Peter Critchley

Oct 21, 201517 min read

Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place

The environmental crisis we face is an existential crisis that requires much more than institutional reform and technological solutions. We need to recover something of the spirit of old Pan, rekindle the wild within and without as the Eros between our sensing bodies and the sensuous, living, animate world that enfolds and sustains us.

Robinson Jeffers’ poetry of place captures this ethos well, pointing to the close identification, the intimacy, with a landscape that a respectful, reverential familiarity can engender. Biologist E.O. Wilson has argued for biophilia as a condition of our survival. Robinson Jeffers expresses this as a ‘falling in love outward’, something which draws us to the ‘divine beauty of the universe’. In this respect, sensuous experience is a mystical experience. In The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Jeffers has the character of Orestes explain how his experience in the forests’ natural landscape has changed him, giving him a oneness with a place:

I entered the life of the brown forest

And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the changes in the veins

In the throat of the mountain, a grain in many centuries, we have our own time, not yours; and I was the stream

Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars,

Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit; and

I was the darkness

Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me.

I was mankind also, a moving lichen

On the cheek of the round stone.

I have fallen in love outward.

Jeffers is not advocating some de-industrialised Arcadia, but incorporates machines into his landscape. ‘Great-enough both accepts and subdues; the great frame takes all creatures,’ he writes in Phenomena. His oneness may well be described as mystical, but in a genuinely spiritual rather than obscurantist sense. His words express ‘the feeling — I will say the certainty — that the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced.’ The view is mystical and real, since who we are, our very nervous systems, coevolves with the sensuous world. This yields a vision of being that is attuned to place.

In The Answer’, Jeffers spells out the holistic view of life:

"A severed hand

Is an ugly thing

and man dissevered from the earth and stars

and his history... for contemplation or in fact...

Often appears atrociously ugly.

Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,

the divine beauty of the universe.

Love that, not man apart from that,

or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions,

or drown in despair when his days darken."

Jeffers’ holism is a response to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s plea to be the poet ‘who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artiﬁcial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight.’

Jeffers’ writing is permeated by a holistic understanding of the world. When asked to express his ‘religious attitudes,’ Jeffers commented:

‘I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, inﬂuencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)’

Jeffers’ poem The Double Axe presents a certain philosophical attitude, what could be called Inhumanism, ‘a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.’ (Robinson Jeffers from the Preface to The Double Axe (1948).

This is dialogue, in the sense I use the term in my own work. In the Phaedrus, Socrates declares that he could learn only from the behaviour of 'men in the city'. The stars, the stones, the trees could teach him nothing. That forgetfulness of the city's dependence upon the country expresses the delusion of the civilized man. My understanding of dialogue goes beyond the confines of ‘men in the city’ and instead sees all beings and bodies in our earthly locales in communion and in conversation with each other, speaking and listening in turn, each creating the other through their encounter and their dynamic interaction.

To know oneself, as Socrates demanded, is to know that we are more than a disembodied mind in a walled-in city. We are parts of and dependent upon the web of ecological relations that connect human life with the humblest and most obscure creatures and organisms, bacteria, viruses, remote sources of energy, which nourish the body, the starry skies above that nourish the mind. That is the message I emphasize in defining the Earth's commonwealth of virtue.

The problem is that human beings are always breaking off communication with other beings and bodies, pulling away from the eternal truths of the natural world and enclosing themselves in the abstractions of the self-made world:

A little too abstract, a little too wise,

It is time for us to kiss the earth again.

Robinson Jeffers, Return

True knowledge is a knowledge that comes from inside the world, a carnal knowledge. The problem at the moment is that we approach the world from a position remote from it. The world is external to us, and we are outside and above it. We see this world as objectively valueless, and so project purely human values upon it in order to satisfy our quest for meaning. This quest can never be satisfied in such a way, since satisfaction requires a two-way relationship of mutual learning and growth. We need to develop our values in dialogue with the Earth’s community and learn the values it is teaching. We need a proper understanding of the elements of material reality, what Jeffers calls ‘things’. ‘Things are the God’. Jeffers says in Sign Post’ and he shows us the way to arriving at this understanding: ‘Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity.’ That's where Jeffers found hope and healing.

