Robinson Jeffers is another poet who has faded from memory, gradually losing his prominence as a poet of some significance in his day. This may be due to his clarity or his clear-eyed lack of sentimentality that sometimes leaked gloom, but perhaps he foresaw this in his poem "To the Stone-Cutter" which sees the stone as having more permanence than what we humans produce:
The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out....
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years
This may be a response to Shakespeare's opening to this sonnet:
Nor marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme
Why was Jeffers a Gloomy Gus? Introducing his Selected Poems, Jeffers, after reading Nietchze say that poets lie too much, "decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign emotion that I did not feel; not to pretend to believe in optimism or pessimism, or unreversible progress; not to say anything because it was popular, or generally accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles, unless I myself believe it."
But it isn't correct that these are merely bleak, full of unremitting darkness; it's up to the reader to see the light. Above, the stone lives on. The house dog in "The House Dog's Grave announces "I'm still yours." Even in "Love the Wild Swan" when the speaker-poet despairs of his own writing, he tells himself:
Does it matter whether you hate your... self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the winds. Love the wild swan.
Jeffers is intrigued by our temporary place in the cold, Darwinian universe amid other animals ["Ocean"]:
The gray whales are going south: I see their fountains
Rise from black sea: great dark bulks of hot blood
Plowing the deep cold sea to their trysting place
Off Mexican California, where water is warm, and love
Finds massive joy....
How do these creatures know that spring is at hand? They remember their ancestors
That crawled on earth: the little fellows like otters, who took to sea
And have grown great. Go out to the ocean, little ones,
You grow great or die.
You think you have a handle on his meaning, but he switches it up here. What seemed an important warning is wiped away as not important. His speaker explains why.
O ambitious children,
It would be wiser no doubt to rest in the brook
And remain little. But if the devil drives you
I hope you will scull far out to the wide ocean and find your fortune and beware of teeth.
It is not important. There are deeps you will never reach and peaks you will never explore....
It hardly matters; the words ["grow great or die"] are comparative;
Greatness is but less little, and death's changed life.
Live, die--two sides of one coin. I love the play and compression of that last line, which resonates. One imagines that the blurb for Robinson Jeffers' self-help book might read: "Achieve greater enlightenment by reducing yourself to the cinders of insignificance."
One of my favorites is "Hands" where a speaker finds hands painted on cave walls:
Saying: Look: we also were human...
You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country: enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human.
During his day, Jeffers was famed for his long, narrative poems. "Roan Stallion" is one of those--part short story, part poem, part both, part none of the above. I promise to ruin it with spoilers. The story is somewhat simple. California's husband, Johnny, is a lush, whose drinking brings good and ill. "We share your luck," California says. She points that his gambling meant the family went hungry and "Tom Dell had me two nights / Here in the house."
Two days before Christmas, he brings home the titular horse but has forgotten to get their daughter Christine something for the holiday, so California vows to get something for their child on his winnings. When California rides their mare, Dora, and buggy through the dark river, however, the horse keeps stopping in the middle of the river. She dumps the buggy. Still, the horse stops. Finally, she prays to baby Jesus to bring light which he does. She interprets the river sounds as wings and in the light she sees a baby holding a snake.
Later, when she is retelling the miracle to her child, she accidentally calls Mary "the stallion's wife," which sets up a cascade of symbols where the stallion may be God or Johnny, California may be Mary, and Jesus may be Christine. California keeps imagining God as the stallion. So she rides the roan stallion and is a little afraid of him: "I will ride him.... Is it not my desire to endure death?" That's a curious question. Is it her desire to be dead, to go through death, or to go beyond the possibility of death? Another curious phrase is "Oh, if I could bear you!" which might signify putting up with the horse/god/husband, carrying said figures, and giving birth to the same figures (as Mary gave birth to God in the form of Jesus).
She does ride him and her fear does not abate so much as survives it. After Johnny comes home with two jugs of wine and wants her to join him, she runs out to the stallion and Johnny has his dog, Bruno, chase after her. Bruno, however, taunts the stallion into madness. Johnny follows. Christine hears the commotion and brings out the rifle to hand to California, who shoots the dog (not meaning to hit the dog) allowing the stallion to take out its rage on Johnny. California shoots the horse after it has done its damage. The long list of symbols collapses. Bruno, perhaps, symbolizes Johnny as well, but it's interesting that these symbols don't attack her but each other.
An interesting aspect is that in the middle of the poem, the narrator breaks out of the poem to opine: "Humanity is the mold to break away from... the atoms to be split"--that last referring to the atom bomb, elaborated as "vision [desire] that fools him out of... useless knowledge of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom." He seems to welcome the coming nuclear holocaust. Talk about dark visions. One turns to Jeffers for hope for nature but not the humanity it bore.
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