Theodore Roethke and Robinson Jeffers

We are continuing along our way - rather winding path at times. And after tonight there are four more lectures in this series. Four more lectures in this year exploration of the United States. And we've been exploring it by people. Many have observed that human beings seem to be the stable reality in this world and we have moved from Benjamin Franklin now to Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke. I'm going to start with Roethke.

Roethke's family owned greenhouses in Saginaw, Michigan, where I was born and grew up. And the grounds were quite large on the edge of the city and in town there were several houses, homes. Near the end of his life, Roethke in writing to a friend wrote a little note about the greenhouse. And it's the only important aspect of Roethke to clear up immediately. This greenhouse was in fact started in the 1870s by a grandfather who fled Germany, who was a head forester to Bismarck. And a lot of the German immigrants from that time period from the 1870s through about 1900 ended up in places like Pittsburgh or Saginaw because they were up and coming. They were industrial centers.

His note on the greenhouse reads, “My father's chief interest was the growing of flowers. When the firm was at its height - around 1920 - it took up 25 acres within the city of Saginaw with a quarter of a million feet under glass. We lived in a frame house which was in front of the greenhouse and my Uncle Charlie lived in a stone house which was next door. At one time the firm had three retail outlets but a good deal of its business was wholesale. It had a great reputation at that time period as being the most comprehensive greenhouses in the Midwest.” He also writes of the pride of the family of being able to have not only this growing business but the experimentation with exotic forms of flowers which were not commercially grown but which were grown for self-satisfaction of great artisans of breeding flowers. And for Roethke, the greenhouse is a symbol of a man-made Eden. That man has the possibility of making for himself in Eden but he also has the possibility of walking out of that Eden into the world and that this is what makes life precarious. For he remembers the man-made Eden and discovers in nature abysses. There is no good biography of Roethke; probably the only trustworthy guide is just a simple brief chronology of Roethke in the Selected Letters published by the University of Washington Press.

A few notes. He was born in 1908 May 25th and by 1929 had received a degree - bachelor's degree - from the University of Michigan. He did graduate study at Harvard and then in 1931 joined a small college, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and taught there for four years. At this time small colleges like this did not tenure professors and Roethke was hired on a yearly basis and finally let go. In 1935 he began teaching at Michigan State University while working on an advanced degree and had a breakdown. Now Roethke was very open about this during his life and in a letter to James Wright at one time in the late 50s cautioned him against getting too much fatigue in his life, that there is a threshold which when once we cross, chaos arises. And if our response to life has been legitimate, our response to the chaos will also be legitimate and we will have our problem. Roethke never fully recovered. There were always incidents in his life, but recovered enough to be a very adequate teacher of English, of literature and to become a very fine poet. He was not married until the last decade of his life, 1953, and his wife's name was Beatrice and she was rather frail with a tubercular condition. Roethke finally passed on quite suddenly in August of 1963 on a little island in Washington state out in the Sound. And for the most part his work has been slowly appreciated by a growing number of individuals.

The first poem in his collected works is entitled, Open House, and it was the title of his first volume and it reads something like this:

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

My truths are all foreknown,
This anguished self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witless agony.

Late in his life, near the end of the Collected Poems, to contrast it, a poem entitled, In a Dark Time:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood –
A Lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren.
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul.
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks – is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is –
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

We can see a tremendous growth of character. The circumstances out of which he came - Saginaw, Michigan. The immigrant families. The boringness of the city - It's now about 70,000 people. It is characteristic of the heartland of the United States. It's characteristic of the stagnant centers left by the westward rush of that earliest vision from the Jeffersonian days. That vision which swept over the land illuminating it, giving it the fire of intentions of founding great families of founding new possibilities for man developing communities and all of this raging vision rushing westward to at last stumble here in California or in Oregon or in Washington and now daydream about Asia.

