Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources For Further Study |
Criticism
David Rothman
David J. Rothman is a poet, critic, and journalist who has published widely and taught English at many colleges and secondary schools. He recently became the Executive Director of the Robinson Jeffers Association, a group of scholars and writers. In the following essay, Rothman describes how Jeffers portrays the “stark beauty and violence of inhuman nature” in “Hurt Hawks,” which he considers among the poet’s best work.
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was one of the most famous American poets of the twentieth century, and he led a career that ranks as one of the most fascinating, productive, and controversial among all American artists. In 1925, already in his late 30s, Jeffers was relatively undistinguished as the author of two virtually unknown volumes of verse; these would prove to be very different than his mature work. But with the publication of Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems in 1925, he rocketed to a fame shared by only a handful of contemporary writers. In the following twelve years, his output was tremendous: seven lengthy volumes of new poetry, each of which contained one or more long, tragic, narrative poems along with visionary lyrics about nature and the fate of civilization. Several of the books also included verse plays, often based on free adaptations of Greek tragedies. Many of these volumes were highly praised best-sellers, and some are still in print. In 1932, with the publication of Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems, his photograph, a portrait by Edward Weston, appeared on the cover of Time. The anonymous reviewer referred to Jeffers as a writer “whom a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced.”
After this high point, Jeffers’s star sank rapidly beginning in the mid-1930s. The causes included his continuing emphasis on what was viewed as social detachment, in a time when more and more writers were calling for politically engaged art; his occasionally bitter philosophy of “Inhumanism,” in which Jeffers argued that human beings should turn away from human problems to contemplate the more lasting beauty and significance of the inhuman, natural world; his advocacy of isolationism during World War II, including poems highly critical of both Hitler and the Allies; and the harsh judgment by many critics that his poems lacked erudition, complexity, and craft, and were hysterical, by which the critics meant excessively violent and shrill. Although Jeffers published more work of high quality, and his free adaptation of Euripides’s Medea enjoyed a highly successful run on Broadway in the late 1940s, by the time of his death in 1962 he had been all but forgotten by scholars
“‘Hurt Hawks’ is an excellent introduction to all that is best in jeffers: gripping narrative; clear philosophical meditation; spiritual intensity; a tragic view of life; and a sublime vision of nature.”
and critics. He has, however, always retained a popular following, especially as a poet of the natural world.
Today Jeffers is primarily known through a few anthologized lyrics and some of the shorter narratives (such as “Roan Stallion”). Yet despite general critical indifference and lingering scholarly hostility, he has directly influenced not only poets such as William Everson (who credited his exposure to Jeffers’s work as one of the most important events of his life) and, more recently, Mark Jarman, but also figures as different as O’Neill and Faulkner. The list of recent and contemporary writers who claim to admire him includes Charles Bukowski, Robert Bly, Diane Wakoski, Edward Abbey, Dana Gioia, John Haines, Czeslaw Milosz, Gary Snyder, and many others. As Gioia has pointed out, Jeffers remains the greatest poet to date of the American West; one of the greatest American poets of the natural world, indeed one of the greatest visionary poets of the natural sublime ever to have written, and a crucial influence on the entire modern environmental movement; and one of the greatest narrative poets America has produced. I would add that he is one of the greatest verse dramatists this country has ever seen, perhaps surpassed only by T. S. Eliot. Most important, he conveys his vision of the poet’s place in the world so powerfully that even many who do not agree with him feel compelled to address his art and its claims.
