"Birds and Fishes," one of Jeffers' last poems, almost makes the mistake of attributing greed and malice to the feeding of seabirds on fishes but then recovers to find in the violence of the scene a manifestation of the "beauty of God":. . . .

For Jeffers, then, as for Emerson, original sin consisted in a fall into ego consciousness, which sets mind against nature and individuals against one another.