The portrayal of freedom thus presented a formidable challenge. To capture its elusive and dialectical character, to make it comprehensible not only to his own but to a later time, Jeffers had to find a formulation independent of the vagaries of historical fortune. He did so by juxtaposing man's situational freedom as a moral agent in the world with the unconditioned freedom suggested by certain aspects of natural process. In Jeffers' poetry birds of prey, particularly the hawk and the eagle, came to serve as emblems of such unconditioned freedom.

"Hurt Hawks" shows great admiration and sympathy for the hawk as a strong wild creature who never yields even in misery to his baser instincts, will not be drawn to self-pity or dependency on others, will not suffer humiliation even when wounded, but will face pain and death without flinching. Jeffers sees the hawk, "intemperate and savage," as closer in spirit to what he calls "the wild God of the world" than are the "communal people," who band together in fear for self-protection.

For both [Havelock] Ellis and Jeffers, insane mainkind would go down before the lasting grandeur of Nature. The restorative power of Nature, to which all things transitory and human eventually return, is described by Jeffers in November Srf. Considering the respective dates of composition and the correspondent attitudes toward Nature's regenerative capacity to absorb humanity's decay and contamination, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the poem owes a debt to the following passage from Ellis' Fountain of Life:

 Progress, in its final incarnation, was the rationalization of pleasure, the pursuit of gratification by material means, and that pursuit in turn was the expression of a despair so profound it could be felt only as a longing for death. Divorced materially, intellectually, and spiritually from the natural world, modern man was enclosed in the artifice of his cities, whose lights against the night sky resembled nothing so much as the glitter of scales in a fishnet: . . . .

Although it was the sparsely populated coast that Jeffers preferred to live in and write about, he also portrayed his feeling about coastal cities (probably Los Angeles) in such a poem as "The Purse-Seine." This poem is about fishing, as other poems are about hunting, primitive actions of men that Jeffers admired more than their congregation into cities. In the poem, he describes the sardine-fishers going out at night in their boats to cast their huge seines for schools of fish, and he paints a thrillingly realistic picture of their prey caught in the net beneath the boat:

The poet would have the reader imagine a time when "bombers ... will drop wreaths of roses down," when "doves will nest in guns' throats." The joyous dance of peace and innocence has finally begun, "without hate, without fear." Even the potentially sobering act of meting out justice to war criminals is sublimated into the act of hanging them in effigy. All feelings and deeds of violence, it would seem, have disappeared; goodness and mercy appear to have inherited the earth.

Robinson Jeffers' "Fantasy" is a fine example of William Empson's seventh type of ambiguity, as explained in his classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. As he writes, this type of ambiguity "occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer's mind" (192). Of course, this definition provides merely the starting ground for understanding the way Jeffer's poem works.

[Note: Jeffers wrote about Cassandra twice in his career, first in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" and later in "Cassandra"]

By 1948, in The Double Axe, the next to the last volume of verse published during the poet's lifetime, we are not surprised to hear Jeffers say, in Cassandra,

        Poor bitch, be wise.

No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men

And gods disgusting.--You and I, Cassandra.

 

To focus on Jeffers's women seems beside the whole point of Jeffers's philosophy, which is that men and women alike ("You and I, Cassandra") are doomed in their human, evolutionarily misguided drive to wreak destruction through greed, avarice, desire, and power-mongering. No doubt there is a personal psyche at work in Jeffers which allows him to portray women as so much bigger, more flexible, stronger than most of his male figures.