“Here is a symbol…” begins the Robinson Jeffers poem, “Rock and Hawk,” the order of those in the title, as in all poetry, meaningful. The setting is a “headland” of Jeffers’s beloved and rugged northern California (Big Sur) coast, where we read (and see, through the poet’s eyes), a hard, unfeeling gray rock, “standing tall…/where the seawind/Lets no tree grow…”
Jeffers lets us know the rock has also proven unmoved by earthquakes and “ages of storms,” so stout and unyielding it is in its essence, repelling all who would seek to impinge on its domain.
With one exception.
Because after those storms, on the rock’s peak:
“A falcon has perched.”
A falcon which by the end of the poem will have been “Married to the massive/Mysticism of stone.”
Let’s see how Jeffers lays that rugged landscape down for us in this compact 21-line gem that seems to encapsulate his singular view of the world, about which he provides us plenty more to discuss below.
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ROCK AND HAWK
Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.
This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,
Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.
I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.
(From The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Three Volumes, edited by Tim Hunt. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of Stanford University.)
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Jeffers’s brilliance shone soon after his 1887 birth as the progeny of a Presbyterian minister and scholar and his much younger (by 22 years) wife. Both parents were driven to make their oldest son (another would follow seven years later, becoming an astronomer) into a literate, highly educated man of the world.
That meant extensive travel and foreign sojourns engineered by the elder Jeffers from their Pennsylvania home, along with a doting mother who meticulously noted every utterance and milestone of her son’s early life.
After four years of secondary education in four different Swiss boarding schools, Jeffers became fluent and “able to think” in French, German, Italian, and English by the time he enrolled with sophomore standing at Western University of Pennsylvania at age 15. The wages of this precociousness included this, according to a letter Jeffers wrote to his publisher decades later: “When I was nine years old my father began to slap Latin into me, literally, with his hands.”
Nevertheless, by 18, Jeffers had graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he had edited the college’s literary journal and begun writing poetry.
Following aborted stints in a graduate literature program and medical school at USC followed by forestry studies at the University of Washington, he ultimately left formal education behind and confirmed his poetic vocation with an emotional assist from Uma Kuster, a woman three years his elder and married to a prominent Los Angeles attorney. Jeffers and Kuster carried on a notorious affair that eventually attracted media attention—and her husband’s ire. Jeffers married Uma the day after her divorce became final in 1912.
The couple would remain together until her death in 1950, Uma of the far more social persona often running interference for her noted, self-acknowledged loner husband, intermittently beset by depression and most content among wild things or in his study pursuing his poetic vision.
Fundamental to that pursuit was his laborious five-year effort to build, stone by stone and mostly alone in the afternoons after writing through the morning, the small, two-story “Tor House” on the cliffs of Carmel, where the couple raised twin sons and lived out the rest of their days. (“Tor” refers to any high rocky hill or outcropping.)
Years later, he added “Hawk Tower,” in homage to what would surely be called Jeffers’s “spirit animal” in Native American parlance—a symbol of supreme instinct, self-sufficiency, and cool indifference to the hard realities of existence, deftly rendered in the poem above.
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Jeffers is neither the first nor likely the last thinker to decry the essential narcissism of human beings, busily conquering and bespoiling the planet they share with all the rest of its inhabitants—animal, vegetable and mineral alike. But his poetry stands out for its deep, even ferocious respect for the entirety of the creation, for rocks and hawks no less than humans, though often lamenting that humans don’t grasp the creation’s true beauty and grandeur given their conceit of being at its center.
“Not the cross” (of Christianity, with its personal God who promises to love us in our personhood), “not the hive” (of culture and social relations). “But this; bright power, dark peace;/Fierce consciousness joined with final/Disinterestedness/Life with calm death; the falcon’s/Realist eyes…”
This is Essence of Hawk, as seen in every photograph of them ever taken, and experienced by every prey subject to their disinterested “life with calm death.” Not vicious, vindictive or avaricious life and death, settling old scores or storing excess prey for some future gluttony or gloating to peers.
Instead: complete, focused immersion in the task of existing and subsisting, sans complaint or blame.
Fellow poet William Everson, then known as the monk Brother Antoninus, considered himself an ardent Jeffers disciple, even though he decided never to consummate the relationship, so to speak, with any personal meeting or correspondence despite their creative lives crossing in mid-20th century northern California.