“Hurt Hawks” embodies much of what is best in Jeffers’s work. First published in the volume Cawdor and Other Poems in 1928, Jeffers wrote it when he had recently become famous. It serves as a compact and forceful embodiment of what is most compelling in his work. Although the poem is short, it is clearly both a philosophical meditation and a narrative, which Jeffers presents in two numbered chapters, as if it were a microcosm of his longer poems. “Hurt Hawks” is also obviously a nature lyric, and the descriptions are highly evocative of the harshness and beauty of the inhuman world. The brief story about how the speaker, whom Jeffers presents as himself, tends for a wounded hawk and then kills it out of mercy because it can no longer “use the sky forever” is violent, and Jeffers does not soften that violence in any way. If anything, he uses the stark beauty and violence of in human nature as the setting for a story that provokes us into thinking about immense and dangerous questions, including nothing less than the relation of any given spirit — a man’s or a hawk’s, or by extension, any living thing — to the rest of the universe. The poem has a clear, direct, visionary quality that is very much in the spirit of tragic intensity and the sublime, or inexpressible and terrifying. This is the quality that has attracted so many readers to Jeffers’s work. So “Hurt Hawks” is an excellent introduction to all that is best in Jeffers: gripping narrative; clear philosophical meditation; spiritual intensity; a tragic view of life; and a sublime vision of nature.
The first part of the poem is in the present tense, although it implies a story. A hawk has somehow broken its wing, and thus will inevitably die if left in the wild. Interestingly, much of the vivid metaphorical language Jeffers initially chooses to portray this wild thing comes from the world of human civilization: the exposed bone of the injured wing is a “broken pillar” sticking out of the hawk’s body, a compound fracture; the unsupported wing “trails like a banner in defeat.” So the hawk is immediately compared to a stone ruin, and then to a defeated army.
Astonishingly, most critics have downplayed Jeffers’s interest in poetic language, as he did not dwell upon it in his writing about poetry, and his meanings appear at first to be fairly straightforward. In the case of “Hurt Hawks,” Jeffers makes a comparison between an injured animal and the kinds of defeats suffered by human beings, and the language is certainly more direct than that of high Modernists such as Pound and Eliot. Still, Jeffers’s metaphors are highly complex. In order to understand that complexity, we need to have a somewhat better sense of what Jeffers meant by “Inhumanism,” the name he gave to what he called his “philosophical attitude.” In a poem penned a few years before “Hurt Hawks” called “Credo,” Jeffers had written that “The beauty of things was born before the eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” In other words, as he repeated throughout his life, the beauty of nature — in ocean, rock, hawk, sky, and star — has absolutely no need of human beings. In one of his longer poems, the narrative poem “Roan Stallion,” he actually called humanity “the last, least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution” of the universe.
In Jeffers’s view, many of civilization’s problems, including the problems that led during his lifetime to two devastating world wars, grew out of a childish insistence of considering ourselves to be the center of the universe and always looking inward when we should be looking outward, away from human concerns and toward the wild beauty of all creation. So Jeffers defined Inhumanism as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not – man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” Hostile critics often called this attitude hateful and misanthropic, but it is probably more appropriate to say that Jeffers felt we should not exaggerate our own importance in the cosmic scheme of things. In Jeffers’s view, as he wrote in a poem called “The Answer”:
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.
This is the approach to life, deeply influenced by modern science as well as traditional Christianity, that has led many to see Jeffers as one of the spiritual founders of the modern environmental movement.
Why, then, if he always seeks to look away from humanity to let nature take its magnificent, indifferent course, does Jeffers begin “Hurt Hawks” with metaphors of ruined buildings and defeated banners, which are exclusively manmade things? Why does he compare “the great redtail” to things from the human world? Perhaps Jeffers’s language is more complex than it at first appears. By describing the hawk in this way, Jeffers acknowledges our human interest in it, and tries to relate it to our human experience, which is mostly so different from the hawk’s. For the hawk is “intemperate and savage,” unlike most of us, who are merely “communal people.” The poem, which is itself a manmade thing in praise of wild, inhuman nature, becomes a place where the human and the inhuman meet. This is true not only because the
“Jeffers argued that human beings should turn away from human problems to contemplate the more lasting beauty and significance of the inhuman, natural world”
human speaker confronts the hawk, but it is true even at the level of the poem’s most powerful metaphors, which mix the human and the inhuman, the hawk and the pillar. This observation helps to explain why the poem is called “Hurt Hawks,” when there appears to be only one hawk in it — perhaps the other hawk is the poet himself, and by extension that part in all of us that can somehow understand the “beautiful and wild” world of nature, even though we are human.
