A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 357

After this moment of brooding excitement, the poem quickly rises to a strange,

mystical experience of union:

The atom bounds-breaking,

Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, without recognition

Not praying, self-equalling, the whole to whole,

the microcosm

Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally,

more utterly, more incredibly conjugate

With the other extreme and greatness; passionately

perceptive of identity ...

Reading lines like this in context, we cannot help being reminded of one of the most

consistent of ancient legends, in which a god comes to a woman in the shape of a beast

and there is sexual contact between them. This, in turn, encourages us to see the entire

narrative as a symbolic one, with several different levels of meaning. One level is

registered in the heroine’s name, California, and the fact that she is one quarter Indian,

one quarter Spanish, and one half Anglo-Saxon. On this level, the poem is clearly a

myth of the American West: California represents a new land and a new breed of

people, and her moment of communion with the horse figures the close contact with

nature that land and those people enjoy – “life,” to recall Jeffers’s description of the

Monterey mountains, “purged of its ephemeral accretions.” On another level, “Roan

Stallion” is a kind of racial myth which has as its subject myths and the mythologizing

process in general. Jeffers presents us with a legendary union between a mortal woman

and a god in the shape of a beast, and then proceeds to explain why, since the beginning

of time, people have created such legends. After the passage just quoted, for instance,

the poet connects the central incident of the poem to other mythical annunciations,

and then connects every one of these in turn with what he calls

... the phantom rulers of humanity

That without being are yet more real than what they

are born of, and without shape, shape that which

makes them.

All of these legends, he is saying, exist because we need them. They serve to remind us

of the power and the glory latent in us, which we share with the elements, and of

which can only find a partial expression in the lives that we lead, the societies we build.

This leads to the third and most significant level of meaning in the poem. Above

all, “Roan Stallion,” like all of Jeffers’s work, is about the gospel of Inhumanism. The

stallion, according to this reading, figures the power of nature just as the creatures in

“Divinely Superfluous Beauty” do; and, in surrendering to it, the woman momentarily

identifies herself with that power, just as Jeffers always longed to. The identification

is not easy, as the poet’s description of the mystical experience at the heart of the

poem indicates. A rapprochement between woman and nature begins to occur at the

beginning of the lines quoted just now, suggested by the comparison of California’s

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