Everson’s book-length treatment, “Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of An Older Fury,” contains this passage that is as good a summation of Jeffers’s view of existence and humanity’s place in it as you’re likely to find:
“He saw the face of God in Nature, but he saw it as the unspeakable Other, and he gauged man against it…Unchastened, Jeffers continued to delineate, in the tremendous vehicle of his verse, the fallen nature of man, its passion, its violence, incest, rapacity, perversity, cunning, compulsiveness and despair, its exaltation and catastrophe. In the primordial images of nature, over against the coagulation that passes for civilization, he saw and affirmed the majestic countenance of the divine, and few of this earth’s too-few have ever rendered it so superbly.”
If that list of attributes in between the commas strikes you as tilting toward the dark side on the human ledger, you would not be mistaken. It’s not that Jeffers saw humanity as different or inherently less than the creation that he worshipped as the very definition of God (albeit a a pantheistic one).
It’s that humans, our layer of consciousness running amok between head and heart and often divorced from the rest of our bodies, separate ourselves from the natural world, seek to subjugate it in building our empires, plundering our soils, and seeking immortality in monuments to our own importance—while deluding ourselves all along that we are not hopelessly intertwined with that world.
A world, he repeatedly asserted, that was here long before us and will likely remain long after.
This divorce has both a practical, immanent cost in our simmering climate catastrophe and associated ruin, and perhaps just as severe, a spiritual cost that calls to mind science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s 1961 title, “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
Jeffers thus coined a term, “inhumanism,” as a counter to what he saw as humanism pursued to grandiose—and ultimately destructive—ends. Not to refute humans, but instead to knock them off their high horses as the reputed center of what is, in its vast, infinite reaches of space, a cold, indifferent universe that swats its constituent galaxies, planets, stars and creatures aside with even less compassion than we proffer the lowliest flea.
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“His poetry is not meant to be liked. It is meant, I think, to do people good,” wrote the Scottish-American literary historian Gilbert Highet of Jeffers. The line sounds more true than not, given the likely affront many people would perceive of “inhumanism” as a prevailing intellectual sensibility.
And it would almost certainly apply to Jeffers personally, a man who pursued his vocation at the farthest tip of the continent he was born to, a veritable oceania sprawling before him, content to watch and put words to the hawks and rocks before his eyes and the vast wild reaches beyond, with few social bonds beyond his immediate family.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic wrote of him in the “New York Review of Books” as a “brooding loner who made even those who knew him well somewhat ill at ease. He never had a single friend as far as I can tell.”
That did not prevent Jeffers from achieving wide acclaim as a kind of poetic prophet by critics and popular culture through the 1930s and early ’40s. He remains one of the few poets ever to appear on the cover of “Time” magazine, in 1932. His star dimmed, however, after he opposed American entry into World War II, thinking war an indefensible travesty, and critics began to have reservations about his uncompromising vision.
So here we are in 2025, our planet deeply troubled, our governments no less so, homo sapiens still the great despoilers, burning through forests, species and the very waters and air that sustain us. Drought, famine, and inequality of opportunity are still subjected as ever both to rolls of the cosmic dice and the merciless oppression or simple indifference to unfortunates by those in power.
Is this just the same story that Jeffers offered, the unfeeling hawk with its cold stare, taking what it needs from a captive world?
I don’t think so. I think he would say quite the opposite, actually: that in failing to honor and absorb the hawk, the rock, and all the rest of the creation as the wild beloved brethren they are, parts of the whole and separated from us not at all in their essential life force and value, we veer toward something other than ourselves and that which spawned us.
Something outside the arms of the creation, too often intentionally cruel and alien to others in contrast with the indifferent cruelty of the natural world. Hence in an even more profound sense, alien to our very selves.
But that is not to say humanity is without hope. Jeffers’s 1934 letter to a nun who was compiling perspectives from poets on their spiritual views revealed perhaps his own most soaring, direct take on the creation:
“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.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations, and abstractions—the world of spirits…I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches.”
There is an essential modesty in that “ever so slight” contribution to the whole that Jeffers seems to hold out not only as possibility but even noble purpose, done “intensely in earnest” for “a kind of salvation.” Take that possibility into yourself, he seemed to suggest, but don’t go getting all soft in the knees over some special nobility of the human project.
There’s a lot of competition out there, after all, for accolades from eternity.