But in the early part of the 20th century all of these pools were left with no vision and the psyche grew stagnant in these places. When I was born in Saginaw it was on its decline, had about 120,000 people, and now it has about 70 and slowly declining everything going downhill. The tone in a place like this is one which Roethke is trying to work with and he is indicative of that American experience that we have had in the 20th century for many of finding the vacuity of our lives the dark unconscious underside of a vision which is passed by. This hauntedness comes through in Roethke’s life. He writes to a friend, Dorothy Gordon:

“I'll be quite shameless and tell you [something about me]. For one thing, I'm not the delicate fellow my verse would lead you to think: I am six feet two, [I] weigh two hundred and ten. Blonde with grey-green eyes. (Oh God, this sounds like an answer to a lonely hearts column - my excuse is that I'm drinking some of the worst whiskey in America right now - some rye from the remote fastnesses of New Jersey. I've been trying to go on the wagon of late and I'm succeeding pretty well.) But forgive all this. I'd love to see your room. I've never had a nice room. I've always lived in complete disorder even at home, with books and papers strewn all over. I'm writing now from my room in the freshman dormitory. It's a corner room on the ground floor. From one window you can look down at the town; from the other you can see a lawn (now covered with snow) and tennis courts surrounded by high bushes. It isn't unpleasant, but the room's a mess. There's a steel book shelf, a bed, a chair filled with books, a dresser piled with books & papers, a desk covered with junk. A fur coat hangs on a molding in the wall - I can't get it in the closet. There are books in the window ledges. That's all there is - there aren't any pictures, any curtains, any rugs.”

This was in his fourth year as a professor at this college. The early childhood was fluorescent with life not just the imagery of flowers in the greenhouse but the family knowledge of how to breed, how to work with the genetics and produce beautiful flowers. These were prizes that were not sold, they were family treasures. And this man leaving that childhood into a room where there are no pictures, there are no rugs, there are no curtains - there are only the books. At the University of Washington in the Roethke collection there is an eight foot section of Roethke's notebooks, most of it unpublished. It's a torrential outpouring of a man who wanted to be a poet. People ask him about his origins, poetic origins. He said I have three, I have the Bible, I have Mother Goose, and I have the prose of Thomas Traherne (a metaphysical writer, English, exquisite 17th century).

In Traherne is a key to the personality of Theodore Roethke because Traherne almost unknown, never published, was discovered by accident in the 20th century almost three hundred years after he wrote. Some bookseller trying to make a fast buck came across this manuscript. Had never heard of him, had someone investigate it. The investigator - some half literate unclad like fool - realizing the quality took it to a university and Traherne was discovered and his works published. Now Oxford has done a two-volume edition which we have at the Whirling Rainbow. They haven't heard of Traherne here.

The important thing about Traherne is that he wrote for others which he found existing in himself. He was full of people, he was full of others. Besides the ego, his soul, his spirit was inhabited by a multitude. And so he wrote in order to express to all of him what needed to be said. And Roethke is this kind of a writer. He is also a barometer of what has happened to the American psyche in the 20th century. That the great vision of the individual with Benjamin Franklin of being able to unfold himself in terms of the world, in terms of nature, now can unfold himself in terms of himself to himself. And this is insufficient. And so what comes out as a muffled cry and almost desperate childlike longing to have someone else who's not in oneself appreciate.

He writes, May 1934:

“I've been hoping that I'd hear from you, although I know that [I wrote you] last. What a puzzling letter it was! I couldn't figure out whether deep in your heart of hearts you thought what I write is lousy or whether you were perplexed or what. But no matter.”

This he's writing to his British agent Dorothy.

“I've been doing a lot of silly things just to keep from starving. Publicity among other things. And coaching the tennis team. You see this job is not permanent and I'm trying to make myself as useful as possible because there are hundreds of college teachers out of work. Lord how tiresome this is! But here's the point: If I could only publish in several more places between now and next November, I might get a really decent, permanent position and I would get time for some really important work. So if you could push some of that stuff it would be a great help. Don't you think that ‘This Various Light’ would go somewhere? And that piece ‘Exhortation’? Has [A. R.] Orage seen that light piece. But here I'm violating your rule of no business in the body of the letter, so I'll put it on another paper.”

All through Roethke's life is the reaching out for others, but a reaching out in the sense of a desperate need to fill oneself of putting those others in oneself to repopulate a dying breed because the multiplicity of selves in the American psyche in the 20th century are diseased, they're dying. It's not a family, it's a series of alternatives and as elements of this series of alternatives die off it leaves gaps and a paranoiac fear arises cloud-like from this neurotic to the teeth. Because in the rapidness one senses a fearful lack. And because of the lack of the old European self, lording itself like some emperor over the psyche. The American self when its multiplicity is denigrated and depopulated experiences a kind of an odd fragmentation piecemeal, a different kind of a madness.

