Many of you teach modern American poetry from time to time, and I would guess (actually I’d be willing to make book on it) that you would, as a matter of course, include Frost and Moore, in any survey of modern American poetry that you might teach—and you should. But how often would it occur to you to include Jeffers? Would you feel obligated to include him in your account of the period’s important poets or your mapping of its significant currents? I won’t ask for a show of hands (though I wouldn’t mind banking my winnings if one could make book on such things). The common take on Jeffers is that he is an overly discursive, misanthropic, minor regionalist who was naïve enough to continue to believe that nature (rather than culture, tradition, or artistic making) was the source and authority for beauty and value. And perhaps even worse he insisted, it seems, on addressing his reader directly without mask or irony or experimental play as if what mattered was his own authority and sincerity. That he ensconced himself in a stone tower on the California coast and declared that he had chosen “not to become a modern” makes it even easier to conclude that his poetry was—both formally and thematically—an evasion of the crisis of modernity that his contemporaries were confronting. I can’t in a brief conference talk build the whole case against this understanding of Jeffers, but I can, I think, offer a first step. The seeming clarity of the surface of Jeffers’ poems and the seeming directness of his voice make it rather easy to read him simplistically. The first step to understanding how Jeffers and his work are another (and significant) strand in the tapestry of modern American poetry is to recognize that he is easy to read badly but perhaps not as easy to read well as we have thought.
Jeffers wrote “Salmon Fishing,” a key early lyric, in December 1920, as he was working out the techniques and assumptions that would typify his mature poetry. Two preliminary typescripts survive: one typed soon after the poem was written, the other apparently from 1923 when he was assembling a preliminary version of Tamar and Other Poems, his first major collection. The two typescripts show Jeffers moving toward the poem’s final conception, and a reworking of the latter two thirds of the poem written in pencil across the bottom of the two typescripts documents yet another step in the process. Across the drafts, the basic scene remains the same and the tone shifts little. But the implications and resonance of the poem do shift, and while the changes are perhaps subtle, cumulatively they show Jeffers shifting his vision of nature and his sense of our relationship to it.
In the 1920 typescript the “anglers” are a flat, intrusive presence; they “torture” the fish against the backdrop of the “Red ash” of a solstice “sundown,” which implicitly indicts their actions:
Autumn and evening rains make the earth young-blooded,
The southwind shouts to the rivers,
The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
Nose up into the rapids;
In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown,
Red ash of the dark solstice, I have seen the anglers
On the rocks and in red shallows
Reel out their lines to torture, silent men
Playing the three-foot steelheads,
And land their living bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales full of the sunset
Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will
The wild Pacific pasture, nor wanton and spawning
Race up into fresh water.
In this draft nature is renewal, pleasure, energy—even speech (“The southwind shouts to the rivers”), while the human figures not only intrude on nature’s dialogue with itself but disrupt it with violence and death. The relationship between nature and the human actors in this draft is a simple (even simplistic) dichotomy, and the speaker’s pronouncement of “hav[ing] seen” all this seems an example of the overly naïve, unreflective voice that supposedly characterizes Jeffers’ work.
For the 1923 typescript Jeffers rephrased a number of lines. The adjustments to the first half leave the poem’s underlying logic essentially unchanged, but the recasting of the middle is another matter. The speaker no longer sees the “anglers” as “Reel[ing] out their lines to torture” but instead sees them, in what is now the “Red fire” of the solstice sunset, this way:
I have seen the anglers,
Like dark herons, like priestlings
Of a most patient mystery, at the river-mouth
Perch the rocks and lash the pool there.