Robinson Jeffers was horrified by the cruelty that human beings had inflicted on each other and on the world in the course of the twentieth century. He calls his poetry an inhumanism, looking forward to the day when ‘the people [are] fewer and the hawks more numerous.’

November Surf

“Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn

Like smoking mountains bright from the west

And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then suddenly

The old granite forgets half a year's filth:

The orange-peel, eggshells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots

Of dung in corners of the rock, and used

Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings of the summer

Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:

I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then. . . . But all seasons

The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,

Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast

Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:

The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous,

The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed

Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains

The dignity of room, the value of rareness.”

In this poem, Jeffers sees human activities and achievements as detritus left on rocks, to be swept away one day, when all things will be made anew, and the world regains its ancient voice. At the heart of this vision is a profound sense of the unity of all things in the world as one:

Natural Music

“The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,

(Winter has given them gold for silver

To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)

From different throats intone one language.

So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without

Divisions of desire and terror

To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,

Those voices also would be found

Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone

By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.”

The edge of Western civilization is bounded by the Pacific in “The Torch-Bearers’ Race” (1924).

Here is the world's end. When our fathers forded the first river in Asia we crossed the world's end;

And when the North Sea throbbed under their keels, the world's end;

And when the Atlantic surge rolled English oak in the sea-trough: always there was farther to go,

A new world piecing out the old one: but ours, our new world?

Dark and enormous rolls the surf; down on the mystical tide-line under the cliffs at moonset

Dead tribes move, remembering the scent of their hills, the lost hunters

Our fathers hunted; they driven westward died the sun's death, they dread the depth and hang at the land's hem,

And are unavenged; frail ghosts, and ghostlike in their lives too,

Having only a simple hunger for all our complication of desires. Dark and enormous

Rolls the surf of the far storms of the heart of the ocean;

The old granite breaks into white torches the heavy-shouldered children of the wind ... our ancient wanderings

West from the world's birth what sea-bound breaking shall flame up torchlike?

I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration's

End; the sun goes on but we have come up to an end.

We have climbed at length to a height, to an end, this end: shall we go down again to Mother Asia?

Some of us will go down, some will abide, but we sought

More than to return to a mother. This huge, inhuman, remote, unruled, this ocean will show us

The inhuman road, the unruled attempt, the remote lode-star.

The torch-bearers' race: it is run in a dusk; when the emptied racer drops unseen at the end of his course

A fresh hand snatches the hilt of the light, the torch flies onward

Though the man die. Not a runner knows where the light was lighted, not a runner knows where it carries fire to,

Hand kisses hand in the dark, the torch passes, the man

Falls, and the torch passes. It gleamed across Euphrates mud, shone on Nile shore, it lightened

The little homely Ionian water and the sweet Aegean.

O perfect breathing of the runners, those narrow courses, names like the stars' names, Sappho, Alcaeus,

And Aeschylus a name like the first eagle's; but the torch westering.

The seas widened, the earth's bloom hardened, the stone rose Rome seeding the earth, but the torch northering

Lightened the Atlantic ... O flame, O beauty and shower of beauty,

There is yet one ocean and then no more, God whom you shine to walks there naked, on the final Pacific,

Not in a man's form.

The torch answered: Have I kindled a morning?

For again, this old world's end is the gate of a world fire-new, of your wild future, wild as a hawk's dream,

Ways hung on nothing, like stars, feet shaking earth off; that long way

Was a labor in a dream, will you wake now? The eaglets rustle in the aerie, the red eyes of dawn stabbing up through the nest-side,

You have walked in a dream, consumed with your fathers and your mothers, you have loved

Inside the four walls of humanity, passions turned inward, incestuous desires and a fighting against ghosts, but the clarions

Of light have called morning.

What, not to be tangled any more in the blinding

Rays of reflected desire, the man with the woman, the woman with the child, the daughter with the father, but freed

Of the web self-woven, the burning and the blistering strands running inward?

Those rays to be lightened awide, to shine up the star-path, subduing the world outward? Oh chicks in the high nest be fledged now,

Having found out flight in the air to make wing to the height, fierce eye-flames

Of the eaglets be strengthened, to drink of the fountain of the beauty of the sun of the stars, and to gaze in his face, not a father's,

And motherless and terrible and here.

