Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

OCEAN, ROCK, HAWK, AND ROBINSON JEFFERS 175

Turning fifty and struck by Europe ’s imminent barbarism, in other poems
he draws on the oracles of W. B. Yeats, for whom “The falcon cannot hear the
falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Where catastrophe for
Yeats was cultural, Jeffers imagines the sun combusting like a nova:

The earth would share it; these tall

Green trees would become a moment ’s torches and vanish, the oceans

Would explode into invisible steam.

And where Yeats hoped an aristocracy rooted in folk tradition could save civi-
lization, Jeffers relies on a lonely rock and our true selves, no more changed
“in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.”
Often a stubborn love for primordial nature vies with disdain in his writ-
ing. In “Orca,” written just after World War II, he again feels the “surf-beat ’s
ancient rhythm” just below his home. “Sea-lions loafed in the swinging tide in
the inlet,” and offshore rocks

Bristled with quiet birds, gulls, cormorants, pelicans, hundreds

and thousands

Standing thick as grass on a cut of turf. Beyond these, blue,

gray, green, wind-straked, the ocean

Looked vacant.

Then “two black triangles, tacking and veering,” killer-whale fins, drove in
panicking the seals. “The water boiled for a moment,” while below “a scream-
ing / And wheeling sky... brown blood and foam / Striped the water of the
inlet.” Terror, death, “yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful. / Why?
Because there was nothing human involved... no smirk and no malice,” only
the raw trend of things.
Riveted to a lovely, lonely rock “Smooth-polished by the endless attrition
of slides and floods,” Jeffers waives any affection for “man / Apart” (and for
himself too), in favor of a deeper, necessary love.