In 1945 writing to Kenneth Burke. Roethke was always trying to get into position to do the large work, the major project. He writes to him:

“Statement of General Nature of Project
My plan is simple. I wish to complete the various groups of poems on several levels [and] experience… [here is an] enclosed manuscript… [I will] also write a longer meditative [and] speculative piece. The poems in [the] manuscript include the following categories:
(1) An uncompleted sequence about my father's greenhouse called News of the Root. In this I'm trying to avoid the sentimental and literary diction of the Georgians or the earlier Floral Offerings of the nineteenth century and write a natural sensuous poetry with some symbolical reference in the more complex pieces. The poems done so far are not sufficiently related do not show the full erotic and even religious significance that I sense in a big greenhouse a kind of man-made Avalon, Eden, or Paradise.”

It was the lack of the relatedness that bothered Theodore Roethke. His individual poems are extraordinarily poignant but all of the relatedness increasingly becomes problematic for Roethke. In fact, when we review Roethke's life we realize that he had in his mind all the time the idea of doing a large project. And near the end of his life, in 1959 writing to the Ford Foundation for a grant, Roethke writes, if he had the money he would do a very long poem. And that this poem is extremely precarious for himself.

“A sequence of serious poems beginning with a long dirge which will express through suggestive and highly charged symbolic language the guilts we Americans feel as a people for our mistakes and misdeeds in history and in time. I believe, in other words, that it behooves us to be humble before the eye of history. Obviously such an attempt would, indeed, must bring into play great boldness of imagination, poetic and spiritual wisdom, in order to reveal some of the secrets of our enigmatic, vast, shrill, confused and often childish nation. Obviously, this would not be chronological, yet would expose some of the lies of [the] history; our triumphs of rage and cunning; our manias, our despairs; our furtive joys. And it would attempt to expiate some of our collective mistakes.”

For the experience of an individual like Roethke is an accurate barometer of the experience of the American people as a whole. Because the series of the varieties of self in the United States have been slowly dying out, winking out, and leaving these gaps and creating this paranoia on a grand scale. Because the experience was not founded as a kingdom but as an experiment in variety. It was never meant to be a shape which was identifiable, but rather an open matrix which was growing. So there was no foundation laid for life by rule of law, by definition of single purpose, but rather only a motion to explore, only an encouragement to discover. And that's all there was.

It is a total delusion to think that the Constitution is any kind of a template for human beings. That is a delusion. For human beings live a life and the quality and character of American life in the 20th century is approaching madness. Exactly the kind of madness with which Roethke, detecting it himself again and again, that somehow at the beginning there was the gorgeousness of nature where man was able to select the best in the cream of nature and prepare it for himself in his family's individually and somehow all of this now is in a past which cannot be found. For it was not there objectively but only there in the human beings who lived it at the time. And those human beings have left a legacy only of the encouragement to discover and the freedom to step out and find. Whereas, we have been deluded in thinking that what was left was a body of doctrines, some taproot of laws, and so the prolific madness, the scramble to find some legal basis for life. Some court decision which will allow us to be free. How are you going to be free by a court decision? It's madness.

Roethke in his poetry again and again explores this. An early poem called Night Crow.

When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree,
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Because, as we have seen in our lectures on Pound and Eliot and Cummings and Stevens and Faulkner, that the American literary expressive medium was fluid enough to be able to express real spiritual vision - penetrating. Roethke has the language, but he has the nightmare also.

A poem called The Manifestation.

Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, the bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil –
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.

What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.

These tremendous outpourings of breathing. The poignancy. He sought all of his life to link together and present a vision which would have been a historical therapeia for the United States. And towards the end of his life in a short poem called The Moment we have the first beginnings of a sense of grand triumph rising out of this abysmal life. Entitled, The Moment:

We passed the ice of pain,
And came to a dark ravine,
And there we sang with the sea:
The wide, the bleak abyss
Shifted with our slow kiss.

Space struggled with time;
The gong of midnight struck
The naked absolute.
Sound, silence sang as one.

All flowed: without, within;
Body met body, we
Created what's to be.

What else to say?
We end in joy.

He was discovering, not the euphoria of expectation but, the joy of life when it realizes that to discover itself continually is to be free. That there is nothing to be discovered. There is no object, there is no person, there is no final group, there is no ambition to be discovered that will make us free, but only to realize that by doing it we are.

