172 PA RT T W O
“I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” This rude thought,
from “Hurt Hawks,” might turn one off Jeffers, but listen to the end. Having
fed the broken-winged redtail for six weeks,
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river
cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.No false sentiment, no sentiment at all, spoonfeeds these lines. “Soared... fierce
... fear” identify with animate life, while “rising... unsheathed from reality”
discovers a raw spirit-bound beauty.
Along with hawks, Jeffers bonded with gray rock, the “granite sea-boulders”
he hauled up “wind and wave-worn” to help construct Tor House on a stone
outcrop fifty yards above the Pacific. Digging for a fireplace foundation he found
bedrock blackened by ancient Indian campfires, and from a disused Spanish
mission brought home a discarded boulder with an Indian mortar hole in it. A
few years later, with his twin boys, he built Hawk Tower (setting into it a piece
from Yeats’s old stone tower in Ireland). Again and again his verse comes back
to “living rock,” “lonely rock,” “water-darkened... lovely rock,” “pure naked
rock.” His poem “Rock and Hawk” calls these two presences, bird and stone,
“Fierce consciousness joined with final / Disinterestedness.” No American poet
had bound together such starkness and passion, speaking from “this granite
edge of the continent.”
Jeffers first caught East Coast attention in a 1925 California anthology whose
title poem, “Continent ’s End,” stands where the ocean “beat its boundary, the
groundswell shook the beds of granite.” Like the Yokuts shaman—“My words
are tied in one /... With the great rocks”—a western Whitman feels the conti-
nent ’s pulse: “my song’s measure is like your surf-beat ’s ancient rhythm.” Here
was a voice akin to Thoreau confronting “vast, terrific... inhuman Nature”
at Maine ’s Mount Katahdin.
From his own standpoint, Jeffers spoke of “Inhumanism,” based on “the
astonishing beauty of things” and “the fact that mankind is neither central nor
important in the universe.” What he felt as pure nobleness doesn’t always sit
well. In one of many poems looking deep into her place on earth, “Yom Kippur
1984,” Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) has just moved from the East Coast to Santa
Cruz County, near Carmel. Jeffers-like, she meets the “grey Pacific unrolling
its scrolls of surf.” Searching for some lines she remembers, “something to bind
me to this coast... / I find the hatred in the poet ’s heart.” She cites a poem of
his: “the hateful-eyed and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multi-