Robinson Jeffers, Humanity and the Eagle

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

 

                                                 Robinson Jeffers “Carmel Point” 13-15

 

            Robinson Jeffers is a poet of the American Western wilderness. Of special interest to him are the craggy cliffs of Carmel in early twentieth-century California and the wild condors and other birds he often saw fly there. He coupled a celebration of the idea of wilderness with a thought-provoking indulgence in myth, tragic stories told in long narrative poems that contrasted to the shorter bullet-shots of his shorter poems, eight to one hundred or so lines of pinpointed sudden realizations. These poems hold an immediacy akin to Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach, one that heralds the reader’s priority in immediate visceral reactions over the more modernist concerns of long-range forms or universal notions of “greatness” in art. I will show through investigation of a short passage of one of my favorites of Jeffers’ poems, “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” that direct, blood-boiling actions play a predominant part in overall interpretation, especially in the shorter poems such as those of Jeffers. I began by quoting from one such short poem, “Carmel Point,” a sonnet-like insight into human encroachment in the natural world (fifteen lines instead of fourteen, typical of Jeffers’ Whitmanesque sudden lengthening of poetic normalcies). By going into “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” I will point out a more specific and direct instance of the theme of human versus the wild.

            When I was a child, Jeffers was taught as a counterpoint to Robert Frost with Frost’s comfortable, yet unsettling snowy New England forests replaced by the wild ocean coastlines of California. Jeffers dropped out of favor, partly because the inevitability of human encroachment in California makes his plea to the wild nature of existence inconsistent, that wild nature no longer a constant presence. Also, the Steinbeck idea of “Westering” that Jeffers coincided with became known as a mostly Caucasian construct, one that disregarded the diversity of how the human populations of the AmericanWest in fact arrived there. The Hispanic, African American, Asian, and the hundreds of groups of American indigenous peoples that roamed around the North American continent were not “Westering” so much as drifting in broad circles from all directions. But they all dealt with the natural boundary that was and is the ocean coastline. Jeffers celebrates that coastline and its predominant wildness, even in the face of astounding human interference.

 

 

Condor on the California Coast. Credit:  AP.

 

Turning now to the lines I wish to investigate more closely, here is the excerpt from “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” CW p. 185 lines 8 – 21.

 

“The nerves of men after they die dream dimly

And dwindle into their peace, they are not very passionate,

And what they had was mostly spent while they lived.

They are sieves for leading desire; they have many pleasures

And conversations, their dreams too are like that.

The unsocial birds are a greater race;

Gulf-eyed, and their blood burns. What heaped up to death,

The extension of one storm-dark wing filling its world,

Was more than the soft garment that fell. Something had flown away. Oh, cage-hoarded desire,

Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame-rising from fire, or cloud-coiled

 lightning,

Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven; I am stationed, and cold at heart, incapable of

  burning,

My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire-to the rock, how can I speak

                                                                                                                                      of you?

Mine will go down to the deep rock.”

 

The seven lines before these act as a prologue to the remainder of the poem. Notice how, after line twelve, the focus of the speaker turns from the nature of human dreams to the eagle. The remaining lines, and sixty-four more after these, continue the intense death-dream of the eagle. The remainder of the poem describes in beautiful, majestic, and harsh detail the passionate dreams of the dying eagle. The lines I have quoted show Jeffers’ theme, that humans have no concept of the passion of wild things, the living eagle dying, and, by extension, the ever-continuing passion of the “cold-eyed” wilderness itself.

            My thinking is that the immediacy of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach proves itself in these lines. Even without thinking of the larger form, most of the poem’s beauty lies in the dying eagle’s death dream. The blatant exposition of the first seven lines tells of two humans who quickly shoot a caged eagle. Jeffers names the humans, and thus the reader identifies with them, but Jeffers then abandons them in favor of the eagle. The reader takes on the responsibility of the wild animal’s dream by comparing its possibilities to her/his own. Jeffers’ comparison claims that no human can know the passion experienced by the wild thing. This immediate visceral claim is akin to the reader’s own bullet, shot into her/his reason through the violent act of killing the eagle. Jeffers directs his claim solely to these lines, ending with the bleak phrase “Mine will go down to the deep rock.” The “Mine” refers to desire, the limited desires of humans (the “dreams” of lines eight through twelve) in comparison to the long-reaching desire of nature, with nature fated to prevail. Though nature, represented by the dying eagle’s dream, will be celebrated in the remainder of the poem, the reader takes this moment, this immediacy to confront the hard-hitting theme that the idea of wilderness contains within it the short-sighted brevity of human interference.

            These descriptions are violent, a violence that Jeffers celebrates as inevitable when humans confront nature. According to Robert Zaller’s The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers, the confrontation of human violence and fated natural violence is predominant in Jeffers: “extremes of violation (violence) were both a means and an effect of Jeffers’ quest for psychic autonomy and poetic form” (68). Humans, in “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” long for psychic autonomy, but only the Eagle can comprehend such a visionary experience. Jeffers’ poetic form, then, is also an attempt towards a natural perfection that humans can only partly realize. The natural world holds this poetry as well as the connection to something supernatural. Humans writhe in their meager attempts to achieve both a natural and a supernatural connection. The eagle succeeds.

            The reader can view the remainder of the poem as a series of immediate moments also, though explaining them as such is not my purpose in this essay. I only mean to show that Jeffers, a modernist in league with the Western mythos of Steinbeck and the formal concerns of poets such as American modernists like Robert Frost, also proves to be an exemplar of Sontag’s early postmodernist position. Indeed, a reader or viewer can apply Sontag to most anything, but with Jeffers, the process works wonderfully to open up a poem such as “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” to other, even more blood-curdling interpretations, or, rather, “against interpretations.” Jeffers interprets the natural world and its connection to the supernatural through violence erupting in sudden, impactful moments. The sudden impact is the only gateway the mere human readers of his poems can fathom both natural and poetic forms.

 

Nick Harris 

blog post 10.16.2024

 

References

Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robertson Jeffers. Random House, 1938.

Oelschlager, Max, “The Idea of Wilderness in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder,” The Idea of Wilderness, Yale University Press, 1991, 243-280.

Sontag, Susan.  “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation & Other Essays. Farrar,            Strauss & Giroux, 1963, 3-14.

Zallar, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. Cambridge University Press, 1983.