Roethke died at age 55. His large work never done. One volume of selections was made from the works. The notebooks - and we have it over at the Whirling Rainbow Library if you wish to view it.

Let's take a break and then we'll come back to Robinson Jeffers who is at the same time period radically different.

One reason for presenting Jeffers with Roethke - not to make them minor in comparison with the other individuals that we're taking - but because they are contemporaneous and they present two different sides to the American experience in the same time period.

Jeffers came from an exquisitely educated background. His father was a professor of biblical literature, was literate in Hebrew and Latin and Greek, and wanted his son and sons to be also. And they were raised to be cultivated, to be educated. They were taken to Europe; they were given education and all the best schools – Zurich, et cetera, et cetera. But the center of Robinson Jeffers - like the center of Theodore Roethke was the greenhouse - the center of Robinson Jeffers was the house that he built himself out of stone in Carmel called Tor House with his hands.

Here's his poem, Tor House:

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress,
haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the
art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the
Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-
fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon
were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-
lighted bridge.
Come in the morning and you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, [the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion], a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings in the day moon.

That's Robinson Jeffers. This is different. It is also the same. Jeffers and Roethke present the same American vision that is discoverable only by living it. You cannot think it, you cannot define it for someone else, only in your life by living it is it there. And it can be whatever you would like it to be. These are two contrasts. Here's someone in the wind, and here's someone in the earth - same time period. This completeness, this extraordinary completeness, is the essential quality of the American character.

Now, Jeffers in his life had something that Roethke did not have. He had a true love from the beginning that he never gave up. The indispensable thing to be able to make stone love stone and put yourself in that granite and stay there is love - abiding love. He met her - her name was Una - he met her in class, a German class. They got along. It was eight years before they were married. She was already married. She'd been married for three, four years to a successful man, happy. Love is not happiness, it is completeness, it is different. And when she met Jeffers there was something else suddenly in the universe that was not there in the happiness. She had plenty of friends, plenty of money, plenty of position, plenty of security, plenty of it all but what wasn't on the list in happiness was that sense of the incredibleness of the real brought by the other. It's unbelievable that it's so. People talk about it but if you don't experience it you can't understand it. Jeffers had this, tried mightily not to respond to this. Could not not respond to this.

His early work at this time reflects. This is a poem called The Truce and the Peace.

…All in a simple innocence I strove
To give myself away to any power,
Wasting on women's bodies wealth of love,
Worshipping every sunrise mountain tower;
Some failure mocked me still denying perfection,
Parts of me might be spended not the whole,
I sought of wine surrender and self-correction,
I failed, I could not give away my soul.
Again seeking to give myself I sought
Outward in vain through all things, out through God,
And tried all heights, all gulfs, all dreams, all thought.
I found this wisdom on the wonderful road,
The essential Me cannot be given away,
The single Eye, God cased in blood-shot clay…

So the early Jeffers, already struggling with a sense that the divine is not out there or in there, but discoverable as one is and only by continuing that is it real. Now that's esoteric. That's more esoteric than a solid gold tarot deck complete with instructions. Only by continuing to be is it at all - that's the mystery. Jeffers was incredible. The family had a tremendous amount of money. The father was left sixty thousand dollars at a time when that was a massive fortune. Jeffer in 1912 came into possession of some monies. But what was important to him was to try to find his voice, his voice, poet's voice.

You know in the chakras the vishuddha chakra, the throat chakra - blue, blue and dark purple - and that energy when it comes up through that is bifurcated the blue and the dark purple they go to different areas of the brain. Only when they're integrated does the eye, inner eye, see. But they have to be integrated here where you say it. That's why the word is sacred because if it isn't integrated here it's going to come through bifurcated and you're never going to put it together in your mind because it was pulled apart before it got there. And there's no facility there for integrating. The mind is a wonderful prism but it can only show what is given into it by light. And the light's got to be coherent before it gets to the mind. That's why poetry purifies - it's the primal art.

I love Frank Lloyd Wright when he says, “Architecture is the mother art yet it is the mother art, but poetry is the primal art because poetry purifies the language so we can say what is true.” Then we get told the truth is what makes you free. That’s what frees it. Frees it, not for the multiplicity of choice, but freeze it for the veracity of unity. That's what happens. And so poetry for Jeffers becomes an extraordinary attempt to bring together all within an expressive tone of unity.

