Robinson Jeffers’s Poetry and Prose
and Scientific Theory
James Baird
(Vol 5, Nr 1)

1. Robinson Jeffers is one of the few twentieth-century poets who include scientific theory as not merely illustrative but a functioning element of their work. Although Jeffers, like many other contemporary thinkers, warns of the mistake of relying too much on scientific explanations or scientific discoveries (e.g., “Science,” CP 1:113), he uses scientific terminology to bolster his philosophical beliefs and refers to what, at the time he wrote, were advanced theories regarding the nature of the universe and humankind’s place in it. Because the science in Jeffers’s writing actually does poetic work, it is important to know if it is valid. This essay attempts to locate and classify Jeffers’s scientific references and also to evaluate whether what Jeffers understood of scientific theory was correct at the time he wrote it and whether that theory is still valid. I conclude with some critical judgments about Jeffers’s use of scientific ideas, particularly about the limitations of the scientific viewpoint, which he adopted at first because it seemed a potent ally in his effort to tell the truth in his poetry.
A scientific reference is either a term common to scientific discourse or a presentation of an idea that can only be understood through the knowledge of scientific evidence or theory, though it may not contain scientific terms. Ancient believers in the Ptolemaic cosmological system, which supported a naive realist view (based on immediate sensory impression) that the Earth was at the center of the universe and that the planets and fixed stars were not far from Earth, provide an example of the latter type of reference. By the nineteenth century, telescopes and better systems of measurement had not only confirmed the vision of Copernicus in a sun-centered planetary system but also made it clear that the distances to the far stars were very great. Antares’s red face was known to the ancients, but its diameter was not calculated until Jeffers’s own time, so when Jeffers writes that the star “. . . Antares reddens, / The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children, / The earth’s orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness” (“Night,” CP 1:115), he is making a scientific reference.

2. Hyatt Waggoner investigated this topic in 1938 in an article titled “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Waggoner notes the appearance of spe-cific scientific terms in Jeffers’s writing (277), particularly after Jeffers adopted a materialistic philosophy in his mature work, and he analyzes in detail passages that are clearly informed by a scientific view, such as Hood Cawdor’s death. Waggoner thinks that Jeffers’s world-view is limited because of this predilection for scientific explanations, leading to the kind of “nihilistic pessimism” expressed in Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Modern Temper, which, in spite of its title, is an early presentation of Post-Modernism.

3. This article is the beginning of a thoroughly negative assessment of Jeffers which Waggoner presents at greater length in his The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern Poetry, in which he states “Mr. Jeffers’ verse seems to me to confirm [Edwin Arlington] Robinson’s belief that in a universe of efficient but no final or formal causes, neither poetry nor life itself are finally conceivable” (131). As a result, Jeffers’s characters fail to have an emotional impact on the reader because, according to Waggoner in his later American Poets from the Puritans to the Present:

4. Jeffers . . . seldom writes well when he writes of people—never when he writes of ordinary “sane” people—for he starts by assuming that people are not ultimately “real.” Their actual experience therefore does not interest him, except as it provides the materials for allegorizing his philosophy. When he writes well, his subject is nature, or man’s fate viewed from nature’s perspective. (471–72)

5. Such a judgment seems based on an evaluation of Jeffers’s presumed philosophical assumptions rather than the “strain” and testing to which he put those assumptions in his poetry and prose. A review of Jeffers’s scientific references shows that he often used them as a gateway out of the trap into which strict rationality led him, and that, as will be seen below, he undercut these assumptions with reminders that scientific accounts, no matter how closely reasoned, are necessarily flawed accounts of truth.

6. After locating and categorizing Jeffers’s scientific references, I checked the ones about which I had questions with colleagues at the University of North Texas, Professor Donald Smith, a botanist, and Professor Ray Sears, a physicist. Although Jeffers’s knowledge of science is at least forty years old, he was wrong in only one instance, and he may have had a poetic reason for writing as he did, as will be seen below. In fact, after I presented a number of passages, Professor Sears, who had never heard of Jeffers, said, “It sounds like this guy has a good idea of what’s going on.”

7. An example of Jeffers’s scientific sophistication is his treatment of the death of the sun. The naive realist assumes that the sun will use up its energy, give off less heat, the earth will grow cold, and life will end. Physicist Ray Sears affirms that the sun will die as a white dwarf after first going through the “red giant” phase, which Jeffers describes in a number of poems (see quotations below under Deaths and Renewals of the Stars). As the sun uses up its mass in heat, its density will lessen, and it will expand until its diameter swallows the orbit of the earth, turning a less intense red in color as it loses heat (“red giant”). Thus things will actually get a lot hotter before they become cooler several billion years from now.