But I at the gate, I falling

On the gate-sill add this: When the ancient wisdom is folded like a wine-stained cloth and laid up in darkness,

And the old symbols forgotten, in the glory of that your hawk's dream

Remember that the life of mankind is like the life of a man, a flutter from darkness to darkness

Across the bright hair of a fire, so much of the ancient

Knowledge will not be annulled. What unimaginable opponent to end you?

There is one fountain

Of power, yours and that last opponent's, and of long peace.

Jeffers is warning the people of an erring civilization to reform their errant ways, which is evidence of a normative humanist concern, I would say. In reminding us that the Pacific Ocean is more enduring than human life and its concerns, Jeffers cautions us to reflect upon the sea’s inhuman presence, and avoid misconceiving life as nature’s ultimate achievement. In clinging to life and its transitory concerns, we pervert it, and miss its real significance.

Read in this light, the inhumanism of Jeffers’ philosophy is not so much anti-human as anti-anthropocentrism, a call for sanity, proportion and balance, restoring the world to its true dimensions. The vastness of earth, sea and sky, and their complete indifference to human concerns calls for human beings to come and see their true place in the natural world. Nature’s indifference to the cruelties and horrors of war issues a call for sanity. It is also a call for mercy. In Calm and Full the Ocean, Jeffers explains that ‘man, his griefs and rages are not what they seem to man, not great and shattering, but really / Too small to produce any disturbance. This is good. This is the sanity, the mercy.’

Small, but not insignificant.

It is too easy to mistake Jeffers’ philosophy of inhumanism as misanthropy. In getting human beings to see their true place in the order of things, he is expressing a humanism of a far higher quality than anthropocentrism, the insanities of which are the true anti-humanism. Jeffers may call faith a lie but, I would say, his merit is to ‘cling to faith beyond the forms of faith’, to quote Tennyson in The Ancient Sage. There is healing in coming to lose ourselves God’s beauty, Jeffers affirms.

Jeffers here refers to the line in the Greek drama when Orestes says, ‘I have fallen in love outward.’ Commenting on this, Jeffers says, ‘the feeling - I will say the certitude - that the world, the universe, is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things, and is so beautiful it must be loved and reverenced, and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.’

Overcoming anthropocentrism is the key to a true humanism, a humanism that allows us to see ourselves as parts of a bigger picture. Social activities, interests and concern absorb our attentions to such an extent that we make the mistake of thinking that human society constitutes the whole reality. Jeffers appeals to the realists who see themselves as parts of a greater reality. In the poem Carmel Point, Jeffers writes of ‘The extraordinary patience of things!’ He proceeds to demand that we ‘unhumanize’ ourselves a little, see our true place in the world, see ourselves truly for the first time.

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Here, we see that answering the question of ‘who’ we are depends also on our understanding of ‘where’ we are. And, I would add, where we are going, and why. We can lose ourselves in nature. But nature’s indifference is merely the beginning, for me. Jeffers finds hope and healing in this indifference and inhumanism. It fits with Einstein’s ‘God of Spinoza.’ It is the God of physical creation, and is indeed intellectually satisfying. I go further, to affirm the personal God, the God of love and relationships. In this sense, losing oneself in the Beauty of God/Nature is to experience the transcendent, something outside of us, and yet personal in nature, which touches us and moves us deeply within. In such experience is a feeling of the infinite within the finite, and of being in the presence of a kindred spirit. This is a decentring that takes us beyond anthropocentrism to a true humanism, when we cease to be closed in on our egos and instead are expanding our being in union with something greater than we are. That is when we put our selves behind us and fall in love outwards, and hear the voice of the Greater Love speaking to us from within the ecology of the human heart.

Xenophon wrote that ‘Earth is a goddess and teaches justice to those who can learn.’ We listen, we hear, we respond to the Earth goddess. But we also serve. ‘The better she is served,’ Xenophon went on to teach, ‘the more good things she gives in return.’ I will continue to argue for ethics as a systematic attempt to give good reasons for our choices, actions and behaviour. We have to be able to make sure that any voice we are listening to, and any god or goddess we may be serving, speaks of permanent and trustworthy truths by using our innate rationality and morality, what Kant called our 'common moral reason'.

