Poem Time: Robinson Jeffers' "Return"

Pico Blanco in Big Sur. Image by J Doll.

One of the things I want to do now that I’m writing more on this blog is to provide shorter posts. On the whole, like someone who calls Jeffrey Lebowski El Duderino, I’m not into the whole brevity thing. But in order to keeps the wheels of commerce turning here, I need to be realistic and write some shorter, more manageable posts. One good, pleasurable way to do that is to start writing little pieces about poems I like, as an exercise in close reading that will serve two purposes: first, to introduce you, the reader, to some new poems, and second, to catalog my own thoughts about these verses that I like.

My inaugural post in what I’m dubbing “Poem Time” (as in, “It’s poeming time,” said in Ben Grimm’s voice) is one that’s relatively new to me, Robinson Jeffers’ “Return.” You can find the full poem here.

Jeffers is a poet whose world I am taking baby steps into. I already find him fascinating: a recluse who built his own stone house on the Big Sur coast of California; a pacifist whose anti-WWII stance shriveled his audience after universal accolades in the 20s and 30s; and a man dedicated to stone and bird, practitioner of a style he dubbed “inhumanism.” Jeffers, for me, is one of those figures with whom I fundamentally disagree on major issues, but whose perspective I nevertheless find sharpening, bracing, and perhaps even oddly comforting. In the spareness of his writing and vision of the world, I find hope in the smallness of human beings, even as my Catholic belief in the fundamental dignity of the human being keeps me from following Jeffers all the way down the lonely path he trod. Though I’m new to Jeffers, he reminds me a bit of the craggy English poet Geoffrey Hill, who himself has a dim view of human history and a nearly mesozoic view of the workings of the world. To read Jeffers or Hill is to enter what academics sometimes label “deep time.” Usually that’s a phrase that’s deployed cavalierly and rather stupidly in an effort to sound, well, deep, but Jeffers earns the “more ancient than ancient” feeling that pervades his poetry.

When I picked up his collected poems from my library, I flipped at random, as I like to do. “Return” was the first poem I happened upon, and it stopped me in my tracks (literally: I was walking back to my car and just stopped). It’s a short poem, but from the beginning Jeffers crams his lines with meaning and effect:

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.

Jeffers writes in a free style (he apparently pushed back against meter in favor of “rolling stresses”) but here he channels an almost medieval sense of alliteration to push the momentum of the poem back and forth, the “l” words gliding the reader forward while the “r” words bring us back again. In this juxtaposition of sounds — the “l” slipping off the tongue, the “r” forming a barrier with the teeth against the escape of syllables — Jeffers brings us to the heart of the poem. We live in a frictionless existence — a little too abstract, a little too wise. We must arrest our inert movements, stop and bend down to kiss the earth. We must take time, as he notes in a later line, to plunge our hands into the river up to our shoulders.

“Return” is a Shakespearean sonnet, though a subtle one. Note the strange rhymes Jeffers gives us: the thudding repetition of “again” and “again” (again); the awkward near rhymes of thoughts/hawks and noble/marble. He’s playing with the form; not releasing us entirely but putting up barriers to our simple run to sonnet’s end. That’s noticeable too in the strange shift into the couplet. Shakespearean sonnets of course always have their volta, their “turning” of the poem’s meaning, between the last of the three quatrains and the couplet. But here the gap is especially noticeable. We move from the world of hawks (a constant image in Jeffers’ poems) to the image of the Pico Blanco mountaintop, heretofore unmentioned in the poem. Why this shift?

I think the key to understanding what Jeffers is getting at here lies in the first line of the final quatrain: “I will touch things and things and no more thoughts.” And what a strange line it is! So vague and yet beguiling in its vagueness. Poetry lovers will of course immediately think of a similar but more famous formulation by William Carlos Williams: no ideas but in things. But Jeffers takes this a step further: no ideas, only things. We live in a world moved effortlessly forward by ideas, by the abstract. But the particular punches us in the gut, breaks up our smooth motions with its unwillingness to conform to our categories. When Jeffers himself threatens to get too abstract, wrapped up in his metaphor of the human spirit as a hawk paralyzed by thought, the vision of Pico Blanco, that specific mountain that dominated his own horizons in Big Sur, emerges from the mist to stop the poet short.

If Jeffers’ vision of a world depopulated of ideas, where only things remain, is a little too cold and bleak for me, I can still appreciate what would lead him to embrace that coldness. Turned off by the clattering world around him, he sought refuge in the hard stone and lonely hawks of the California coast. He longed to return to the earth, in more senses than one. And if I find my accounting somewhere other than “where the alder leaf quivers/In the ocean wind over the river boulders,” well, I can at least sympathize with the mind that wrote those lines, and marvel at the noble words he produced, as if chiseled from marble.