A History of American Literature

358 Making It New: 1900–1945

“small dark head” to a “small round stone.” But, at first, there is a gulf if only because

the head is full of the “lightning” of self-consciousness. More effort is required to

bridge that gulf and turn rapprochement into union: “lightning” in this sense could

also refer to the power generated in the struggle to escape self-consciousness. And,

at the lines beginning “The atom bounds-breaking,” the gulf is finally bridged.

“Humanity is the mold to break away from,” Jeffers insists elsewhere in the poem,

“the crust to break through,... / The atom to be split.” Suddenly, in an experience

that transcends and illuminates all that surrounds it, the atom is split and man

assumes the status of “not-man.” “I think one of the most common intentions in

tragic stories,” Jeffers said, “is to build up the strain for the sake of the explosion of

its release – like winding up a ballista.” If this is true, then “Roan Stallion” is certainly

a tragic story. Its heroine may only be able to achieve union with inhuman nature for

a while; at the end of poem, in fact, she betrays the beast-god by shooting him. But,

for a brief enchanted moment, she does experience that union, and in doing so

provides narrator and reader alike with a very special version of tragic catharsis.

Near the end of Jeffers’s life, however, there was a distinct shift of emphasis away

from the tragic and toward the mystical. The sense of an inescapable conflict between

nature and human nature became of less concern; and the poet concentrated more

than ever before on the possibility of union. Of course, union as an idea (as in

“Divinely Superfluous Beauty”) or a momentary experience (as in “Roan Stallion”)

is often present in his earlier work, but there it is normally qualified by a recognition

of the needs and limits of the human character. In the work of Jeffers’s last years, by

contrast, this recognition tends to lose its power, and the poet is consequently left

freer to contemplate those occasions when, as he put it once, there is “no passion but

peace.” In “The Eye,” for instance, the poet finds refuge from the horrors of World

War II in a feeling of identification with “the staring unsleeping / Eye of the earth”:

the poem is a perfect illustration of Jeffers’s claim that Inhumanism is “neither

misanthropic nor pessimistic” but “a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times,”

because it fosters “reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct.” In “My Burial Place,”

in turn, Jeffers anticipates the moment at which the union between himself and

nature will be complete, when his body will be compounded into dust. “Now comes

for me the time to engage / My burial place,” he insists:

put me in a beautiful place far off from men

No cemetery, no necropolis,

...

But if the human animal were precious

As the quick deer or that hunter in the night the lonely puma

I should be pleased to lie in one grave with ’em.

Like Robinson and Frost, Jeffers contemplates mortality here, in severe and immacu-

late lines that register how absurd and petty the human animal is, and how everything

is dwarfed by the enigmatic beauty, the intrinsic perfection of nature. More starkly

even than they do, he also reminds the reader that words are nothing but a temporary

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