian seeking a rational justification of his faith, but as an enthusiast who never doubted the convergence of science and theology in the same truth; as Perry Miller remarks, he “regarded [science] not as an alien body requiring incorporation into Christianity, but as a language of God by which one should learn to refashion the language of theology” (Miller 131). For Edwards, God was manifest in the natural order, which reflected both his creative will and his determination to effectuate it through natural process, or necessity, 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.
This view was qualified by two considerations. First, the privileged relation to divinity was available only to the elect, for it was precisely the spark of the divine within them that the reprobate rejected, thus meriting the fires of hell. 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 utterly loathsome; as Edwards told his congregation, “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” (Miller 280). The reader of Jeffers will readily bring similar passages to mind.
11. 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 Transcendentalist avant la lettre. As 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 confessional” (Miller 185). 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.
12. Jeffers imbibed Emerson thoroughly in his youth, admired him into young adulthood as one of America’s two literary eminences (the other was Poe), and showed his influence in his early verse (Ridgeway 7–8, 209).2 The influence remained, but settled. Behind it rose that of Emerson’s—and Jeffers’s—Puritan forbears, mediated and contested by Jeffers’s own father. The anxious, attenuated Christianity of a late nineteenth-century biblical scholar like the Rev. William Hamilton Jeffers could no more satisfy Jeffers’s religious urgency than the hazy formulations of Transcendental idealism; like Edwards, he looked back through the scrim of a material universe as described by science to re-cover a creed outworn, Calvinism.
13. This is not the place to consider in detail the evolution of Jeffers’s religious thought, for which an impressive study already exists.3 Suffice it to say that Jeffers appears to have had something like a conversion experience around the end of World War I—of what nature 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,14. Jeffers did not deal with the remnants of his filial piety however until he created that stupendous figure of sacrilege, the Oedipally raging and God-engulfing hero of “The Women at Point Sur,” the Rev. Arthur Barclay. Barclay is the projection of everything Jeffers had fled from 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, to touch “truth” (CP 2:608)—as the questing Rev. Jeffers, who spent his last years roving from church to church and from congregation to congregation, apparently was not.
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 savage temple wall . . . (SP 71)
You are kindly and simple, you made war when they told you to, you have made peace when they told you.15. 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 result for him, ultimately, was the loss of his pastorate. 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), and its reception administered a shock 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 1:402).
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. I have been a blind man leading you blind,
Nobody can build the truth on lies. My blindness is not removed,
I have nothing true to tell you, no profession but ignorance, I can tell you what’s false. Christianity is false.
The fable that Christ was the son of God and died to save you, died and lived again. Lies. You’d swallow
The yarns of idle fishermen, the wash of Syria? You are very simple people. It is time to scour off.
(CP 1:249–50)
16. In this and other poems of the late 1920s, a distinct change of diction and tone comes into Jeffers’s verse. In the earlier lyrics his voice is more focused on particulars, and he appears less often to be addressing readers in the plural. Jeffers represents this change as a surprise even to himself: “Am I another keeper of the people,” he asks in “Meditation on Saviors,” “that on my own shore, / On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the sicknesses I left behind me concern me?” (CP 1:398). Prophecy awakes in him, slowly and reluctantly, though he knows that his message has already been rejected, and that it is wiser to be silent:
A sign is declared in heaven17. It is essential to the trope of prophecy in Jeffers that, Isaiah-like, the prophet be spurned or ignored; that great and inexorable transformation is inevitable; and that efforts to reverse or avoid it are in vain: change can only be accepted and endured. Jeffers’s notion of culture cycles is Spenglerian, as has often been noted; but the idea of fixed and determinate world-ages is also 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 presumptively entailed a final confrontation with the Anti-christ, and although they were a harbinger of ultimate joy they would also be a time of utmost 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.
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 1:372).4
18. Jeffers begins “Boats in a Fog” with a summary description—and rejection—of worldly diversions:
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,19. He 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 verbal 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, as the boats, enveloped in their lowering mantle, become “shadows” that move “[o]ut 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 gerundive “throbbing” returns toward the end of the section—now as a simple 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, have been laid under command; their purposes are no longer their own, and their progress is as ordered and apparently 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:
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult. (CP 1:110)
A flight of pelicans20. 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; that, too, which connects them with the larger cosmic pattern that includes “the flight of the planets” and, invoked only by the unattributed qualities of “nobility” and “earnestness,” the unseen presence that embraces all. Thus, through the use of what the Puritan minister 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.
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.
21. Very similar elements are juggled in a somewhat different order in “Hooded Night.” The natural elements are introduced first, as the wind:
Moves in the dark22. 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” roused 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 headland, whose primal shapes contrast with the hewn blocks of the pyramids as “the final unridiculous peace” they guard contrasts with the flimsy Peace of Versailles. “Here is reality,” Jeffers says, in the most unforgiven line in modern poetry; “The other is a spectral episode; after the inquisitive animal’s / Amusements are quiet: the dark glory.”
