356 Making It New: 1900–1945past and his attachment to place. With Jeffers, though, the past that signified was not
immediate, a matter of conscious memory and cultural history, but ancient, prehis-
torical, not so much a human as a subhuman inheritance. Traditionalist he might
have been, in the sense of looking backward for his allegiances, but he was one for
whom the crucial traditions were beyond the scope of consciousness and
community – incorporating the sense that, as he put it once, “the universe is one
being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy.” It was only in “the
Monterey Mountains,” he insisted, that he had ever found “people living ...
essentially as they did in the Idyls or Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca. Here was life
purged of its ephemeral accretions. Here was the contemporary life that was also
permanent life.” In addition, the position of California, facing what he called “the
final Pacific,” convinced him that here was “the world’s end.” With the conquest of
the American continent, Jeffers believed, the westward movement of civilization
was completed. Human history was effectively over; although, of course, cosmic
history would continue.
Among the many poems that explore Jeffers’s own peculiar version of frontier
legend, the mythology of the West, are “The Torch-Bearer’s Race” and “Continent’s
End.” In the latter, the poet stands on the Californian coastline, watching the Pacific.
As he watches and meditates, it occurs to him that the sea represents a form of life
much older than human history, a form from which human beings, in the progressive
stages of their development, have moved ever further away. But perhaps the finest of
Jeffers’s pieces in which California is a visible, palpable presence is the longer,
narrative poem “Roan Stallion.” Jeffers was frequently drawn toward longer forms.
Most of his published volumes include one or two long narrative or dramatic poems.
Among his dramatic pieces are adaptations of Greek legend like “The Tower beyond
Tragedy,” “At the Fall of an Age,” and Medea (1947), as well as his idiosyncratic version
of the story of Jesus, “Dear Judas”; while, over thirty years, he wrote fifteen narrative
poems all located in California in the twentieth century. Not alone among these
narratives, “Roan Stallion” has its origins in local character and experience: at least
some of its events, Jeffers later claimed, were “part of ... actual history.” Starting from
there, however, the poem soon assumes the dimensions of myth. Like so much of
Jeffers’s work, it belongs at once to a particular people and place and to a world of
elemental human experience. Its central action suggests these larger dimensions
when the heroine rides a stallion by moonlight to a hilltop, and there falls upon the
ground prostrating herself beneath its hooves. The stallion, the poet tells us:backed at first; but later
plucked the grass that grew by her shoulder.
The small dark head under his nostrils: a small round
stone that smelt human, black hair growing from it;
The skull shut the light in: it was not possible
for any eyes
To know what throbbed and shone under the sutures
of the skull, ... a shell full of lightning ...GGray_c04.indd 356ray_c 04 .indd 356 8 8/1/2011 7:53:50 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 50 AM