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See https://robinsonjeffersassociation.org/who-was-robinson-jeffers/biography/ for more on Jeffers’s life and work
Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
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Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) and Pfeiffer Beach McWay Falls, Big Sur by Elizabeth Haslam
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Red-tailed hawk top of page by Matt Giambartolomei https://www.flickr.com/photos/164270974@N04/
Hawk in flight by Chris Briggs, Vancouver, B.C. https://unsplash.com/@cgbriggs19
Red-shouldered hawk on wire by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Tor House courtesy of the Tor House Foundation Archives and the Robertson Jefferson Association
Hawk Tower by Meggle https://www.flickr.com/photos/sesen/
Jeffers portrait from cover of “Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury,” by Brother Antoniunus, Oyez Press, Berkeley 1968
My introduction to Robinson Jeffers took place in 1962 at the Occidental College library where an entire room was devoted to his personal letters, manuscripts, books, poetry drafts and photographs. It was a dark room with dark furniture and a rather dark rug and a minimum of light. Perhaps its ambience was intentional; Jeffers’ view of humanity tended to lean to the dark side (apologies to George Lucas). “Rock and Hawk” immediately struck a chord with me because of its similarity to his poem “Their Beauty Has More Meaning”; both depict his preference (and reverence) to nature over the inhumanity of man, and birds (falcon and night-herons) deliver the message.
“Their Beauty Has More Meaning”
Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today
Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt;
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.
Yeah, this is probably right up there among the most “inhumanist” of his poems, that last sentence leaving little room for doubt about where his sympathies were most rooted. Another—”Hurt Hawk”—contained his somewhat infamous line, “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” I think that got him a lot of attention, though the basic scaffolding of that poem was about his decision to finally put a severely damaged hawk out of its misery by shooting it.
Mary and I were talking this morning about Jeffers’s essentially asocial ways, a true loner, his wife his best and only friend, apparently. We could hardly expect anything different from a kid dragged from one city and school to the next throughout his childhood, making a conscious effort NOT to develop friendships he would have to be leaving shortly. About what that did to his development as a person. We are social mammals, after all, and to be asocial amidst that comes at quite a cost, though out of it came remarkable poetry. Tough trade-off, but I’m none too sure he had any regrets about it at the end of his life. Want to read a biography to get a fuller picture; he’d be worth the time.
Also, Robert: Is that Jeffers room perchance still there in one form or other at Oxy? Seems the perfect decor for his sensibilities!
I can’t imagine Oxy dismantling it unless it’s been supplanted by somebody named Obama.
I am reminded of the very first poem that I had to analyze in 1967 at Ramona High School in Riverside CA. The beauty of poetry is the personal images created by word choice, rhythm and age. As an example, The Eagle, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, is simple, powerful, and adorned with anthropomorphisms. A well accepted description would be, “a short two stanza poem that speaks on the power and solitude of a lone eagle on a rocky cliff.
However, bombarded with the mayhem of the politics today this poem conjures up a more banal imagery for me.
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The Eagle, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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So who or what do you think this poem describes today?
The Eagle (president’s code name)
Gripping the pinnacle of power by criminal means
Spray tanned in a friendless white house
Surrounded by the political blue, he stands.
The aged congress on their knees
Watching TV from his fortress
like the god Zeus, Pounces on his prey.
(or maybe a reference to his ultimate fall from grace).
Now I realize how ridiculous this analysis is. And at the same time, I realized how meaningful your thoughts and sharing of the Rock and Hawk are for me. Listening to music by the Boss, from my amazing Cerwin Vega 300 SE speakers, and watching a nature program, I came to understand, again, how important it is to take the time and soak in the beauty so apparent. (reminding me of the scene where Edgar G Robinson watches his last images before his death). Coupled with your introspective thoughts of Robinson Jeffers’s poetic grandeur. We must more frequently step away from the banalities of today and direct our energies on what is pure and true. Thank you my friend.
Thanks for this, Kirk, I’m seriously weak on the English Victorian poets, so this was a treat, and gave me a chance to read up on Lord T.—quite a life he led.
As for your analysis, as it were: I’m often dumbstruck by the crazily varied responses people have to any piece of text, be it poem or prose. But that’s the beauty and challenge of art: We see what we see from all that we have seen and been and learned and intuited in our past, and that is who sits down in front of a text or painting to begin harvesting reactions, which are almost never identical in every way between any two people, much less thousands or millions. I actually think the parallels you draw between the poem and the president represent a worthy little interpretive leap, and entertaining besides. Now the thing to do is to make a hybrid poem between his and yours, spinning it all into something new—fun project for a spring Saturday afternoon!
And about “stepping away from the banalities of today”—I hear ya, Brother, I hear ya…