8. The biologist and the physicist disagreed regarding Jeffers’s poem “Animals,” which suggests that the great explosions seen on the sun are “animals, as we are” (CP 3:364). I recalled a report that scientists had found a new kind of microbe in volcanoes, but botanist Smith said that temperatures on the sun are simply too hot to support any kind of life. Physicist Sears at first agreed, but when I suggested that Jeffers might have been an early adherent to the Gaia theory, which maintains that everything on earth, even rocks and water, is part of an interconnected life system, he reconsidered. Perhaps the sun has its form of consciousness, too. Jeffers, with his fondness for the inanimate, would certainly have been interested in this idea. In “Animula,” he suggests it obliquely, but in an unpublished fragment addressed to Una, he states directly, “this dark planet / Has its own consciousness” (“Whom shall I write for,” CP 4:541).

9. Some quasi-scientific ideas which students of literature can accept as poetry also cause a scientist to balk. In “The Women at Point Sur,” Barclay speaks of alternative universes. The idea of alternative universes sounds like science, but to some scholars, it is science fiction or fantasy. My botanist friend, Don Smith, retorted “There is no evidence for alternative universes.” Because science can only discuss observed phenomena and we are in this universe, we cannot observe anything about another posited universe. This concept seems beyond the scope of science. But physics is becoming increasingly speculative and philosophical rather than experimental. Ray Sears remarked that researchers into String Theory, which posits as many as eleven dimensions, are working on just such questions and further offered the view that this universe is not the only possible one but is the one that exists in this energy field. Others may exist that we cannot experience because we are components of only this energy field. Just as the air is full of radio and television transmissions to which we have no access without the proper equipment, one must be “tuned” to an energy field to be aware of it.
Jeffers also uses several scientific ideas that were out of favor in his time but which are now accepted. During Jeffers’s lifetime, the idea that the continents might have shifted position several times, which he suggests in two poems (see quotations below under Continental Drift), was considered foolish. Now it is the theory that best explains a number of geologic phenomena. In the nineteenth century, there was a conflict between those who thought that natural changes occurred cataclysmically and those like Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology (three volumes, 1830–33), who thought that they occurred by gradual processes working over millions of years. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (to which Jeffers refers in several poems—see quotations below under Evolution) finally won the day for the gradualists. But in the last century, more careful scientific observations indicated that major changes may have occurred because of catastrophic events. The asteroid which crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in prehistoric times may have sent a dust cloud into the atmosphere which destroyed vegetation and hastened the end of the dinosaurs. So when Jeffers says, “someday the coast will lose patience and dip / And be clean” (“Cawdor,” CP 1:463), his reference to the predicted big California earthquake is based on scientific values, not Sunday Supplement sensationalism.

10. Jeffers is also tantalizingly close to describing DNA in a poem in which he comments on the possibility that an egg has within it the structure and organization of the mature organism (“De Rerum Virtute,” CP 3:401). Perhaps this is not as startling as it appears from hindsight. Everyone knew that the egg did contain some sort of genetic blueprint, but until Watson and Crick discovered the exact mechanism in 1953, no one knew what it was.

11. The scientists also had difficulty dealing with metaphor and fancy. Jeffers describes death at the cellular level in a number of places, most notably twice in “Cawdor,” in which both Old Martial’s and Hood Cawdor’s deaths are de-scribed thus (see quotations below under Consciousness). Jeffers correctly notes that at the time of the death of the central organism, most of the cells in the body are still alive, but after a period of time, receiving no further electrical stimuli or chemical influx from the central nervous and circulatory systems, they begin to separate into individual entities which dream their own dreams. This description stopped the scientists, who professed to know nothing about dreaming, but could only say that chemical activity had ceased. The descriptions in “Cawdor” are notable in other ways as well: three deaths are described in that poem, but while Martial’s and Hood Cawdor’s deaths are depicted in biological terms, the third death, that of the caged eagle, becomes the occasion for a lengthy vision of and comment on the entire history of the earth from pre-historic times to the death of the main species, a panoply to which the eagle reacts with indifference. In Jeffers’s view, a vision such as that is reserved for the noble wild predator, not the human beings who have so misunderstood their place in the order of things.
 