This revision naturalizes the “anglers” by equating them with the “dark herons” that also fish the river mouth. The anglers are no longer figures outside nature who are violating its wholeness and tranquility. The poem no longer posits violence as something the human figures impose on nature. The anglers’ actions are still acts of violence and death (the “living silver” of the fish still “Twitch on the rocks”), but this violence, the violence that they enact, is now the violence that is both within nature itself and fundamental to it. Anglers and herons both kill the fish they harvest, but this violence does not violate nature; it is more simply an aspect of the destruction, renewal, and continual transformational flux that is nature and which contains anglers, salmon, and herons. This revision also ritualizes the “anglers” and fishing. It casts anglers, herons, and salmon as all enmeshed in a sacrificial landscape of fire and blood. In this draft, the “long angry sundown” of the earlier typescript has become a “storm-prophetic sundown,” a “Red fire of the dark solstice,” rather than “Red ash” (an image that better fits a moment of actual ritual sacrifice and also underscores the implicit analogy later in the poem, where the salmon’s bloody scales are “full of sunset” as they “Twitch on the rocks”).
The 1923 typescript is, I’d suggest, a stronger, more complex piece than the 1920 version, but it is also confused or muddled or contradictory in at least one way. The anglers seem both to participate in nature’s flux, as herons do, but also to stand above or outside it as “priestlings,” whose fishing, then, is of a different sort and order than the herons’ fishing. While violence has been shifted in this second draft from being something man enacts on nature to being a fundamental feature of nature itself, human violence seems to be both within and of nature, yet also apart from it. In some sense human violence is of a different order, even unnatural. In part, this difficulty is in the image itself. Salmon fishers do not consciously direct their fishing as a sacrificial rite (however many private quirks may be part of their fishing). In part the difficulty is rhetorical and conceptual. It is the speaker of the poem who sees the fishing as if it is a ritual. More logically, this figure who “has seen the anglers” would function as the priestling, but the voice in the poem stops short of assuming that authority for the scene’s actors, actions, and imagery.
The revision Jeffers worked out across the bottoms of the two typescripts, a third phase of working, suggests that he recognized the promise of the trope of sacrificial ritual in the 1923 typescript and that he may also have sensed that he hadn’t quite resolved the implications of casting the anglers as “priestlings.” The revision, workings for line 6 and following, reads in part:
I have seen the anglers
On the rocks and in red shallows
Draw landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales[?] full[?]
The wild Pacific pasture,
Nor wanton and spawning race into fresh water.
The men were stranger to gaze at,
Dark forms against the fading red,
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people that built Stonehenge,
Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn,
This sketch complicates and extends the revisions made to the middle of the poem in the 1923 typescript. The most significant adjustment, I’d suggest, is the way the speaker’s act of looking and responding shifts from the largely passive pronouncement “I have seen” to the more openly engaged reaction of “The men were stranger to gaze at,” which in turn makes the figure of the anglers as “priests” a characterization that the speaker comes to as he tries to make sense of why they are “stranger to gaze at.” In these revisions, that is, the speaker seems both to see the anglers as of nature, as herons and salmon are of nature, and yet also to see them as different than herons and salmon (“stranger”), in part because they are able, as the speaker is, to observe and reflect. As such, their strangeness is less their consciousness per se than their ability to give themselves up to (and into) the moment as Jeffers imagines the herons would, even though the anglers, like the speaker, also have the capacity to step back and contemplate. In these revisions, then, a dichotomy (or more a dialectic) is emerging between active and unreflective participation on the one hand and standing apart to contemplate on the other, and it is the speaker of the poem who both recognizes this dichotomy and enacts it in creating the figure of the anglers as priests whose ability to function as if priests for the speaker is that they are unaware of their priestliness and even unaware of their ritual actions and the landscape’s ritual dimension. At the very least, the speaker in this revision is a more active figure in the poem; he is dramatically engaged in the scene and its implications in a way quite different from the 1920 typescript.
