This is the first in an occasional series of articles on what I’m calling “the poetry of old age”, or rather, the poetry of impending death, as not all of the poets I will cover died in old age, but all wrote with intensity about their own mortality, directly or indirectly.
The poems/poets I intend to cover, in no particular order, are:
“Billy in the Darbies”-Herman Melville
“The Bed by the Window”-Robinson Jeffers
“Melbourne Heatwave”-Philip Hodgins
“Orpheus and Eurydice”-Czeslaw Milosz
“Aubade”-Philip Larkin
“He Resolves to Say No More”-Thomas Hardy
“The Mystery”-Les Murray
“Revision”-R.S. Thomas
“Man and Echo”-W.B. Yeats
The Bed By The Window-Robinson Jeffers
I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
When we built the house, it is ready waiting,
Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects
Its latter purpose. I often regard it,
With neither dislike nor desire; rather with both, so equalled
That they kill each other and a crystalline interest
Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
And then it will sound rather like music
When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: 'Come, Jeffers.'
I.
“I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed”.
A few years ago, on a tour of the stone house Robinson Jeffers built with his own hands on a sea-cliff in Carmel, California, overlooking Point Lobos, I was invited by the tour guide to read this poem out to the small group gathered around that same bed by the window. Only sometimes at Mass, usually when serving at the altar, have I felt so electrified through my body and soul.
Despite much talk about so-called “thin places”, by their nature these experiences, like dreams, are subjective and can’t fully be shared with others. Also, by their nature these experiences can’t be sought out or planned. I am a fan of Jeffers and I was keen to see the house he had built with his own hands over many years, but I didn’t imagine anything like reading that poem at his deathbed.
It was a perfect aesthetic experience. The waves and rocks, the dark wood room, the simple bed, the honest words about death. As if corroborating this experience, at a raffle later in the trip I won a small watercolour of Point Lobos (pictured above), depicting almost the same view from Jeffers’ death room.
Thirty years after writing “The Bed By The Window”, with his two sons at his side, Jeffers indeed died in that bed, making his poem something of a prophecy. It was a poetic death, like Yeats’. Snow fell on the beach that January day in 1962, an extremely rare occurrence for Central California. The golf tournament at nearby Pebble Beach had to be cancelled. If Jeffers was going to change his mind that nature is indifferent to human affairs he might have done so that day.
Jeffers might be the most explicitly anti-Christian major American poet and I have often wondered why he should appeal to me and many other Christians, including Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, who treats Jeffers briefly but thoroughly in that book, identifying him as an “immanent inhumanist”. Jeffers conceived of a God who at once is the universe and is yet indifferent to the specific creatures that make up the universe. Christianity, he saw, with Nietzsche, as a mix of narcissism and wishful thinking. Inhumanism marvels that Christians are vain enough to think that God cares about their fates. God is as indifferent as the rocks, which are also alive, as you are. Man, far from being set above nature, as is clear from Genesis, is a particularly perverse product of nature, but perhaps at our best no worse than the orcas, or Jeffers’ beloved hawks. Violence, in Jeffers’ cosmology, what animals do to each other and to the earth, simply is.
That he could write such a line as the final one here shows that Jeffers was nonetheless a profoundly spiritual man. Despite his beliefs he did not embrace the cruelty he saw in nature, the hurt to hawks, or men dying needlessly in war. Jeffers probably would not want me to call his tendency towards nature a “worldview” or God-forbid, a philosophy. But his approach, or his tendencies, are more sympathetic, have more integrity, than most contemporary anti-Christians. His was a natural spirituality, that saw quick life in everything: sand, hawk, stone, sea-spray. It is this point of view that allowed him to see the corruption at the heart of a USA, “thickening to empire” and to stand above the political battles of his day, at considerable cost to his reputation1.
II.
“The Bed By The Window” is written in long-lines with no apparent rhyme scheme or metrical structure. But there is a rhythmic logic to it, a rhythm of the waves that have no beginning or end, just variation in intensity. There is nothing that places the poem in a particular time or place. The word window indicates that the author can afford a dwelling with such extravagances, but so could many, if not most people throughout the ages. The author, at least, is not a pauper. But what else he may or may not be, in worldly, material terms, cannot be gleaned from this poem.
What can it mean to have chosen the place one will die? How many of us do this? We may think of a country or a town or even a house, but a specific bed and the spare one at that? What does Jeffers think of these unsuspecting guests who sleep in his death-bed? What kind of joke he is playing on them, or what kind of intimacy is he allowing them? And also, we may ask, what exactly is the daemon waiting for?
There is one type of person throughout the ages who have chosen their death-beds: cloistered monks and nuns. Tor House was the hermitage Jeffers built for himself and his family. The Jeffers’ never electrified their house, persisting with kerosene and candles into the 1960s. It is one of the few places where encountering the artist’s mise en scene doesn’t feel like empty voyeurism. Jeffers and Tor House seem to fit, and this is obviously so because Jeffers himself built it. Even Thomas Hardy’s thatched cottage near Dorchester doesn’t have its thick aura.
What can that gnomic line: “We are safe to finish what we have to finish” mean? An acknowledgment of destiny, a fatalism. As in most death poetry there is a reluctance to speculate on where, if anywhere, the unbound soul may wash up. The daemon emerges from behind the physical world and plucks him away, but to where, Jeffers does not say. Like Socrates and Seneca before him Jeffers self-reports an equanimity, a mere “crystalline interest” in his own death. Needless to say we are well beyond the warm lagoons of post-Christian liberalism.