The sleeping power of the ocean, no more beastlike than manlike,
Not to be compared; itself and itself. (CP 2:3)
23. 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 Victor’s Peace of 1919). These are “spectral,” episodic, and they are immediately annulled by the clinching phrase “the dark glory.” Heaven is present, and one needs only the attentiveness to sense it, the clarity to speak it: “Here is reality.”
24. “A Little Scraping” 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 a picture of an “anthill” human culture that has degenerated from amusements to mere “vices,” to which is opposed the arch-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 dishonest contractor’s-concrete25. The long withheld object of the first couplet springs the magnificent 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:
Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom.
Shake the dust from your hair. 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. (CP 2:282)
A few26. 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 of which she forms part. 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.”5 Jeffers then proceeds immediately to the unexpected conclusion that links the poem to its opening lines:
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 power27. 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’s time.
That piles up cities for the poem of their fall
And gathers multitude like game to be hunted when the season comes.
28. Let us consider three more examples of “meditation” from the 1930s, 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” is a sermon compressed into a sonnet, but the “you” of its address is the poet himself no less than his audience, and hence it is a soliloquy no less than a pronouncement. It begins commandingly—and self-rebukingly:
Civilized, crying how to be human again: this will tell you how.29. The poem’s problematic is stated in the form of a declaration: “Civilized, crying how to be human again.” As any reader of Jeffers would have known, the word “civilized” was the most negatively weighted term in his vocabulary. It carried precisely 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 have become the veritable antithesis of all value, for it is the condi- tion one must escape to become “human” again. This is an apparent paradox, heightened by the use of “again,” with its suggestion that Homo sapiens had been properly human in its precivilized form and might be in some post- or transcivilized one, but could not be so as civilized. One must, again, be attentive to the theological underpinnings of Jeffers’s 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’s use of “human” in contrast to “civilized” is, therefore, analogous to the Puritan distinction between innocence and re-demption, that is of a prelapsarian (precivilized) and a blessed (transcivilized) state. Even the regenerate cannot return to primal innocence, and final blessedness, of course, can only await the elect in heaven. The latter can, however, enjoy the assurance of blessing on earth, as Sibbes and Baxter emphasize, and through meditation attain a glimpse of Zion’s glory. Jeffers, in a post-Calvinist age, scoffs at the “harps and habitations” of a Christian hereafter (“Night,” CP 1:116), 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 the one mode of apprehension we have, the sole vision of the divine we are vouchsafed, the act of praise for which we were formed. In Baxter, meditation is a particular duty; in Jeffers, it is the supreme duty.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. (CP 2:418)
30. 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,31. Jeffers’s 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 of ascending to heaven but a meditative technique for escaping both the unredeemed or, more modernly, the narcissistic self and the collective which is its mass projection. With desire stilled by divinity and eyes cleansed by the natural world, one can reap the fruits of meditation:
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.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;32. These lines are perhaps as close to 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:
Things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature.
At length33. 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”).6 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 further. For the purposes of our present discussion, it is as perfect an example of divine meditation—and of meditation on the nature of such meditation—as modern poetry possesses.
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.
A severed hand34. 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, Jeffers makes a critical distinction with 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 man’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 obscured by human action.
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. (CP 2:536)
35. This last point is dramatized in “Going to Horse Flats,” whose narrator engages an elderly hermit in a conversation about politics. The hermit is Jeffers’s 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, as Jeffers says with his usual laconic accuracy, for “despair.” Once again, however, there is a salvific alternative:
But for each man36. It needs to be emphasized, in the face of persistent misinterpretation, that the “solution” Jeffers proposes has nothing to do with evasion, indifference, or withdrawal. The detachment it counsels is not from suffering but from partisanship, which is always in error because there can be no collective solution to the human dilemma. As the elect know themselves blessed by the experience of saving grace, a grace that can never be conferred by ritual or sacrament but is known only in the individual heart, so it is each man’s responsibility to climb out of the pit of himself, to escape the “trap,” and, as Jeffers says in “Meditation on Saviors,” to “make his health in his mind” (CP 1:401). To do that is to turn outward, to what Jeffers calls in the same poem “the coast opposite humanity.” It is not a stoic act, a concentration of fortitude. It is a religious one, an opening toward divinity.
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. . . . (CP 2:543)
37. The Inhumanist—he is given no other name—lives as a “caretaker” on the farm of Bull Gore, whose destruction is the subject of the first part of “The Double Axe.”7 His sole companion is a dog, his sole possession the double-bladed axe that gives the poem its title. The axe is both symbol and protagonist, at various points in the poem “screaming,” “barking,” “neighing,” “buzzing,” “yell-ing,” 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 pas-sage, “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” (258). Its two halves, that is, represent the alternating poles of creation and destruction that Jeffers saw as divine process, and in wielding it (though the axe at times seems to wield him, too), the Inhumanist takes on godlike attributes of his own.