12. These references give us a good idea of Jeffers’s dual view of science. On the one hand, the scientific view of the natural world is an aid to him. Jeffers sees all nature as interrelated and human beings as only one small part of nature, but the part which has a special kind of consciousness which can not only perceive, plan, and act, but also contemplate and judge. There is a further split in his view of this quality of consciousness; sometimes he states that perhaps the role we play—to act as the eyes, ears, and recorders of all this experience, is a proper one (“Sign-Post,” CP 2:418). In other works and in other moods, he regards consciousness as a strange aberration, like a disease. For example, in discussing the phenomenon that led to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe (see quotations below under Big Bang)—confronting the fact that, viewed from our position, the galaxies all seem to be moving away from us and each other (suggesting that all the matter in the universe came from a common point of origin), Jeffers recognizes the scientific value of this phenom-enon, but chooses to interpret it in moral terms; he says that the galaxies are fleeing our part of the universe because we have infected the realm of pure matter and energy with the “contagion of consciousness” (“Margrave,” CP 2:161).

13. Science helps Jeffers to spread his message that we are merely biological units, but that, unfortunately, the information that science gives us has been twisted to produce such horrors as the atomic bomb and “the great manners of death dreamed up / In the laboratories” (“Old age hath clawed me with his scaly clutch,” CP 3:484). A scientist, who regards his or her job as description and explanation, would place the blame for such misuses of scientific theory on engineers and politicians; nevertheless, the consequences have been fearful. Ironically, scientific discoveries, which should humble humankind and make it aware of its impotence in the face of the vast cosmos, led to the mistaken notion that people are powerful. Powerful of course they are, but in the Jeffersian scheme of things, they have the power to destroy but not the power to control their destructive impulses or to understand their proper, smaller role in nature and the universe.

14.Jeffers seems particularly concerned with science at the beginning of his mature career and again at the end—several lyrics in the volumes that featured “Tamar” and “Roan Stallion” contain such references, and “Cawdor” has a number of scientific descriptions. The protagonist of “The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” also makes scientific arguments to reinforce his debating points. The Inhumanist of that poem, which appeared shortly after the explosion of the first atomic bomb, uses scientific principles to undercut the idea that the postwar world, defined by its scientific achievements, had a morality to match its technological skill. Then at the very end of Jeffers’s poetic career, many of the poems posthumously assembled are about scientific subjects. Of course, Jeffers did not see these poems to press, and as there are several poems on the same or similar themes (e.g., three poems on the Russian space dog Laika, two on the Big Bang theory, two on the possibility of a new ice age—see quotations below), it is possible that Jeffers was trying out several ways of looking at a subject. If he had prepared another volume of poetry, he might have discarded some of the poems on science so that the publication would not be top heavy with works on that subject. Still, the scientific interpretation of life and nature was much on his mind when he found his own poetic voice, a voice that would speak for the totality of the universe and not just humanity. Science helped him to reach the conclusion that all is a flux of matter and energy that sometimes forms into a consciousness, a life, but that ultimately returns to that primal flux. At the end of his life, such ideas recurred as he prepared to join that flux once again:

You [Una] are 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 shall be with you presently.
(“Hungerfield,” CP 3:397)

16. Finally, in five passages (see quotations below under Science and Mathematics as Metaphor), Jeffers reminds us that even science, with its remarkable discoveries, its explosion of knowledge, is just a description, not the description: “Science and mathematics/ Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,/ They never touch it” (“What’s the best life for a man?” CP 3:425). Jeffers obliquely makes this point in the poem “I walk on my cliff” (CP 3: 457), in which he makes the one scientific reference which appears to be inaccurate, his description of the formation of the moon from the Pacific Basin as a result of the gravitational tidal pull of a passing star. In an article about this poem, “Truth, Myth, and ‘The Great Wound,’” Grant Hier points out that this idea had been discredited in the scientific community long before Jeffers wrote the poem. If a star passed near the earth, it would destroy the planet before it would pull out material to make the moon. Hier comments,

Research into what the poet knew of the scientific discovery and theories of his day points to the conclusion that Jeffers intentionally created his own mythic scenario, one that was clearly an impossibility. . . . Jeffers tells us outright that he is a mythmaker, and so is science. Neither the poet nor the scientist possesses the “truth”; the best both can hope for is some illumination through myths and hypotheses. (44)

Hier, Grant. “Truth, Myth, and ‘The Great Wound.’” Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 95  & 96 (Summer & Fall 1995): 29–50.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988, 1989, 1991, 2000, 2001.

Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
_____. The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern American Poetry. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1950.

