The End of Prophecy: “The Double Axe” and the Nuclear Sublime
Robert Zaller
(Vol 4, Nr 2)

Editors’ note: This essay and the following response by James Karman were sides of a diptych presentation on “The Double Axe” at the Robinson Jeffers Association Conference, February 2000.
 

1. For Robinson Jeffers, the poet was the seer of his tribe, and poetry a species of prophecy. In part this grew out of the poet’s relation to the incantatory and di-vinatory elements of language-for the rhythms of poetic speech, as Jeffers asserted in such poems as “Natural Music” and “Continent’s End,” echoed the great rhythms of natural process itself, and those tidal forces in turn encompassed the local destinies of great societies and civilizations (“The Broken Balance”; “Prescription of Painful Ends”). Prophecy was not concerned with the future as such but with the perdurable present, since all times were merely points on the arc of the great interlocking circles that constituted natural process. To prophesy was to place the present moment in relation to past and future, since particular events gained meaning only from the perspective of    the whole. The prophetic function was therefore not one of prediction, but of reconciliation. The angry prophetess Tamar speaks this truth when she says that “all times are now, to-day plays on last year and the inch of our future / Made the first morning of the world” (CP 1: 63), as does the Cassandra who  sees, though futilely, “all the wars to be” (CP 1: 142). It is almost a condition of prophecy in Jeffers that the witness of the future be greeted with unbelief, for too clear a vision must paralyze the will, unless, as in Tamar’s case, it is a will to destruction.

2. Of Jeffers’s prophetic heroes, it is Arthur Barclay who most deliberately conflates vision and action, for, as he asserts, “God thinks through action” (CP 1: 253); i.e., in God alone is thought and action simultaneous. The figure who contrasts with him most clearly is the humble seer Onorio Vasquez, whose visions reveal beauty but no purpose and are therefore inefficacious. The temptation of the strong prophet is, consequently, to approach the condition of Godhood, for only in so doing can the disjunction between the power to see and the power to act be overcome. This effort is doomed to fail, as it does both in Barclay’s case and in that of the Jesus of “Dear Judas,” but it subserves the large tragic purposes of Jeffers’s theodicy, and therefore escapes the constraints of mere hubris or pathology.

3. After “The Women at Point Sur” and “Dear Judas,” Jeffers eschewed the figure of the prophet for nearly twenty years, or more properly assimilated it to the first-person persona he developed in the didactic shorter poems of the   period before and during World War II. It was only in “The Double Axe,” the poem written at the war’s end and in the apparent imminence of a third and  still greater war, that he sought again to incorporate the vision of prophecy in dramatic form, and created a protagonist as close to an alter ego-and at the same time to a divinized figure-as he ever permitted himself.

4. This figure is called by Jeffers the Inhumanist, though that appellation appears only as the title of “The Double Axe’s” second half and is explained only by reference to the prose preface of the volume in which it was originally contained, and which is omitted from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.¹  In the poem itself, he is referred to generically as “the old man,” as if, refusing all social identity, he owns to no given name.²  At the same time, however, the closing lines of “The Double Axe” connect so seamlessly with those of “The Women at Point Sur” as to suggest a resurrected albeit deeply purged Barclay:

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.” (CP 1: 367)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
About midnight he slept, and arose refreshed
In the red dawn. (CP 3: 312)

5. The “red dawn” of “The Inhumanist” is no ordinary sunrise, but the aftermath of the nuclear conflagration with which the poem ends. Writing at the onset of the atomic age, Jeffers was the first American poet to explore what Rob Wilson calls the nuclear sublime, although Wilson gives him no credit for it.³  Unlike his successors in the genre, however, Jeffers’s approach is squarely within the Puritan apocalyptic tradition, if not tied to its dogmatic assumptions.⁴ 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 Antichrist. These events required active response from the faithful. As Jeffers had put it in “Going to Horse Flats”-and John Cotton could have put it no better and perhaps little differently-: “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” (CP 2: 542-43).

6. 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 separate from that visited by humans on themselves.⁵ But he did imagine 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 Age,” as   well as in “The Inhumanist” (CP 3: 270, 308). The long train of wars that he envisioned as having begun with those of his own time would continue,⁶ apoca-lypse 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” (CP 3: 305).