As the first part of the poem continues, the speaker dispassionately describes how the hawk will die, must die, because it is far too wounded to fly again, and therefore cannot hunt. The hawk will slowly starve, though it will do what it can to survive, driving away cats, “curs,” and coyotes, which will go in search of easier prey, “game without talons.” The speaker even imagines the hawk “flies in a dream,” although “the dawns ruin it.” But wait — once again, isn’t Jeffers assuming that hawks are actually similar to people? For we have no first-hand accounts of hawk dreams, since hawks cannot tell us about them. For that matter, it is hard to imagine how a hawk might wait for “the lame feet of salvation,” an explicitly Christian concept. If we are honest, it is hard to say what the hawk is waiting for, or even if he is waiting in any sense we can truly understand. All we have is our own, human language, which Jeffers cunningly sculpts to evoke something utterly beyond itself: the internal life of an injured raptor. The poet is self-consciously trying to get us to imagine something that cannot really be imagined.
Jeffers is quite aware of what he is doing, that his poem is not a scientific description of a wounded animal’s death, but a way of provoking us into meditation. At the end of the first part, the poet suddenly turns to his readers to accuse us of not even being able to think in such a way as to understand his story. Jeffers says we cannot possibly know or remember “the wild God of the world,” the God who will never be merciful to the arrogant hawk, who is somewhat like the stubborn king of a Greek tragedy. This is where the purpose of the poem becomes more clear. It is a kind of sermon, containing a parable that Jeffers uses to provoke us into thinking about the inhuman natural world. We are not hawks, and can never be like them (except perhaps for “men that are dying”); but somehow, through language, we can imagine what it might be like to be in the world the way that the hawk is in the world. We can contemplate the raw, arrogant, utterly wild, extravagant nature of this animal. And if we do so, we find that it is both terrifying and inexpressibly beautiful: sublime. And, for Jeffers, this act of imagining brings us closer to God, who is best described as himself “wild.” In Jeffers’s scheme it is “death” which is “the redeemer,” not Christ.
The second part of “Hurt Hawks” opens in a very different way than the first, and it is immediately more conversational: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” a line that Edward Abbey modifies and quotes (without attributing it to Jeffers) in Desert Solitaire. Jeffers appears to be taking a hard line here, but he identifies himself as the “I,” hardly sounding like the enraged preacher of the first part who accuses us of being ignorant, communal people. It is as if Jeffers, after his blast of prophetic fire in the first stanza, is calmer now, speaking more personally and directly to us — with even a bit of dark humor. Notice that Jeffers is not announcing that he is going to go out and kill a man; he only says that he thinks men are probably more deserving of being killed than hawks, who only do what their natures require them to. The passage resonates with Whitman’s famous lines from Leaves of Grass:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they areso placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for
their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to
God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with
the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole
earth.
Both poets admire the simultaneous stoicism (“they do not sweat and whine”) and freedom (“Not one kneels to another”) of wild animals. Jeffers’s statement may seem the more shocking, but his acknowledgment of “the penalties” for killing a man suggest that in this part of the poem he is less angry and prophetic and more like one of the communal people who lives by law. In this part of the poem, he is one of the accused, not just the accuser.
The rest of the poem bears out his resignation to and even the spiritual rewards of this destiny. Most of the passage describes, in chronological sequence, how Jeffers tried to nurse an injured redtail hawk — presumably the hawk of the first part — back to health. In the end, however, it becomes clear that the hawk will never fly again and can only look forward to “unable misery.” Jeffers releases it to die on its own, but it returns after a day, “asking for death.” Once again, it is irresistible to ask, in what sense does a redtail hawk ask for something like this? In what sense does a bird “ask” at all? Isn’t that something that implies language, which the wild, savage hawk does not have, at least in any sense that we can directly understand? Further, Jeffers goes on to say that the hawk is “not like a beggar,” again a human comparison. But now it is Jeffers who acts, shooting the hawk in a twilight mercy killing. He describes this killing not only as an ending, but as a liberation for something in the bird, a “what” that fiercely and magnificently soars and disperses.
