VULTURE
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up
in heaven,
understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the
naked red head between the great wings
Beak downward staring. I said "My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how beautiful
he'd looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes -
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after
death.
- Robinson Jeffers (Last Poems 1953-62)
This is a very lovely poem about what is believed to be
a very ugly bird and the even uglier fact of our own mortality.
But Jeffers has the knack - as a poet in his own right and as a reader of Nietzsche - of making ugly things and terrible truths seem beautiful and desirable. Not by sugar-coating them with the lies and aesthetic illusions of moral idealism, but by placing them within the context of his own Inhumanism and affirming all things as belonging to a general economy of the whole.
But Jeffers has the knack - as a poet in his own right and as a reader of Nietzsche - of making ugly things and terrible truths seem beautiful and desirable. Not by sugar-coating them with the lies and aesthetic illusions of moral idealism, but by placing them within the context of his own Inhumanism and affirming all things as belonging to a general economy of the whole.
Jeffers encourages us to revel in our experience of life as is - not seek refuge from it, nor try to transform or transcend reality via flights of fancy. Like Lawrence, he wants us to intensify our perception of (and participation in) the natural world, which is red not just in tooth and claw, but also hooked beak.
For Jeffers - a tragic poet in the noble sense - it is the sacrificial essence of existence that makes life beautiful. It's astonishing that things are born and grow; but it's equally astonishing that they decay and die. In 'Vulture', he expresses his eco-paganism in relatively simple language, but with all the visionary dynamic of a man for whom the god-stuff is roaring in all things.
Give your heart to the hawks - but let the vultures pick over your bones ...
See: The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, (Stanford University Press, 2001).
Both poem and post (and dedication) much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly a striking and arresting piece that, if anything, 'out-Lawrences Lawrence' (though the writer will be in a far more informed position than me to comment here). Though Roethke's terse verse 'Night Crow', profiled on TTA a while back (engaging as it does both the crow as a real bird, but also, and more importantly to me, its value as a departure point for the poet's tenebrous imagination), Jeffers' poem, with its long-limbed and expansively American lines, reads as perfectly attuned to this most maligned of carrion consumers. It appears, notwithstanding the post's accompanying photo, that, of the eight species native to the US, the author is likely euologising the red-headed Turkey vulture in this poem.
Whether one is 'sugar-coating' reality in 'aesthetic idealism' (is there any aesthetics that does not involve ideas, or at least images, one might wonder?) or, I suppose, embittering the pill with delirious inhumanism, one is invariably working in service of one artistic ideology or another. Not for the first time as a contributor to TTA, I'm also never really sure what life 'as (it) is' means, since it's presumably self-evident that 'life' always involves a perspective upon it of some kind, as Nietzsche highlighted.
For my part, I might read Jeffers' poem as concerning a kind of Malrauxian ontopoeic metamorphosis rather than elevating a logic of indifferent annihilation. Death is not death, since everything is always transformed into/by means of something else, be it fire, earth, or a hard-to-love feathered friend. As such, Jeffers may or not be a tragic thanatologue per se, but he certainly purports to be a poet of sublimity - indeed, and rather gratuitously to my ear, he even uses the word to enforce his claim at his poem's ecstatic climax. Implicitly, in doing so, he also marks himself out to me as an Icarian 'puer' poet, as captured in that telling closing neologism, 'enskyment'. It's why, to turn Dr Alexander's reading back on itself, the phrase 'flights of fancy' - which is indeed often used disparagingly to mock the 'aerial' or inspirational origins of poetic music - ironically points us back into the poem's ornithocratic crux, which is, after all, all about how bird flight meets poetic flight.
PS The reference to bird beaks (hooked or otherwise) also makes me think amusingly of the late and much-loved Rod Hull - another tragic (or tragicomic) entertainer gloriously plagued by an autonomous bird. As other readers may recall, some of those sketches with Emu were as anarchically poetic as anything one might read in a modern anthology!