_____. “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” American Literature 10 (1938): 275–88.
 

All quotations are treated as block quotations; if quotation marks appear, a character is speaking. References are to the first four published volumes of    Jeffers’s Collected Poetry.

Adrenal and Thyroid Glands

       He saw clearly in his mind the little
Adrenal glands perched on the red-brown kidneys, as if all his doomed tissues became transparent,
Pouring in these passions their violent secretion
Into his blood-stream, raising the tension unbearably. And the thyroids: tension, tension. (“Margrave” 2:163)

Howard felt a sudden increase of force and life in his mind, like a transfusion
Of strong red blood, he thought “The faithful adrenals
Have just heard how near death I am . . .“ (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:575)

   . . . the leonine adrenal glands poured their blind fury
Into his blood. . . (“Hungerfield” 3:380)

  . . . I think about the rapid and furious lives in the sun . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   They are animals, as we are. There are many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids. (“Animals” 3:364)

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. (“The Women at Point Sur” 1:312)

“When have you considered the stars, what have you known of the streams in my soul,
And one lit point lost in the sky’s eternity
A universe, millions of many-planeted suns, but another a universe
Of universes: they move in my mind . . . “ (“The Women at Point Sur” 1:313)

“Therefore astronomy is the most noble science: is the most useless.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:291)

Man’s world puffs up his mind, as a toad
Puffs himself up; the billion light-years cause a serene and wholesome deflation. (“Animula” 3:420)

I strain the mind to imagine distances
That are not in man’s mind . . . (“Pleasures” 3:473)

There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man,
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance: let him count the star-swirls. (“The polar ice-caps are melting” 3:476)

We know the stars, hotter and more fatal than earth; we have learned lately the fire-wheel galaxies,
Infinite in number or all but infinite, among which our great sun’s galaxy’s
Flight is as a gnat’s, one grain of sand in the Sahara: it is necessary to stretch our minds
To these dimensions . . . (“Not Solid Earth” 4:538)

. . . The atom to be split. (“Roan Stallion” 1:189)

. . . Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom . . . (“Roan Stallion” 1:189)

  . . . he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons . . . (“Roan Stallion” 1:189)

  The atom bounds-breaking,
Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets . . . (“Roan Stallion” 1:194)

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 . . . (“Apology for Bad Dreams” 1:211)

   . . . the strain of the spinning
Demons that make an atom, straining to fly asunder,
Straining to rest at the center . . . (“Prelude—The Women at Point Sur” 1:244)

  In the north the oil-tanks
Catch from the first, the ring-bound molecules splitting, the atoms dancing apart, marrying the air. (“Prelude—The Women at Point Sur” 1:248)

The grain of sand was the Rock. A speck, an atomic
Center of power clouded in its own smoke
Ran and cried in the crack . . . (“Cawdor” 1:511)

   . . . 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?” 3:208)

“True, but we’ve seen. But it is only recently they have the power.” The third answered, “That bomb?” (“The Inquisitors” 3:209)

        “There—or thereabout—
Cloaked in thick darkness in his power’s dust-cloud,
There is the hub and heavy nucleus, the ringmaster
Of all this million-shining whirlwind of dancers, the stars of this end of heaven. It is strange, truly,
That great and small, the atoms of a grain of sand and the suns with planets, and all the galactic universes
Are organized on one pattern, the eternal roundabout, the heavy nucleus and whirling electrons, the leashed
And panting runners going nowhere; frustrated flight, unrelieved strain, endless return—all—all—
The eternal firewheel.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:269–70)

  There is another nature of fire; not the same fire,
But the fire’s father: “Holy, holy, holy,”
Sing the angels of the sun, pouring out power
On the lands and the planets; but it’s no holier
Than a fire in a hut, it is another chemistry,
More primitive, more powerful, more universal, power’s peak,
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.

   It is with this kind of fire
Our people are playing tricks and will blast their enemies. (“Fire” 3:367)

     . . . and the powers that make the atom put into service . . . (“The World’s Wonders” 3:370)

There have been two, there will be a third, to be fought with what weapons? These that we test and stock-pile.
And every test makes the earth
At such and such a place uninhabitable. (“The Beautiful Captive” 3:428)

      . . . 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, we shall use it
In peace and war . . . (“Passenger Pigeons” 3:436)

For fifty thousand years man has been dreaming of powers
Unnatural to him: to fly like the eagles—this groundling!—to breathe under the seas, to voyage to the moon,
To launch like the sky-god intolerable thunder-bolts: now he has got them.
How little he looks, how desperately scared and excited, like a poisonous insect and no God pities him. (“For fifty thousand years” 3:482)