Jeffers is extremely careful in this ending. He never refers to what happens as the release of a spirit or a soul. In fact, he says that the bird’s “rising” occurs “Before it was quite unsheathed from reality” [my emphasis]. In the end, what the bird was simply vanishes, but even in that vanishing there is astonishing poetic and spiritual force. And Jeffers sugar-coats nothing. The release of this spirit is violent and terrifying: “the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising.”
The final question to ask is why a man who upbraids his audience for being weak and communal spends any time nursing a wounded hawk? Why not simply let nature take its course? The answer is that Jeffers is far from being a one-dimensional character. “Hurt Hawks” is a poem filled with conflict and pain transformed into fierce beauty. The pain lies in Jeffers’s forthright acknowledgment of death, that even nature’s most beautiful, wild, and free animals, hawks, must die, and often die horribly. Jeffers doesn’t like this anymore than anyone else, and in the poem actually goes out of his way to try to save the hawk. But when he realizes it cannot live any kind of life that would be appropriate for a wild animal, he accepts what amounts to an ethical burden in relation to it. Of course, the killing of the hawk therefore remains an inevitably human act, an act of mercy, unlike anything a hawk would ever do. This contradiction only looks like a problem if we think Jeffers was unaware of it. In fact, it is the contradiction out of which he created the poem.
The tortured, but compelling and beautiful result is that Jeffers describes a connection between the living and the inanimate world, even between the living and something so vast that it includes both reality and that which is “unsheathed from reality.” Rather obviously, death will ultimately be our fate as well as the hawk’s, which is why Jeffers says that “men who are dying” also remember “the wild God of the world.” For Jeffers, the hurt hawk — arrogant, wild, and savage — opens a visionary passage to the infinite and eternal, in comparison to which our lives are insignificant. In awakening us to this sublime comparison, Jeffers evokes profound awe at the very fact of existence, connecting our humanity back to that wild God. If we read carefully, he forces us to stop, look around, and view life with astonishment at its vastness, fierceness, and energy.
It is Jeffers’s ability to convey awe, often through terror and uncompromising fierceness, that will make his poetry survive. His strongest work always aims to achieve pathos, the awakening of powerful feelings through the depiction of suffering. Despite his apparent quirkiness and isolation, and his radical differences with the Modernists, poems such as “Hurt Hawks” stand in a great American tradition in which a lonely mind confronts wilderness and through it senses the divine. As much as any poet in this tradition, Jeffers sought to bridge the gap between ordinary human life and a sense of the sacred. Far from denying his humanity, in his best work Jeffers thoroughly acknowledges it and then goes about the great task of giving it meaning by envisioning our place in the largest possible scheme of things, which includes even that dimension into which we will eventually be “unsheathed from reality.” Many readers have therefore described Jeffers’s project as a religious one, but we should remember that he worked exclusively as an artist, not a minister or theologian. While acknowledging that Jeffers’s poems draw on what he called “the religious instinct,” we might in the end do better to say that what he sought was not religious knowledge, enlightenment, or ecstasy or even a path to any dogmatical grace (death is the only redeemer). Instead, he sought simply to be utterly, completely, and even painfully awake.
Source: David Rothman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.
What Do I Read Next?
- Many critics trace Jeffers’s theories of inhumanism back to his years of philosophical studies in Zurich. While at the university he read Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers whose works shed interesting light on Jeffers’s later poems. Schopenhauer is the primary expounder of pessimism, the doctrine that reality is essentially evil. Nietzsche denounced religion and glorified a class of people who are superior to the vast masses of humanity.
- Jeffers’s complete body of poetry, titled The Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, is gathered in two 300-page volumes, edited by Tim Hurt.
- David Brower recently rereleased a book of poems and photographs originally published in 1965 by the Sierra Club. Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast combines Jeffers’s poems with photos by several famous artists, including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.
- You can read the Jeffers’s once-censored poetry in the book In this Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers.