Here is a poem called Ocean, characteristic of Jeffers.

Ocean
It dreams in the deepest sleep, it remembers the storm
last month or it feels the far storm
Off Unalaska and the lash of the sea-rain.
It is never mournful but wise, and takes the magical
misrule of the steep world
With strong tolerance, its depth is not moved
From where the green sun fails to where the thin red clay
lies on the basalt
And there has never been light nor life.
The black crystal, the untroubled fountain, the roots of
Endurance.

Therefore I belted
The house and the tower and courtyard with stone,
And have planted the naked foreland with future forest
toward noon and morning: for it told me,
The time I was gazing in the black crystal,
To be faithful in storm, patient of fools, tolerant of
memories and the muttering prophets,
It is needful to have night in one's body.

The integrity, the wholesomeness. It’s not to be afraid of the abyss out there but to hold it inside comfortably easily effortlessly. It's a place of primal privacy. Why give it away? How can you give it away? It's only fearful because you're trying to give away the core, the basalt, the very foundation of reality. How can you give it away? To whom are you going to give it? It's not realized that it is the very basis of one's self. And if you build on that you build a stone house built with stone. You dredge up from the primordial ocean of problematical magically whatever clumps you need to work with. And just in patting them the clay becomes stone and one becomes aware that one has created clouds in the sky a horizon of reality. One has a coordinate just from doing that. It's easy, easy, easy to do.

Jeffers poem Still the Mind Smiles. That's its title, Still the Mind Smiles.

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions,
Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils
That make humanity ridiculous, remain
Beautiful in the whole fabric, excesses that balance each other
Like the paired wings of a flying bird.
Misery and riches, civilization and squalid savagery,
Mass war and the odor of unmanly peace:
Tragic flourishes above and below the normal of life.
In order to value this fretful time
It is necessary to remember our norm, the unaltered passions,
The same-colored wings of imagination,
That the crowd clips, in lonely places new-grown; the unchanged
Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms,
Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their
dawns are beautiful.
From here for normal one sees both ways,
And listens to the splendor of God, the exact poet, the sonorous
Antistrophe of desolation to the strophe multitude.

The experience which comes in Jeffers which finally begins to bubble up in Roethke and little droplets comes like a wind torrential in Jeffers. His capacity to bring all of his experience into play at the same time. His work was unaccepted for a very long time. His first volume of poems he published at his own expense - five hundred copies. They sent him a big crate of four hundred and eighty copies which he put up in the attic. He tried to give twenty copies away and people wouldn't even take those. It took twenty years before anyone read Robinson Jeffers. Una all the time supporting him, helping him, encouraging him. She loved the poetry of Yeats. She thought Yeats was the great poet. And Jeffers, all the time loving that woman, keeping his eye on Willie. He's going to write poetry that will win her away from Yeats someday, he will never give up. He will never give up. And she's saying, through the years, “You're getting better, you're getting better.” And he's saying, “Damn right! Someday.” And she wonderfully glad for him. When finally his poetry began to come out began to sell people began to notice him.

Jeffers and Una made their own place, of course, Tor House. Una wrote of their first years in Carmel.

“So began our happy life in Carmel, full and over-full of joy from the first. For a long time we knew no one, but we were busy from morning till night anyway. Robin was writing poetry, his reputation yet to make; I was studying certain aspects of late 18th century England and receiving from the State Library at Sacramento, through the little village library, priceless packages of old and rare books on my subject. There was housework, and continual wood chopping to fill the maw of the great fireplace in our drafty cabin. We bought simple textbooks on flowers, shells, birds, and stars and used them. We explored the village street by street, followed the traces of the moccasin trail through the forest, and dreamed around the crumbling walls about the old mission. When we walked up from the shore at sunset scarfs of smoke drifting up from hidden chimneys foretold our own happy supper and evening by the fire. It was pleasant to sniff the air and recognize the pungent scent of eucalyptus, the faint, somehow nostalgic quality of burning oak, the gunpowdery smell of driftwood, redwood like ripe apricots, and keener than all, the tonic resin of pitch pine.”

