This is one of my favorite Jeffers poems (with The House Dog’s Grave and The Deer Lay Down Their Bones), partly because of the shift you note near the end. If we think we’ve got Jeffers pegged as an anti-American cynic in the first stanzas, the force of love for his children may surprise us at the end. This is a love poem - fierce love. And the metaphor of “mould” means that even “vulgarity” is part of a natural process (compost) from which another generation of life will come again. Jeffers’ disappointment comes from holding his sons and country to a high bar. By filtering his anger through poetry, he makes it inseparable from love and impossible to reduce to a political stereotype.
I agree with you that the poem’s virtue is its truth for Jeffers. He gets a whole, contradictory truth in just a few lines: anger, despair, love, and slim hope as almost an afterthought. Thanks for featuring this poem. You drew me in. :-)
I keep my Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz on the shelf right next to my collected Robinson Jeffers for a reason. "No one with impunity / Gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void, / You offered sacrifices to demons...Better...to implore protection / Against the mute and treacherous might / Than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing." ("To Robinson Jeffers," 1963)
In "Milosz's ABCs," Milosz talks about Jeffers in the short essay, "Carmel." He disagreed with Jeffers' Inhumanism, as your quotation indicates, but regarded him as a great poet, and noted that, in the 1920s, Dwight Macdonald ranked him above T.S. Eliot.
I've never liked this poem. Its language seems to me to be the epitome of the shallow-minded anti-Americanism that was fashionable in Jeffers' day and is still around today. It is dismissive and ignores all the good that one finds in this country (despite its many flaws). Jeffers was an embittered recluse and, more than anything else, the poem reflects his inability to love and appreciate anyone or anything.
It's hard for me to read the final stanza as you do. The structure of the first sentence - be not so moderate - reads to me as counsel against even loving humanity. If life is good but all its expressions are from a lousy servant working for a worse master, then only the man-God is worthy of uncynical love. I hope I've got the sense of the last stanza wrong :)
I think I may have been unclear at the end, and so I've added a few words. To be a Stoic, telling your children to flee, is to give up on love and care for humankind. Either Jeffers means that love is clever servant/insufferable master (which is how I take it), or he means that humans are those bad servants/masters. Regardless, love is the great trap that caught even God, and he advises his boys to be extremely moderate in it.
This is one of my favorite Jeffers poems (with The House Dog’s Grave and The Deer Lay Down Their Bones), partly because of the shift you note near the end. If we think we’ve got Jeffers pegged as an anti-American cynic in the first stanzas, the force of love for his children may surprise us at the end. This is a love poem - fierce love. And the metaphor of “mould” means that even “vulgarity” is part of a natural process (compost) from which another generation of life will come again. Jeffers’ disappointment comes from holding his sons and country to a high bar. By filtering his anger through poetry, he makes it inseparable from love and impossible to reduce to a political stereotype.
I agree with you that the poem’s virtue is its truth for Jeffers. He gets a whole, contradictory truth in just a few lines: anger, despair, love, and slim hope as almost an afterthought. Thanks for featuring this poem. You drew me in. :-)
I like the poem but I really love the title.
I keep my Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz on the shelf right next to my collected Robinson Jeffers for a reason. "No one with impunity / Gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void, / You offered sacrifices to demons...Better...to implore protection / Against the mute and treacherous might / Than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing." ("To Robinson Jeffers," 1963)
In "Milosz's ABCs," Milosz talks about Jeffers in the short essay, "Carmel." He disagreed with Jeffers' Inhumanism, as your quotation indicates, but regarded him as a great poet, and noted that, in the 1920s, Dwight Macdonald ranked him above T.S. Eliot.
I've never liked this poem. Its language seems to me to be the epitome of the shallow-minded anti-Americanism that was fashionable in Jeffers' day and is still around today. It is dismissive and ignores all the good that one finds in this country (despite its many flaws). Jeffers was an embittered recluse and, more than anything else, the poem reflects his inability to love and appreciate anyone or anything.
It’s fairly clear (to me at least) why you picked this poem on this day. I sadly smile.
It's hard for me to read the final stanza as you do. The structure of the first sentence - be not so moderate - reads to me as counsel against even loving humanity. If life is good but all its expressions are from a lousy servant working for a worse master, then only the man-God is worthy of uncynical love. I hope I've got the sense of the last stanza wrong :)
I think I may have been unclear at the end, and so I've added a few words. To be a Stoic, telling your children to flee, is to give up on love and care for humankind. Either Jeffers means that love is clever servant/insufferable master (which is how I take it), or he means that humans are those bad servants/masters. Regardless, love is the great trap that caught even God, and he advises his boys to be extremely moderate in it.