That said, there is no necessary antithesis between this more conventional understanding of ethics and an ethics of nature. We are in the mess we are in precisely because we have understood our rationality in far too narrow, disembodied and disembedded a sense, conceiving the natural world to be no more than a passive background to the development of our purely human projects. Robinson Jeffers understood ‘things’ to be the essential elements constituting concrete reality. The problem is that our dominant conception of rationality sees these ‘things’ as passive, inert, and lifeless ‘objects’ with no elemental significance of their own, no voice and no value of their own. Since they have no lesson to teach us, we no longer listen to what they have to say. There is no dialogue anyway in this one-way relation to the objective natural world as an external datum. So long as we continue to cut ourselves off from the natural world in this way, we shall continue to close down our senses, depriving ourselves of the natural diversity and vitality we need in order in order to survive and flourish. Out of right relationship with the surrounding earth, we lack sufficient nourishment to be able to do much more than survive. For all of the pretensions of ‘men as gods’ through technological expansion (read eco-modernizers like Stewart Brand), the human community can never be some heavenly paradise suspended high above the natural community, but is embedded within the more-than-human community of beings and bodies. Until we understand this, and adjust our social institutions and practices in accordance, then our human world, for all of its technical power, will be thin and brittle, its relationships skewed. Human beings thrive and coevolve within a complex web of relationships, relationships between human beings in society but also between human beings and a diversity of entities of other kinds. We need to pay attention to these entities, the plants, the non-human animals and other elemental presences such as soils, rivers, clouds, we need to attend to them, and honour them for the way they sustain and nourish us in right relationships.

The rationalisation of the world has taken us out of right relationship, drawing us further away from the permanent truths of the natural world and further into a world of abstraction. We live in a world mediated by the ‘things’ of our own making, institutions, laws, economic systems, business imperatives, moral codes, principles etc., placing a greater value in these than in the ‘thing’ of the natural world. In this abstracted world, we are blinded to the true nature of our earthly reality, and instead mistake our symbols and concepts for reality. We have lost the sense of the direct, spontaneous, unmediated layer of an intimate and solidary interchange that is always proceeding within sensuous nature, precisely because we have lost touch with the bodily level of our existence. We should be careful. I have a book by anthropologist Jonathan Kingdom called Self-Made Man and his Undoing which shows that there is something badly wrong in the relations between the natural world and the social world we have created. This refers particularly the way that the technosphere is encroaching upon the natural systems upon which our biological survival depends. ‘Drawn further and further out of our biological matrix we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through. Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology.’ (Kingdon 1993). We have ignored our dependence upon nature and become over-reliant on our technical powers. Kingdon is worth quoting at length on this point.

'We cannot make a scapegoat of the technological revolution that has pampered us yet passed by the emaciated victims we see on television. It is an extension of what we are. If we are greedy and selfish technology will be a faithful mirror. Left to its own dynamics, technological and industrial innovation trashes products, places and people. Technology is at once social shredder, racial churn and political furnace. It is for the children of technology to humanise their parent or, like Saturn, it will consume them. Self-made Man and his society will be undone. If the twenty-first century sets out to build a new sense of family it has powerful tools to help in the task. If it doesn't, its antithesis - increasing conflicts between haves and have-nots - is inevitable.'

Kingdon 1993: 316/317

'Where are you going? And where do you come from?' Socrates asks Phaedrus. These are questions we all need to ask ourselves. Phaedrus is leaving his urban house to take a walk in the country, a dangerous place, a place where the mad god Pan has his shrine.

At the end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to Pan, and to the other gods of this the wild country outside the city walls. He asks for a beautiful inside and for an outside that will be loved by that inside.

The prayer acknowledges the limitations of 'pure' intellect, affirming the positive role of wild divinities associated with passion.

The dialogue ends with the discovery of the mutual love of individuals based upon character. Socrates asks whether 'we' need anything more.

Phaedrus replies: 'People who love each other share everything.'

'Let's go', says Socrates.

Go where? Back to the city of civilised individuals with Socrates? Or back to the wilderness? Or to a world where city and country are joined together? In that way, we could take a walk on the wild side without abandoning the comforts of civilised life.

That would be to a world that joins a beautiful inside and a beautiful outside. A place of our own, where all things are common among friends, a place where friendship is more than philia, it is biophilia. That would be the home we need to build to house the sacred.

Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place

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