38. Like Barclay (or Jonathan Edwards among the Indians), the Inhumanist is self-exiled, having “paid his birth-dues” and being quits with his fellows, as Jeffers puts it in the original preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems.8 As always in Jeffers, this is a resolve not kept, for it would mean the end of the 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 though several express the wish to become disciples, none are invited to remain. The first “disciple” presents himself humbly, as a seeker of 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 doppelganger 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 such poems as “The Broken Balance” and “Prescription of Painful Ends” (CP 1:372–76; CP 3:14), 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” (263). The image is that of the apocalypse in Revelations 13.11, 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 In-humanist, finally lying down to sleep, awakes to the “red dawn” of the post-apocalyptic future (310–12).
39. The poem’s mystical apotheosis occurs when the Inhumanist, transcending the mediatory roles of savior and prophet, achieves ecstatic union with 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 leather40. The Inhumanist achieves 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 of heavenly meditation, although of course Jeffers’s 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 im-puted wonderment of nature at a creature that inhabits itself so “loosely” that it has need to seek beyond its limits. The Inhumanist responds by reaffirming the experience of union with all 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, the integrity of each thing in its “felt nature” that he had celebrated in “Boats in a Fog” and many other poems; on the other, the perception of the divine unity of all phenomena and the longing for aesthetic consummation in it.
Of his old cheeks. “Dear love. You are so beautiful.
Even this side the stars and below the moon. How you can 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.” (289)
41. Jeffers’s panentheism might seem to have had more in common with the antinomianism of renegade Puritan seekers whose vision later fed into Quakerism than with New England orthodoxy. But in his insistence on the unapproachable majesty as well as the radical immanence of God, he was perhaps more faithful to Calvinism than the Calvinists themselves. Calvinist orthodoxy had always stumbled on the rock of divine love, for God’s eternal decree ex-cluded the reprobate, and his mercy extended only to the few. By rejecting the categories of justice and mercy and embracing the full implications of Darwinian materialism, Jeffers sought to pare away the anthropomorphism that, no less than the long-shed doctrines of reprobation and election, 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 beyond any other duty; it was the very object of heavenly meditation itself. Such meditation had ceased with the collapse of salvific belief, and humanity, deluded in Jeffers’s view by dreams of a secular redemption, had turned in-ward. Only the restoration of the individual encounter with the divine—which was to say, the restoration of the individual himselfreverse this process, at least for those capable of achieving it.
42. 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 science rather than that of seventeenth-century theology. Without the anchor of divinity, 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 inevitably collapsed upon itself. If radical individualism was the burden of the American ego—and Jeffers, like Hawthorne and Melville, never doubted that this was so—it could be borne, in his view, only by the opposition of an infinitely greater power. Americans in that sense needed God more than any other nation, but a God whose colossal disproportion and salutary indifference could humble, and in Robert Frost’s term “appall” them. That such a God could not perhaps be loved (and in that sense even 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 remarks of American literature that:
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.43. Robinson Jeffers, under the eye of a dead father and the cope of heaven, sought to recreate this primal scene on the last wild shore of America. His isolation in American letters is the consequence of this, but so is his importance.
ENDNOTES
1 Carpenter, 637–39. Jeffers wrote to Carpenter (who sent him an offprint of his article) that he had read his essay “with much interest, and some profit . . . feeling a new sympathy toward your subject” (Letters 186).
2 For Emersonian influence in Jeffers, see especially the sonnet sequence “The Truce and the Peace” in Brides of the South Wind, 69–82, discussed in Zaller, Cliffs, 73–75.
3 Everson, The Excesses of God.
4 Jeffers offers the same advice to the prophetess Cassandra in the late poem “Cassandra”: “Poor bitch, be wise” (CP 3:121).
5 Cf. the treatment of this poem in Zaller, “Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime,” 46–48.
6 Cf. “Oh Lovely Rock” (CP 2:546–47).
7 For a discussion of this section, “The Love and the Hate,” see Zaller, Cliffs, 185–93.
8 Jeffers, The Double Axe, 175; cf. “Birth-Dues” (CP 1:371).
9 Kazin, 3.
WORKS CITED
Baxter, Richard. The Saints Everlasting Rest. 1650. Ed. John T. Wilkinson. London: Epworth, 1962.
Carpenter, Frederic Ives. “The Radicalism of Jonathan Edwards.” New England Quarterly 4 (1931): 629–44.
Daly, Robert. God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Everson, William. The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
Jeffers, Robinson. Brides of the South Wind. Ed. William Everson. Cayucos, CA: Cayucos, 1974.
_____. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 3 vols. to date. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988, 1989, and 1991.
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_____. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897–1962. Ed. Ann N. Ridgeway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968.
_____. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1938.
Kazin, Alfred. God and the American Writer. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Lesser, M. X. Jonathan Edwards. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954.
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_____. “Robinson Jeffers and the California Sublime.” Jeffers Studies 1.4 (1997): 40–84.
Robert Zaller, Professor of History and Politics at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and President of the Robinson Jeffers Association from 1997 to 2000, is author of Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers (1983), and editor of Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991) and The Tribute of His Peers: Elegies for Robinson Jeffers (1989).
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