7. Apocalyptic rhetoric had long been part of Jeffers’s arsenal, but always with-in a limited and finite context. Barclay had spoken of the need to “scour” en-crusted doctrine, and Jeffers used the figure again in “November Surf”: “The earth, in her childlike prophetic 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 numer-   ous, / The rivers mouth to source pure . . . (CP 2: 159). Apocalypse, then, was purification, renewal. Nothing was permanent but God (“you Night will re-sume / The stars in your time”), but even the uttermost annihilation was only the prelude to new birth: “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” (“Night,” CP 1: 115; “Shiva,” CP 2: 605).

8. The ultimate serenity of this vision was tested by a new world war, whose horrors obsessed Jeffers far beyond 1945. In “The Inhumanist” he imagined again the death of the sun and the galaxy: “Vast is the night” (CP 3: 261). In a later section of the poem he faced the even more nightmarish vision of universal entropy, only to resuscitate the cycle with an affirmation that seems somewhere 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 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,
“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. (CP 3: 293)

9. 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 had haunted the mind of his generation.⁷ Such a “final desert” would truly represent the death of God, not the Nietzschean rejection of the tribal deity ridiculed by Jeffers in “The Inhumanist” as a mere projection of “human fears, needs, dreams, justice and love-lust” (CP 3: 257) but the ex-tinction of the universal creator. This death is intolerable, however, and Jef-fers, having echoed and amplified Nietzsche’s famous dictum (“Well: God has died”), immediately recants his far greater blasphemy by invoking the image of eternal recurrence, of inextinguishable hope.

10. Yet atomic weaponry-the new physics applied-had, for Jeffers, disturbed the cosmic equation in a way that even the threat of entropy could not; it had introduced derangement, disorder. Writing in 1944 on the eve of the Normandy invasion, he could still will himself to find a kind of “ghastly beauty” in the “Enormous and doomed weight” of the Allied and Axis armies that were like the “enormous opposed presences” of mountain and ocean sprung to action (“Invasion,” CP 3: 131-32). With Hiroshima, however, “the awful power that feeds the life of the stars ha[d] been tricked down / Into the common stews and shambles” (“Moments of Glory,” CP 3: 198). Even if the mushroom cloud were only a “squib” beside the galaxies, it signified a Promethean transgression that had deeply troubling implications, because it was no hero that had stolen fire from the heavens but a race of pygmies projecting the shadow of its evil:

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 this 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 3: 208)

12. With these issues in mind, we can examine more closely the figure of the Inhumanist. We have noted a continuity, if not a kinship, between the Inhumanist and the figure of Barclay; but this is a Barclay stripped to essentials and purged beyond illusion. The Inhumanist camps on the ruined Gore farm, whose story is the subject of the first part of “The Double Axe”-camps, that is to say, in the ruins of narrative, for the story has no sequel, and the isolated events that befall the Inhumanist or to which he is witness, while fodder for his ruminations, remain mere fragments. Ostensibly he is a caretaker, equipped with a watchdog and the double-bladed axe that gives the poem its title, but the site he occupies has nothing to be guarded; it exists as a space of meditation, a place already scourged by fire. To invoke the title of another Jeffers poem, this is truly a place for no story, where passion has been enacted and embers alone remain. In choosing it, the Inhumanist chooses the retrospectively human; unlike the solitary protagonist of “An Artist” (CP 1: 390-92), who in a genuine wilderness is compelled to sculpt his monstrous titans, he no longer needs to invent what has already been told. This is a prophet who has chosen to live among the dead.

13. The double axe is not only the poem’s reigning symbol but its co-protagonist as well. It sounds of its own accord through a full range of vocalization (screaming, barking, neighing, buzzing, yelling, and giggling) that stops just short of articulate speech, and expressively exceeds it in the way that natural force (thunder, earthquake, storm) can. It is an independent actor, coming and going of its own accord, slaying intruders, and prompting the Inhumanist’s own action. The Inhumanist himself glosses its symbolic function, noting that it was a god in ancient Crete, and, like many other pagan deities, both fructifying and destructive (CP 3: 258). But the “two-edged sword” has a potent Christian signification as well. In Hebrews 4:12, it is the Word that divides in order to unite, and slays that it may save:

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (KJV)

15. The Inhumanist remains, then, a prophet, though a prophet in the wilderness whose preferred discourse is soliloquy. When he is beset by others who come to him for refuge, for wisdom, or for salvation, he sees in them not only the “transgressors” whose pride and folly have ravaged the planet but also the image of his own temptation, his will to power, and when he slays the most importunate of them with his axe, the face that turns toward him is that of his youthful self (CP 3: 301).