The secular approach to death, as opposed to the Christian’s or the Inhumanist’s, is irrational in its insistence on both physical and mental annihilation and its offering of same as a consolation. As people commonly say, you won’t know you’re dead, it will feel just like you felt before being born, thus depriving both life and death of any and all meaning. This schizophrenic approach is refuted logically by Philip Larkin in “Aubade” as
…specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing,
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with..
How can a thing fear a thing it will not feel…
Readers familiar with Larkin will now be screaming at me, and yes I hear you. What does Larkin compare this “specious stuff” to? Yes, religion, “the vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” This is the self-made trap. Fear of nothing, fear of everything.
Secular humanism was meant to rescue us from the dimness of superstition and the power of unseen forces, raising man to new vistas, and what is the result? A quivering wreck terrified of the light behind his curtain-edges.
Yet, how many modern people, including Christians, really think deeply about their own death? How many can say they have overcome their fear of it? To fear is natural but also, fully understood, reveals a lack of trust in God, and is ultimately, if not dramatically, sinful. We must deal with Creation as it is, not as we wish it would be.
This is what is attractive about Jeffers: his acceptance. Amidst so much demand for change, reform, to go back (to where?) or progress (again, to where?), which is nearly always a distraction from the immediate material and spiritual work before us day after day, Jeffers articulates unchangingness. Vanity, vanity, as the famous words go, all is vanity.
“Original Sin”, a poem that comes daringly close to a Christian worldview, was written in during World War II, a conflict Jeffers saw as ultimately pointless. As many a Church Father has written, even the pagans have wisdom.
As for me, I would rather
Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.
But we are what we are, and we might remember
Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
And not be astonished at any evil; all are deserved;
And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed.
III.
Czeslaw Milosz was one Christian who tangled himself up in Jeffers’ worldview2. Milosz, who lived in nearby Berkeley and translated Jeffers into Polish, often visited him at Tor House, yet could not embrace his more uncompromising views. “His God was pure movement pursuing no direction.” In the absence of God at the top of the hierarchy Jeffers, perforce, makes his own the birds-eye.
“The Bed By The Window” is one of Jeffers’ “hymns of complete acceptance” as Milosz calls them. Milosz writes that “there was something sickly in his simplicity…I fumed at his naivete and his errors, I saw him as an example of all the faults peculiar to prisoners, exiles and hermits.”
In his critical poem-letter “To Robinson Jeffers” Milosz concludes,
And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches
more than does the nakedness of the elements. No one with impunity
gives himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void,
you offered sacrifices to daemons; there were Wotan and Thor,
the screech of Erinyes in the air, the terror of dogs
when Hecate with her retinue of the dead draws near.
Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses
As was done in my district. To birches and firs
Give feminine names. To implore protection
Against the mute and treacherous night
Than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.
Milosz is referring to the folk syncretism of Eastern Europe, a version of which occurs in every Catholic country. It’s better, Milosz says, to remain ambivalent, and hedge your bets with a mix of symbols, than to fully commit to inhumanism, however logically correct it seems. “No one with impunity gives himself the eyes of a god.”
IV.
California is the end of the earth, the limit of westward European expansion in North America, in the obvious literal sense, and to those sensitive to it, in the spiritual sense. The landscape the most, those high mountains, the pastel colours of the deserts, the rich red fragrant manzanita trees, the dusty she-oaks and the delicate wildflowers waving on the cliffs above deceptively frigid breakers. When there is nothing to conquer, nowhere further to go, men stagnate.
Amidst California fog was the closest I believe I have yet come to death. I was sailing back to Dana Point from Avalon on Catalina Island in the twenty-six foot trailer-sailor we owned with five other families. The sky above the harbour was clear but out on the horizon we could see dense fog. It was a Sunday. Dad had work and I had school the next day. The things of the world were pressing. I learned later that the type of fog we entered about a mile into the channel is called katabatic.
It was like being lost in a dark wood. Like flying through a cloud. But at least it also had the effect of making the sea relatively calm. The other thing we entered at about the same time as the katabatic fog was the last few nautical miles of a global shipping channel terminating at Long Beach. All we had to navigate the fog was our wits and a heading on the analogue ball compass above the wheel. My Dad made his way to the bow of the boat and leaned against the forestay as far as he could to make our collective line of sight stretch as far as possible. I kept my hand on the throttle, prepared to gun the motor. A few minutes in to the fog we heard a deafening blast, and then another, then another from somewhere well above us. Nothing emerged out of the fog but a minute or so later we bobbed over several large waves that rose out of the fog in quick succession, the wake of some enormous unseen ship. We see not God but the waves of God.
As Christians we must choose our own death-beds, not necessarily in the literal sense, but certainly in the spiritual sense. Christ’s death-bed, the Cross, or a worldly death-bed. Death is not personal, it comes for the good and the evil, the strong and the weak, but it is individual. We all face our deaths alone and we must try to face death with the equanimity of Robinson Jeffers, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the Holy Martyrs, and the Living God Himself, and not fear death, as “it is the only way to be cleansed.”
Jeffers could be extreme in his opinions. Most famously, he said that the USA should remain neutral in World War II. His publisher put a disclaimer at the front of The Double-Axe (1948) so concerned were they to distance themselves from this view.
The Milosz-Jeffers relationship is treated in detail in Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life (Heyday, 2021) by Cynthia L. Haven.