The great work in science was done by men working alone:—Copernicus, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin; Newton and Einstein, in youth, when they did their work. The great theorists of atomic structure worked as individuals; only when their work was to be used for mass murder a tight association became necessary. (“Preface: The Double Axe and Other Poems” [original version] 4:420)

[Entire poem on the possibility that an atomic explosion might begin a chain reaction which would destroy the earth.] (“City-Destroyer” 4:529)

[Entire poem on the Big Bang theory.] (“Explosion” 3:413)

[Entire poem on expansion and contraction of the universe.] (“The Great Ex-plosion” 3:471)

“Consider the surface of half-cooled planets.” (“Great rough-legged hawks” 4:515)

    . . . some day the coast will lose patience and dip
And be clean. (“Cawdor” 1:463)

Consciousness (biological basis)

Our nerves and brain have their own chemic changes,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The swift messenger nerves that sting the brain,
The brain itself and the answering strands that start
Explosion in the muscles, the indrinking eye
Of cunning crystal, the hands and feet, the heart
And feeding entrails, and the organs that tie
The generations into one wreath, one strand;
All tangible things or chemical processes
Needs only brain and patience to understand . . . (“Consciousness” 1:7)

      Gently with delicate mindless fingers
Decomposition began to pick and caress the unstable chemistry
Of the cells of the brain . . .
   Or one might say the brain began to glow . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   . . . But then the interconnections between the groups of the brain
Failing, the dreamer and the dream split into multitude. Soon the altered cells became unfit to express
Any human or at all describable form of consciousness.” (“Cawdor” 1:449-51)
The bone vessel where all the nerves had met
For counsel while they were living, and the acts and thoughts
Been formed, was burst open, its gray and white jellies
Flung on the stones like liquor from a broken flask,
Mixed with some streamers of blood.

    The vivid consciousness
That waking or dreaming, its twenty years, infallibly
Felt itself unitary, was now divided:
Like the dispersion of a broken hive: the brain-cells
And rent fragments of cells finding
After their communal festival of life particular deaths.
In their deaths they dreamed a moment, the unspent chemistry
Of life resolving its powers; some in the cold star-gleam,
Some in the cooling darkness in the crushed skull.
But shine and shade were indifferent to them, their dreams
Determined by temperatures, access of air,
Wetness or drying, as the work of the autolytic
Enzymes of the last hunger hasted or failed. (“Cawdor” 1:479-480)

 After a time of darkness
The dreams that follow upon death came and subsided, like fibrillar twitchings
Of the nerves unorganizing themselves; and some of the small dreams were delightful and some slight     miseries,
But nothing intense; then consciousness wandered home from the cell to the molecule, was utterly                 dissolved and changed . . . (“Margrave” 2:171)

  . . . and under the thick brown hair and under the cunning sutures of the hollow bone the nerve-cells
With locking fibrils made their own world and light, the multitude of small rayed animals of one descent
That make one mind, imagined . . . (“Thurso’s Landing” 2:186)

. . .[His mind] shook a filament,
There a dark ganglion faintly glowed for a moment and returned to darkness, a pin-point nexus of brain-cells
Grew phosphorescent and faded and faintly glowed again; little superfluities of meaningless chemistry;
Besides the tidal glowing and paling, and traffic-light rhythms
Of nerves that govern breathing and heart-beat, arteries and viscera.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
       About that time a small constellation
Of nerve-cells began to glow in the sleeper’s brain . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
             . . . Some gland poured opium into the blood. (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:566–67)
  Meanwhile the gentle click of the door-latch and Arab’s entrance
Had touched the ears of the old woman dying; and slowly from nerve-complex to nerve-complex
Through the oxygen-starved brain crawled into her mind. (“Hungerfield” 3:381–82)

That saw you [ocean] soft and violent wear your boundaries down, eat rock, shift places with the continents.
(“Continent’s End” 1:17)

And the wings torn with old storms remember
The cone that the oldest redwood dropped from, the tilting of continents,
The dinosaur’s day, the lift of new sea-lines. (“Pelicans” 1:207)

“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.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:274)

[Entire poem on Darwin as an artist who produced the theory of evolution.]       (“I hear that Darwin grown old lamented” 4:536)

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart . . . (“To the Stone-Cutters” 1:5)