16. The prophet, then, does not dismiss humanity, but remains tied to it, and, in the poem’s last moment, he affirms solidarity with his fellows by offering shelter to a dying man.⁹ If the human present and its foreseeable future is “a burning brazen wheel” (CP 3: 311), there is a future, and the prophet keeps faith with it. When Jeffers speculates about the entropic death of the cosmos, only to reject it in favor of a vision of eternal recurrence, he rejects as well an end to history, for human destiny has not run its course. Even atomic war will leave the race but “slightly scorched. It will slough its skin, and crawl forth / Like a serpent in spring” (CP 3: 311). The metaphor suggests both the cycle of renewal and the persistence of sin. Humanity has yet to be fully tried: God is not done with it yet.
The fulcrum of the poem, as Jeffers himself noted,¹⁰ is section XLV, in which the Inhumanist, riding alone in the natural church of the mountains, hears the “crying” of “future children” in “the enormous unpeopled nave of the gorge,” and in this thronged solitude delivers the sermon that, as he believes, the present age cannot hear:

Moderate kindness
Is oil on a crying wheel: use it. Mutual help
Is necessary: use it when it is 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 stars;
          and the night thatcontains them. (CP 3: 304)

18. In “Cassandra,” a shorter poem from The Double Axe, Jeffers predicted again the rejection of his vision; the prophet, he wrote, was “to men / And god disgusting” (CP 3: 121). He was correct on both points. Even a sympathetic critic, Selden Rodman, accused him of sitting “in that properly inhuman stone tower of his waiting exultantly for the Bomb” (Karman 257-58), and more than forty years later Rob Wilson described him as “all too gleeful” at the prospect of atomic annihilation (60). Wilson excluded Jeffers from his treatment of poetic responses to the nuclear age, presumably on these grounds, for the admissible tropes in his discussion are shock, numbness, despair, and resistance, and Jeffers’s attempt to set the war and the bomb within the framework of apocalyptic (including his refusal to bewail their inevitable, and in ethico-religious terms, not unmerited consequences) could only appear as frivolous   or bizarre from such a perspective. Rodman apparently had the same thought when he described Jeffers’s attitudes as “totally irresponsible, politically, poetically, [and] humanly” (Karman 158). It is a tribute to the bitter and uncompromising force of Jeffers’s vision that intelligent critics continue to misread his purposes to the present day, but it signifies as well their failure to recognize his place in the apocalyptic tradition of American letters.¹¹

19. As Jeffers’s prophecy was misunderstood, so was his prophet. The Inhumanist is commonly supposed to have been a spokesman for the poet, 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, like Siegfried’s sword, is a magical implement, where not a divine figuration. But it represents human violence too. On one level, it symbolizes technology run amok, for Jeffers regards techne not as an aspect of human mastering but as a Promethean enterprise, epitomized in the sacred power of the atom that has now been “tricked down / Into the common stews and shambles” (“Moments of Glory,” CP 3: 198). The Inhumanist himself, who shares the sins of the “transgressors,” 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”:

[I]t flew a long flashing arc, dived gannetlike
And breached the wave . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                   But presently the sea boiled,
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. (CP 3: 309)

20. 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. (CP 3: 282)

21. The girl interrupting him, the Inhumanist 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. (CP 3: 282-83)

23. 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 (CP 3: 270, 308), the climax of “The Double Axe” occurs when the Inhumanist “becomes” God by an act of ecstatic insight that reveals to him the divine simultaneity in all things. He addresses this presence as “Dear love,” but as the moment unfolds he realizes that what he perceives is “beyond love” because it abolishes the sub-ject/object distinction entirely. Love, then, remains as the will to abolish otherness, to experience the other as oneself. On a creaturely level this cannot be sustained without contradiction and annihilative collapse; this is the fate of the incestuous passion in the poem’s first half, whose title, “The Love and the Hate” (CP 3: 214-55) is fully explicated only by “The Inhumanist” itself. Divinity alone can resolve the paradox of unity and division through the cyclical alternation of cosmic creation and destruction.