Jeffers recast the poem’s middle section yet again for the final version that was published in Tamar:
In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown,
Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers,
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people that built Stonehenge,
Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
In this reworking the speaker is again at a somewhat greater distance from the scene and its actions. It is now a “you” who is hearing the poem (either as the reader or as an aspect of the poet in a kind of internal dialogue), and it is this “you” who “sees” the anglers as “performing” nature’s central mystery of destruction and renewal against the winter solstice sunset. In this iteration of the poem the implied “I” who is speaking offers the equation of anglers as priests not as the scene’s truth but instead as a figure that pushes us (as the listening “you”) to move beyond either the mystery of ancient priests or contemporary ones and instead to focus on the “solemnities in the red shallows,” and the violence, beauty, and renewal of “bloody mouths/And scales full of the sunset” and to treat this as a moment of recognition. In this way the poem asks the reader to consider the image of angler priests and the details that evoke human ritual but then to move beyond this trope to recognize instead the deeper sacrificial process of nature in which we both participate unconsciously as victim and victimizer but which we can also at moments experience as a kind of sublime beauty if our act of contemplation is sufficiently charged and active.
“Salmon Fishing,” then, functions through a kind of gazing as action that can in a casual reading seem simply a simple scene simply presented. Yet the poem involves a complex layering of active being in nature and standing apart from nature to contemplate its beauty (including the beauty of “scales full of sunset”), and as it happens Jeffers makes the dialectic of action and reflection that is implicit in “Salmon Fishing” quite explicit in “Continent’s End,” a lyric from 1922, where the figure of the sun’s “tides of fire” evokes the fundamental reality of all being, its recurring destruction and renewal, while the sun as a figure of “the eye that watched before there was an ocean” evokes both an awareness of destruction and renewal and an awareness from within destruction and renewal. This is the nature and consciousness that Jeffers attempts to enact and explore within his poems. This project can seem (as the title suggests) romantic in the sense that nature is the ground of value, and the poet’s role is to intuit that value and evoke it for us through his witness. But the nature that Jeffers intuits is not Wordsworth’s nature. It is not just a matter of the shift from the Lake Country to the California coast. More, it is a matter of how Darwin and modern astronomy intervene and recast nature. Moreover Jeffers’ sense that consciousness is both a means to become aware of nature and yet what sets us apart from it and can alienate it from us, means that his acts of witness can never be the truth of the matter. The truth of nature outstrips language, even the language of the poem, and thus his poems so often move through reflections on consciousness and nature to reach moments where what is truly important occurs as we imagine moving beyond the poem to a particular moment of engaged awareness that the language can perhaps trigger but not fully possess or contain.
“Salmon Fishing,” I’m trying to suggest here, evokes the problematic and rich relationship of being to awareness in Jeffers, and it illustrates how the rhetoric of the poems brings us into this dialectic. In the final draft of “Salmon Fishing,” I’d suggest, Jeffers recognizes that the speaker of the poem is, finally, the priest and the reader (and the speaker’s less engaged self) the initiate. By the end of the poem the violation of nature is not the anglers’ violent actions but the poet’s and the reader’s momentary pulling back from the unreflective, full immersion in being in order to recognize it, transcend it, and accept one’s part in it (including one’s death).
Perhaps in the interest of time you’ll forgive me if I try to clarify what I mean by this process by illustrating these points rather than trying to define them further. I’d like to close by reading a Jeffers’ poem from the mid-1930s and one from late in his life that I think enact this layering of participation and awareness and that perhaps also allow a glimpse of the rhetorical richness and subtlety just below the surface of the seeming transparency of his voice. These poems, and others, suggest I think both the continuity between Jeffers and the early romantics, especially Wordsworth, and the differences, both the “romantic” and the “post-romantic” in his poetic witnessing:
“Oh, Lovely Rock”
“Vulture”*
SALMON FISHING (as completed for publication in Tamar and Other Poems)
The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now,
The south wind shouts to the rivers,
The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
Race up into the freshet.
In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown,
Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers,
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people that built Stonehenge,
Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn,
Drawing landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales full of the sunset
Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will
The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning
Race up into fresh water.