The search for reintegration into the instinctual world of animals in "Vulture" completely subverts Emerson's intention to use nature as a means of spiritual transcendence--Emerson would rise above nature, while Jeffers wishes to be digested into it. "Vulture" opens with the speaker lying "death-still" on a hillside, watching a vulture make progressively lower circles, approaching him as a potential meal. As the vulture closes in, the man takes in the beauty of the bird and sincerely regrets having to pass up the opportunity to offer his body to the vulture:

                                        . . . But how beautiful

he'd looked, gliding down

On those great sails, how beautiful he looked, veering away in

    the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly

That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that

    beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--

What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.

 

Clearly, any sense of immortality, for Jeffers, derives from the participation of the human body in the natural order. As the birds in "Birds and Fishes" felt no remorse for their actions, Jeffers would not hesitate to play the role of the fish. Man's truest link with nature, then, is not his ability to decipher it intellectually but his ability to participate in it physically.