   The oceans we shall have tamed then
Will dream between old rocks having no master, the earth
Forget corn, dreaming her own precious weeds and free
Forests, from the rivers upward; our tributary planets
Tamed like the earth, the morning star and the many-mooned
Three-belted giant, and those red sands of Mars between them,
Rust off the metal links of human conquest, the engines
Rust in the fields, and under that old sun’s red waning
Nothing forever remember us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   . . . [I]s it 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 their old places . . . (“Point Pinos and Point Lobos” 1:94)
    . . . the enormous rhythm of the stars’ deaths
And fierce renewals. . . (“Point Pinos and Point Lobos” 1:97)

Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated . . . (“The Treasure” 1:102)

   . . . [Y]ou Night will resume
The stars in your time. (“Night” 1:115)

I seem to have stood a long time and watched the stars pass.
They also shall perish I believe.
Here to-day, gone to-morrow, desperate wee galaxies
Scattering themselves and shining their substance away
Like a passionate thought. It is very well ordered. (“Margrave” 2:171)

      Time will come no doubt
When the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze, and the air on them; frozen gases, white flakes of air
Will be the dust: which no wind will ever stir: this very dust in dim starlight glistening
Is dead wind, the white corpse of wind.
Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way, our universe, all the stars that have names are dead. (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:261)

       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 Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:293)

The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes. (“The Epic Stars” 3:466)

    The trance
Was changed again, a reddening wane of sun
Alternated with brighter and chillier stars
About the lessening ocean, men built forts
No longer against each other but against
The invisible invasion and thick frost
From beyond the world. (“Shells” 4:501)

   . . . Antares reddens
The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children,
The earth’s orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire
Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night
What? Not a spark? . . . (“Night” 1:115)

  He thought it was nearly certain
That nothing like this could be, there was not one needle-point
Of real in it; except his whole body shaking,
His heart bursting its rib-cage: “but as real as Europe’s
Rearmament race,” a jiggling splinter of his mind laughed, “or Dirac’s equations:
Nothing is real this year.” (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:593)

Earth’s Consciousness

I think it [Una’s consciousness] is taken into the great dream of the earth; for this dark planet
Has its own consciousness, from which yours came,
And now returns: as the Earth’s consciousness,
Half-separate for a time, will return at length
To the whole galaxy; and when that perishes
To the whole endless universe—that is, to God,
Who will make all things new. (“Whom shall I write for” 4:541)

You [Pacific Ocean] were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline. (“Continent’s End” 1:16)

So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape’s by-shot
Was moderately admirable? (“The Broken Balance” 1:375)

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 out from being
And galaxy on galaxy endure after that as it were forever . . . (“Margrave” 2:160)
 

It is scene two act four of the tragic farce The Political Animal. Its hero reaches his apogee
And ravages the whole planet; not even the insects, only perhaps bacteria, were ever so powerful. (“Fourth Act” 3:113)

. . . Peeled apes teetering on their back legs . . . (“The Double Axe: The Love and the Hate” 3:238)

     . . . an absurd ape drops from a tree
And for a time rules the earth. (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:276)

   “I’ll be a stone at the bottom of the sea, or any bush on the mountain,
But not this ghost-ridden blood-and-bone-thing, civil war on two legs and the stars’ contempt, this walking farce,
This ape, this—denatured ape, this—citizen—” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:282)

  “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.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:289)

     Indeed it is hard to see beauty
In any of the acts of man: 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. . . . (“De Rerum Virtute” 3:402)

[Scientific account of the development of the universe and life, ending with our mission as the bearer of consciousness—we may yet grow into this role.] (“The unformed volcanic earth, a female thing” 3: 430–34)

Our cells remember the sea-salt of their origin, and the turns of the sea-tides. (“Preface” [“Continent’s End”?] 4: 375)

     Neither were the sun nor the stars created,
But grew from what grew before. (“Look All Around You” 4: 530)

  The learned astronomer
Analyzing the light of most remote star-swirls
Has found them—or a trick of distance deludes his prism—
All at incredible speeds fleeing outward from ours.
I thought, no doubt they are fleeing the contagion
Of consciousness that infects this corner of space. (“Margrave” 2:161)
 You would be wise, you far stars,
To flee with the speed of light this infection.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 . . . I believe this hurt will be healed
Some age of time after mankind has died,
Then the sun will say “What ailed me a moment?” and resume
The old soulless triumph, and the iron and stone earth
With confident inorganic glory obliterate
Her ruins and fossils, like that incredible unfading red rose
Of desert in Arizona glowing life to scorn,
And grind the chalky emptied seed-shells of consciousness
The bare skulls of the dead to powder; after some million
Courses around the sun her sadness may pass:
But why should you worlds of the virgin distance
Endure to survive what it were better to escape? (“Margrave” 2:166)

    “ . . . and the sun that rushes away we don’t know where, and all
The fire-maned stars like stallions in a black pasture, each one with his stud of plunging
Planets for mares that he sprays with power; and universe after universe beyond them, all shining, all alive:
Do you think all that needs us?” (“Give Your Heart to the Hawks” 2:374)

  . . . for the egg too has a mind,
Doing what our able chemists will never do,
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:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  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. And the Galaxy, the firewheel
On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is one dust-grain, 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.” (“De Rerum Virtute” 3:401–02)

Leaping is not my life nor flashing my joy.