“One dark night the fire-bell clanged wildly and we stumbled down the canyon toward a blazing shed. Overhanging pine trees began to crackle. It seemed as if the whole forest would soon be on fire. Men ran to and fro; on top of a roof a slender man with flashing black eyes fought the flames like a demon – our first sight of Bob Leidig battling his chosen foe. Timmie Clapp advanced into the circle looking very odd with a tiny candle-lantern in his hand. His wife had delayed to pack her bag, wary from many experiences with conflagrations in Constantinople.”

“The big adventure of our first winter was a trip down the coast on the horse stage with Corbett Grimes, who carried the mail and occasional passengers three times a week. He picked us up at 7:00 in the morning at Ocean and San Carlos, and set us down at Big Sur post office after dark, a long day but not long enough. This was the first of a thousand pilgrimages that we, and later our twin sons with us, have made down the coast and into the back country, where with books and maps and local gossip we have tried to piece together a fairly complete picture of this region: its treasures of natural beauty and vivid human life have been inexhaustible.”

One of the strengths of America is its regional cosmicness. Finding everything in the region, in the area, because when you know how to explore in the Benjamin Franklin way, anywhere you are in this country seeing it in depth reveals it all, because it's the same consistency all the way through - discoverable. That's the alchemical nature of the United States is that it's discoverable. What is discoverable? Anything that you find is findable. It's the findableness of it. It's true esoteric is not some secret locked away but the open secret that finding it continuously is always there. Big magics. That's the big magics. It’s only for professional human beings who are real. It's not for children, not for adolescents, not for servants and slaves, not for people who need to be under the thumb and under the rule and under the law. It's for human beings who are ready to find whatever it is, where they are, then they are free, then life is different. Then the big vision is no longer the one that is necessary. Then one can write a poem called The Bird with the Dark Plumes.

The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
That never for one moment, however I patched my truces,
Consented to make peace with the people,
It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure in a breath of tempest
Breaking the sad promise of spring.
Are these that morose hawk’s wings, vaulting, a mere mad
swallow’,
The snow-shed peak, the violent precipice?
Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize
their blame?
‘Their liking,’ she said, ‘was a long creance,
But let them be kind enough to hate me, that opens the sky.’
It is almost as foolish my poor falcon
To want hatred as to want love; and harder to win.

The openness, the completeness is essential to discover, to go on. Life occurs only with its openness. And for Jeffers, in his poetry, this was a key.

In 1934 about the same time that Theodore Roethke was writing from Lafayette College to his English agent about the kind of difficulties which he was finding because everything in his room was, no rugs, no curtains, no pictures but books everywhere, Una wrote this description of the Hawk Tower which Jeffers had made.

“The tower is joined to Tor House by the courtyard wall and they stand firm set against the strong winds that come sweeping across the Pacific at certain seasons of the year. I am writing from my little oaken sitting room on the second floor where at one end an oriel window juts seaward at the other a spinet with piles of old Gaelic ballads stands beside an open fire. If I climb the winding stair two storeys higher I can look from the top of the turret southward and see beyond the river mouth and Point Lobos wisps of cloud caught in the gentle folds of the Santa Lucia mountains. Northward lies the village with the Del Monte Forest beyond and to the east the fertile Carmel Valley with the old amber-colored Spanish Mission where its founder Father Serra sleeps at its foot. Hawk Tower arose out of our dreams of old Irish towers but we have seen the eyes of our friends as we have so often climbed to the turret with them in the last dozen years that in many hearts is the mirage of some symbolic tower, citadel, belfry, or beacon light.”

To accept it only as a symbol would be a mirage. One has to actually live that life and make that place happen. And in Jeffers poetry we find all of that. The tremendous ability to bring together. He has a poem in his selected poetry near the end - I'll read an excerpt from it - The Beaks of Eagles.

An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the
precipice-footed ridges
Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a
falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman
Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged
ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress.
The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
with a son of hers.
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same
tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt.
The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of
eighty-five raged on these ridges.
She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate
scorched meat. The world has changed in her time;
Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts
and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged,
Their powers and their follies have become fantastic,
The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The
motor and the plane in the great war have gone over him,
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and
is never tired; dreams the same dreams,
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats
of these living mountains.
It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and
anguish, not to go down the dinosaurs way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact
in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.

Well we'll take a vacation next week and then we'll come back and we'll take a look at Thomas Merton.