Two spring poems by Jeffers

Last week, after spending an entire morning, a weekday morning, creating the preceding post, the one about Joan of Arc, so that 12 people would read it, I felt a potent combination of guilt and futility. It really is not something I should be doing, except maybe late at night instead of watching stupid TV before bedtime. ("Promising myself before bedtime to contend more urgently with the problem. From nothing, nothing comes..." - opening lines of a poem by R.S. Thomas.) 

An iris in my garden this morning

I think about that futility this morning as I type up these two poems by Jeffers and this little intro. I was going to post "Gale in April" because today it is still rather newly April and we have had a little storm or two, though nothing you would call a "gale." But the truth is, I have always liked "The Maid's Thought" because of its unexpected description of mating deer and for, of course, "it is time for us now/Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies..." Certainly it is a spring poem, full of calm and color and desirous life. I will put "Gale in April" below it. It might not look great on your phone because of those very long Jeffersian lines.

My creased Tamar, plain-looking but important

"The Maid's Thought" and "Gale in April" are from Jeffers' breakthrough collection from 1924, Tamar & other poems, his first collection in which he had found his voice, and the one a few critics discovered and soon he was famous for awhile. Jeffers paid for the publication of the book himself. There were 500 copies. Most of them ended up in storage at his home, called Tor House, in Carmel. Mine has a crease in the cover that makes me think it was at the top of a bundle of others and tied up with string, and so is one of those that sat in Tor House for a long time. I like to think that anyway.








The Maid's Thought

Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliffs, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
The pencilled ones on the hill;
This deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips
Blow out their silky bubbles,
But in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does
Scalded by some hot longing
Can hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect
Love but they crush a flower;
Shells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.
O it is time for us now
Mouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies
To make that burning flower.
                                            -Robinson Jeffers
                                             Tamar & other poems
                                             1924

Gale in April
Intense and terrible beauty, how has our race with the frail naked nerves,
So little a craft swum down from its far launching?
Why now, only because the northwest blows and the headed grass billows,
Great seas jagging the west on the granite
Blanching, the vessel is brimmed, this dancing play of the world is too much passion.
A gale in April so overfilling the spirit,
Though his ribs were thick as the earth's, arches of mountain, how shall one dare to live,
Though his blood were like the earth's rivers and his flesh iron,
How shall one dare to live? One is born strong, how do the weak endure it?
The strong lean upon death as on a rock,
After eighty years there is shelter and the naked nerves shall be covered with deep quietness,
O beauty of things go on, go on, O torture
Of intense joy I have lasted out my time, I have thanked God and finished,
Roots of millennial trees fold me in the darkness,
Northwest wind shake their tops, not to the root, not to the root, I have passed
From beauty to the other beauty, peace, the night splendor.

                                                    -Robinson Jeffers
                                                     from Tamar & other poems
                                                     1924

Joan's leap at Beaurevoir

Contemporary woodcut of Joan being led to prison

Back in the strange days of the poetry and the second sight, I'd hoped I might write a poem about this. But the muse absconded before I could do that. (Please come back, I need you, I love you.)

I still think about it, though, about Joan's leap at Beaurevoir, about the one time she went against her voices, as I continue to consider the great saint often. I re-read the trial transcript, always anticipating the questions about Joan's escape attempt from the tower, when contrary to the apparent urgings of Saint Catherine, she exited the window, perhaps 60 feet up, possibly using a homemade rope, which broke. Joan was knocked unconscious, and her leg was damaged in the fall. She was recaptured quickly. (She'd tried to escape before. In her cell at Beaulieu she'd pulled up loose boards, let herself down to the ground floor, where she found herself just outside the door to her guards' room, and the keys by the door. She was caught just as she was about to lock them in. But she was irrepressible.)

Despite the great pain of knowing its outcome for Joan, the trial transcript is inspiring reading. As W.S. Scott says, "Her patience, her good humor, her religious faith, and her common sense -- a quality which so strongly marked everything she did and said -- never failed."

All of that is here in this very brief excerpt regarding her escape attempt at Beaurevoir:

Concerning the tower of Beaurevoir:

She answered: I did not do it out of despair, but in the hope of saving my life and of going to help a number of good people who were in need. And after leaping she made a confession and asked pardon of Our Lord. And she believes that she did wrong in making the leap.

She said also that she knew by revelation from Saint Catherine that she had received forgiveness after she had confessed. And it was by Saint Catherine's advice that she had confessed it.

Asked if she had been given a heavy penance, she said that she herself bore a large part of it in the hurt she received in falling.

The transcript