Heavy water perhaps—that grave and famous
Allotrope—a cubic inch of heavy water,
In all the laughing and shrieking glee, cold and separate. (“Allotropic Man” 4:532)

  Or let’s observe the shrinkage of glaciers.
From the poles and the peaks:
The poles are thawing—Siberia will soon be all wine and roses.—Yes?—Be advised. Lay in coal and cordwood
For the new ice-age. (“The Urchin” 3:415)

[Poem on melting ice-caps and rising seas.] (“The polar ice-caps are melting” 3:476)

    He smiled in himself
Thinking about the scrap of Mendelian theory
Picked up in high-school: blue eyes recessive, brown dominant:
Therefore blue-eyed parents cannot produce
A dark-eyed child, the dark-eyed-producing element
Is lacking in them. If it were present in either,
That one would be dark-eyed, for dark eyes are dominant. (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:568)

     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 Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:283

[Entire poem about the theory of the formation of the moon from a passing star.] (“I walk on my cliff above the Pacific Ocean” 3:457)

[Entire poem about the theory that the moon was born from the close passage of a star.] (“At the near approach of a star” 3:458)

  And we remember the moon,
At high tide when a star passed torn from the earth the huge trough of the Pacific . . . (“Not Solid Earth” 4:539)

The intellectual strain may be suggested by the well-known words of one of the fathers of the church, Tertullian, I think: “Credo quia absurdum”—“I believe because it is unbelievable.” Or it may be suggested by the spectacle of Newton in his later years, turning his mind from the Mystics and mathematics to works of rather chimerical theology . . .” (“Thoughts Contingent to a Poem” 4:397)

  It is likely our moderate
Father the sun will sometime put off his nature for a similar glory. (“Nova” 2:530)

(It is possible this prodigious plutonium
Is our Greek fire once or twice to save us.) (“What is Worthless?” 3:200)

Have you noticed meanwhile the population explosion
Of man on earth, the torrents of new-born babies, the bursting schools? (“Birth and Death” 3:440)

[Entire poem on explosion of human population and human excesses.] (“Passenger Pigeons” 3: 435–37)

Scant air, though in vast Asia; for they crowd together, and the fields are parcelled small;
And verminlike they die, but daily more are born—how can there still be room for all?

Myriads of lives on myriads, like in number to the cells too small for seeing that clot
The culture-tubes of a microscopist—exhaustless life within one whitish dot. (“The Valley” 4:449)

  . . . the great religions of love and kindness
May conceal that, not change it. They are not primary but reactions
Against the hate: as the eye after feeding on a red sunfall
Will see green suns. (“The unformed volcanic earth, a female thing” 3:433)
Role of Science in Human Life

[Entire poem about humankind’s destructiveness and inability to control its knowledge.] (“Science” 1:113)

Science, that makes wheels turn, cities grow,
Moribund people live on, playthings increase,
But has fallen from hope to confusion at her own business
Of understanding the nature of things . . . (“Triad” 2:309)

The immense vulgarities of misapplied science and decaying Christianity. . .  (“Prescription of Painful Ends” 3:14)

Radar and rocket-plane, the applications of chemistry, the tricks of physics: new cunning rather
Than new science: but they work. (“Staggering Back Toward Life” 3:135)

Cattle in the slaughter-pens, laboratory dogs
Slowly tortured to death . . . (“The King of Beasts” 3:138)

[Entire poem on science; since morality is running backwards, science would have to be given back to the witch doctors.] (“Curb Science?” 3:199)

“Science is not to serve but to know. Science is for itself its own value, it is not for man . . .” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:291)

“Science is an adoration; a kind of worship.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:292)

  You watched the sabre-tooth tigers
Develop those huge fangs, unnecessary as our sciences . . . (“Passenger Pigeons” 3:437)

