Reflections on the Vulture 2: The Poetic Vision of Robinson Jeffers

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,

And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I
    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.  

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).

To read part one of this post - on Lawrence's philosophical dislike of vultures - click here. 
To read an earlier post on Robinson Jeffers and his Inhumanism, click here.

This post is dedicated to Simon Solomon, who introduced me to the work of Robinson Jeffers.

Give Your Heart to the Hawks: On the Inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers

Photo of Robinson Jeffers 
by Carl Van Vechten (1937)

As for me, I would rather be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.

It's only very recently that I've become familiar with the American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962) - this despite the fact he's highly regarded by admirers for his Nietzschean philosophy of Inhumanism and came spinning out of the same cultural vortex as D. H. Lawrence.

Like Lawrence, Jeffers wrote of the astonishing beauty twinned with the savage cruelty of the natural world and contested all forms of anthropocentric conceit. His uncompromising relationship with the physical world is described in often brutal verse and, like Lawrence, Jeffers also had a penchant for exploring controversial subject matter, including rape, incest, bestiality and murder.

Both writers, we might say, subscribed to a model of the sublime that was erotico-daemonic in character. The key question was how mankind could find its proper place in the world as a being amongst other beings (be they animals, flowers, or rocks). This, Jeffers suggests, would involve men and women learning how to uncentre themselves and accept that all things have an element of divinity and are interconnected in what is essentially a tragedy of existence.  

Sadly, like Lawrence, Jeffers has largely fallen from favour and been marginalised in the mainstream academic community during the last thirty years. And probably for some of the same reasons; how many students today care about the extraordinary patience of things or want to hear that the universe is absolutely indifferent to them and their narcissistic politics of identity and social justice?

Still, Jeffers does have his followers and devotees; particularly within the burgeoning discipline of eco-poetics where his effort to shift emphasis from man to not-man is met with approval. And I certainly intend to read his work closely and at length over the coming months; who knows, I may even become a member of the Robinson Jeffers Association ... 

Notes

Readers interested in the Jeffers-Lawrence connection might like to see Calvin Bedient's essay, 'Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and the Erotic Sublime', in Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers, ed. William B. Thesing, (University of South Carolina Press, 1995).

See also the foreword written by Jeffers to Fire and Other Poems, by D. H. Lawrence, published by The Book Club of California / The Grabhorn Press, 1940, in a limited edition of just 300 copies (with an introductory note on the poems by Frieda Lawrence).

Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vols. I-V, (Stanford University Press, 1988-2000).
Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, (Stanford University Press, 2001). 


Thanks to Simon Solomon for introducing me to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and inspiring this post.