24. Love was, therefore, a conditional value for Jeffers, at least on the human plane. As an aspiration toward the divine, it was a means of self-transcendence and even an aspect of divine actualization; as pity or narcissistic self-regard, however, whether individual or collective, it was a calamity for the race.¹² In Jeffers’s view, humanity suffered both from an excess of self-love and from a lack of that love which, whether expressed as aesthetic responsiveness or disinterested scientific inquiry, turned it toward divine reality. The aesthetic emotion, as Jeffers described it in “Invasion,” was simultaneously a counsel of engagement with that reality and detachment from the self, but science too, as the Inhumanist asserts, is “an adoration; a kind of worship” (CP 3: 292), and its goal, the search for truth, was, as Jeffers said elsewhere, “better than good works . . . / Holier than innocence and higher than love” (“Curb Science,” CP 3: 199; emphasis added). Love then, was finally a means; only “truth” was “an end” (CP 3: 199), and what truth revealed about God was earnestness and grandeur, not love. Absolute love, creation without destruction, was as impossible to divinity as human love was without hate. In the heavens this expressed itself as an Empedoclean oscillation, whether of galaxies drawn too close by gravity or predators by hunger:

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 again, 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 . . . (CP 3: 264)

25. In the end, the Inhumanist’s vision of God-and, it is perhaps fair to say, Jeffers’s ultimate vision too-is that of a glorified predator whose prey can only 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 fierce as hunger or hate and deep as the grave.[”] (CP 3: 259)¹³

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. (CP 3: 445)

1. The published preface, and the longer draft from which it was taken, are printed in the 1977 Liveright edition of The Double Axe (xxi-xxii; 171-75).

2. “‘My name,’ the old man answered, ‘is Jones or McPherson or some other word: and what does it matter?’” (CP 3: 305).

3. Wilson, 228-63, but see p. 60.

4. For discussion of this point see my “Jeffers’s Heavenly Meditations.” Jeffers Studies 3.4 (Fall 1999): 55-70.

5. Cf. the old man’s soliloquy in section XLI of “The Inhumanist”: “God does not judge: God is. Mine is the judgment” (CP 3: 299).

6. “No doubt, alas, that more wasting / Wars will bleed the long future” (“Invasion,” CP 3: 131).

7. See treatment in Martin.

8. For a discussion of this trope among Puritan preachers, see Crockett, 8ff.

9. Cf. “Meditation on Saviors”: “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” (CP 1: 396).

10. “[I]t occurs to me that section 45 of Part II of ‘The Double Axe’ might be read as preface to this volume. It seems to me to express quite briefly the intentions implicit in these poems and previous ones” (The Double Axe, 171).

11. See Robinson and Gery. Robinson’s comprehensive work contains no reference to Jeffers, though it is interesting that the key figures he cites in the development of an American apocalyptic, Emerson and Poe, are precisely those cited by Jeffers as his own most formative influences. Gery deals with Stevens and Eliot, but likewise does not allude to Jeffers. I owe the former reference to Bill Costley.

12. Cf. “Meditation on Saviors,” where Jeffers says of love: “[I]t is worst turned inward, it is best shot farthest” (CP 1: 401).

13. Jeffers had presented the divine agon in the image of Heautontimor-oumenos, the self-hanged or self-tormenting God in The Women at Point Sur, “Apology for Bad Dreams,” and “At the Birth of an Age” (see The Cliffs of Solitude, 145, 146-50, 242n33); in later poems he preferred that of the self-hunter, perhaps reflecting his interest in nebular astronomy. Thus, in “The Inhumanist”: “Why does God hunt in circles? Has he lost something? Is it possible-himself? / In the darkness between the stars did he lose himself and become godless, and seeks-himself?” (CP 3: 256). Later, “God” describes himself as “caught” and “in the net” (270). The image of the hunter’s (or fisher’s) net is, of course, one of the most recurrent in Jeffers; the image of God as lost or trapped, however-a concept that had not appeared in his verse since “The Alpine Christ”-may also reflect the agitation and existential doubt that runs through all of Jeffers’s wartime poetry.
 
 

Crockett, Bryan. The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance  England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.

Gery, John. Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. Ed. Melba Bennett. New York: Random House, 1963.

_____. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Time Hunt. 4 vols. to date. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988, 1989, 1991, 2000.

_____. The Double Axe and Other Poems. Ed. William Everson. New York: Liveright, 1977.

Karman, James. Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Martin, Ronald E. American Literature and the Universe of Force. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1981.

Robinson, Douglas. American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Zaller, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.