  . . . the human people are only symbolic interpreters—
So let them live or die. They may in fact
Die rather quickly, if the great manners of death dreamed up
In the laboratories work well. (“Old age hath clawed me with his scaly clutch” 3:484)

“Genius is sometimes derived from neurosis; that is, from some irreconcilable strain in the mind, that activates its energies by wounding them; . . . and as we look at to-day’s scientific achievements and material power—is certainly a genius among ages. And certainly a bewildered genius! (“Themes in My Poems” 4:411}
 

The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human. (“Themes in My Poems” 4:412)

Science usually takes things to pieces in order to discover them; it dissects and analyzes; poetry puts things together, producing equally valid discovery, and actual creation. {“Themes in My Poems” 4:416)

   “Or as mathematics, a human invention
That parallels but never touches reality, gives the astronomer
Metaphors through which he may comprehend
The powers and the flow of things . . .” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:260)

  Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it . . . (“What’s the best life for a man?” 3:425)

. . .they work alongside the truth
Never touching it; their equations are false
But the things work. (“The mathematicians and physics men” 3:459)

     All our knowledge then,
Our opinions, our observations, our science,
Are subjective; are something studying itself
By the light of itself. That is to say all our knowledge is a dreamer dreaming:—say rather a dream
Dreaming a dream. (“We see ourselves from within” 4:534)

  . . . I wish he [Darwin] could hear
Our all-too-human mathematicians making poems (which work, you know)
Parallel to truth, and produce death. (“I hear that Darwin grown old lamented” 4:536)

Trying to observe whether the beat suspended—“suspended,” he thought—in systole or in diastole. (“Margrave” 2:162)

  . . . light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it . . . (“Oh Lovely Rock” 2:546)

“Let me tell you a new riddle: Kay Conquers Napoleon.
What does that mean?”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
  Howren said, “To hell with Kay.”
Howard laughed and said, “How did you know it ionizes?
CN’s the works.” (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:572)

Howard sighed and strained his head back to ease the ache; it seemed localized
Between the atlas vertebra and the skull,
A factory of pain, distributing its over-production
Along the coronal suture. (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:580)

  . . . somatic cells . . . fruit-flies . . . (“Such Counsels You Gave to Me” 2:582)

        . . . metastases of cancer
Had found the lungs. (“Hungerfield” 3:379)

[Three versions of a poem about Laika, the dog the Soviets sent into orbit.] (“The Dog in the Sky” 3:470)

Fish-scales of light? They drew together as they drifted away no path down the wild darkness; he saw
The webs of their rays made them one tissue, their rays that were their very substance and power filled wholly
The space they were in, so that each one touched all, there was no division between them, no emptiness, and each
Changed substance with all the others and became the others. It was dreadful to see
No space between them, no cave of peace nor no night of quietness, no blind spot nor no deaf heart, but the tides
Of power and substance flood every cranny; no annihilation, no escape but change: it must endure itself
Forever. It has the strength to endure itself. We others, being faintly made of the dust of a grain of dust
Have been permitted to fool our patience asleep by inventing death. A poor comfort, he thought,
Yet better than none, the imaginary cavern, how we all come clamoring
To the gates of our great invention after few years.
Though a cheat, it works. (“The Loving Shepherdess” 2:97)

“Does God exist?—No doubt of that,” the old man says. “The cells of my old camel of a body,
Because they feel each other and are fitted together,—through nerves and blood feel each other,—all the little animals
Are the one man: there is not an atom in all the universes
But feels every other atom; gravitation, electromagnetism, light, heat, and the other
Flamings, the nerves in the night’s black flesh, flow them together; the stars, the winds and the people: one energy,
One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow
And man’s dark soul.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:256–57)

  “It brings under one rule atoms and galaxies, gravitation and time,
Photons and light-waves.” (“The Double Axe: The Inhumanist” 3:291)

  We that have the honor and hardship of being human
Are one flesh with the beasts, and the beasts with the plants
One streaming sap, and certainly the plants and algae and the earth they spring from,
Are one flesh with the stars. (“Monument” 3:419)

. . . the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify  ourselves with it. (“Themes in My Poems” 4:412)

       About this time the God of the world
Felt every star and cell and raying electron of his body . . . (“Great rough-legged hawks” 4.515)

 God is not the spirit of the universe,
Spirit and body, energy and matter, are all one substance,
And God is all. (“God is not the spirit of the universe” 4:561)

  “They take horses
And give them sicknesses through hollow needles, their blood saves babies: I am here on the mountain making
Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms . . .” (“A Redeemer” 1:407)

© 2005 Jeffers Studies
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