OCEAN, ROCK, HAWK, AND ROBINSON JEFFERS 171The old ocean at the land ’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks.With no main verb, these notings begin “The Place for No Story.” But any
scene requires a seer, seeing “rock shaped like flame.” And whose pasture and
herd?—though they’re barely there. Jeffers could have ended tellingly on “gray
air haunted with hawks,” but a he adds a comment:
No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.—much as in a later poem, he encounters “pure naked rock” and ends having
“Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.”
Prophetic arrogance has been the charge against him, and misanthropy,
something sharper than Frost ’s “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Yet
the bitterness Jeffers felt at human wastage—the “year’s filth,” “the power-
shovels”—always sprang from loving awe of the earth he dwelled on.
His family, strict Calvinists, had moved from Pennsylvania to California in
- At seventeen, in The Youth’s Companion, Jeffers published “The Condor,”
whose rhyme and meter he ’d soon abandon but not its austere stance: “My
wings can dare / All loneliest hanging heights of air.” California condors had
thrived for tens of thousands of years, until whaling and sealing deprived them
of marine carcases. Then thanks to power lines, pleasure shooting, and lead from
eating hunters’ kills, Jeffers saw them decline from six hundred to about fifty in
the wild. By 1985 one breeding pair remained. Then an astonishing recovery
program literally snatched them from extinction. They’re now back in their
hundreds, though still plagued by lead poisoning.
After college in southern California, Jeffers in 1914 moved north with his
new wife, Una. Traveling by stagecoach they “looked down through pines
and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay”—“our inevitable place.” Una describes Big Sur,
south of Carmel, with the verve of a Dorothy Wordsworth transplanted to the
Pacific rim: “Canyons, gushing springs and streams, are thickly wooded with
redwoods and pines, laurels, tan-oak, maples and sycamores, and, high up, the
rosy-barked madrones.... Lashing waves roll in, incredibly green and blue
beyond the foam, menacing and gray in storm,” wildflowers of every sort,
“Flashing bird-wings... And high above, arrogant hawks hover, marsh hawks
and sparrow hawks, redtails and peregrine falcons. Vultures too peering down,
and a rare pair of eagles.” In “Lashing,” “Flashing,” “peering,” you can feel
the bent of mind she shared with her husband.