It has been almost exactly 10 years since I first encountered Robinson Jeffers. Returning over and over to the riches contained in his Selected Poems, I find a different facet to focus on each time. Sometimes seeking ideas for my own verse—a rhythm to imitate, a novel way to frame a scene. Most often, the straightforward pleasure of luxuriating in great writing.
My most recent return has been focused on (finally) working my way through his longer narrative verse. For anyone who’d care to join me—“Roan Stallion” makes probably the best starting point for this venture (it can be read here in its entirety). It is one of the shortest of his dramas (coming out at 19 pages), a tight, cohesive piece of poetry. While, like its companion poem, Tamar, it set the tone for Jeffers’ explorations of transgressive sexuality and violence in his works, in this regard, it’s really more tame than most of his tales. In short, Jeffers could be fairly accused of excesses in some of his narratives. But “Roan Stallion”—for a poem that scandalised some contemporary reviewers with its intimations of bestiality—actually avoids seeming gratuitous.
“Roan Stallion” is Jeffers’ take on the trope found in many mythic traditions, of congress between a god and a mortal woman—but cast in the context of his Inhumanist philosophy. The Biblical account of Mary’s divine conception is played against in the poem. But the tale of Leda and the Swan makes for an interesting comparison too. Yeats’ version of the legend (published just a couple of years before this) shares more than a superficial thematic similarity; its differences are also worth considering. I’ll return to this. But first, the plot:
The poem’s protagonist is California, a young, impoverished woman of Spanish, Native and Scottish descent (symbolic of her namesake state and its history?) Like all of Jeffers’ characters, she lives in his fictive version of the rural Californian coastline. She is lovelessly married to Johnny, a drunken lout and gambler with whom she has a small daughter. The story opens on Christmas Eve, with Johnny boasting of having won the eponymous stallion while gambling. He has also won some money, which California uses to buy some Christmas presents for her daughter; while travelling home from town, she is caught in a rainstorm and struggles to ford a river. She prays to Jesus, and believes she sees a religious vision that lights the sky, allowing her to safely cross the water. Her vision is a mostly conventional Christian one, but also features “angels [with] birds’ heads, hawks’ heads”—a first hint of the more pagan spiritual notions that will follow.
Months pass, and California develops a fascination with the stallion, viewing it as a manifestation of divinity and freedom. One night, when Johnny is away drinking, she slips outside to ride the stallion up and across the hilltops; in an ecstasy she rides “the savage and exultant strength of the world.” Atop the hill, she bows before the grazing horse and is suffused with mystic images. The tale’s denouement occurs when, the following night, her husband returns. Attempting to initiate sex, he chases California outside, where she leads him to the stallion’s corral. Johnny is killed under the horse’s hooves, and “moved by some obscure human fidelity”, she responds by shooting her stallion-god dead.
So, that is the story. What about how it is told?
The tale is simple, the characters are stark and archetypal. This is not really a flaw, in my opinion, as we are in the realm of myth rather than realism. They simply serve as a skeleton across which poetry is stretched. Much of the poem is cast in long rolling lines. Take this passage, near the beginning:
Dawn comes late in the year’s dark,
Later into the crack of a canyon under redwoods; and California slipped from bed
An hour before it; the buckskin would be tired; there was a little barley, and why should Johnny
Feed all the barley to his stallion? That is what he would do. She tip-toed out of the room,
Leaving her clothes, he’d waken if she waited to put them on, and passed from the door of the house
Into the dark of the rain; the big black drops were cold through the thin shift, but the wet earth
Pleasant under her naked feet.
The language may be plain, but there is solid music- alliteration and assonance and rhythmic variation lull you into the poem without drawing attention to themselves. The stage is set efficiently. Jeffers’ use of dialogue differs from that of the likes of Robert Frost, being generally less colloquial and more heightened, but at his best, he is just as good at writing exchanges that seem to flow naturally while maintaining poetic compression. In “Roan Stallion”, he shows himself well-capable of succeeding in a more Frost-like natural vein too:
He was quite drunk. “They bring their mares up here now.
I keep this fellow. I got money besides, but I’ll not show you.” “Did you buy something, Johnny,
For our Christine? Christmas comes in two days, Johnny.” “By God, forgot,” he answered laughing.
“Don’t tell Christine it’s Christmas; after while I get her something, maybe.” But California:
“I shared your luck when you lost: you lost me once, Johnny, remember? Tom Dell had me two nights
Here in the house: other times we’ve gone hungry: now that you’ve won, Christine will have her Christmas.
We share your luck, Johnny.”
Early in the poem, we are given hints of classic Jeffersian nature imagery:
Red rays cried sunset from a trumpet of streaming
Cloud over Lobos….
But overall, these glimmers are more subdued here. This is a highly effective choice, as it means the later shift into a heightened poetic register during the night ride scene more effectively mirrors California’s ecstatic mental state. Robinson Jeffers’ writing has sometimes been accused of being too didactic and lacking in subtlety, but such details demonstrate his control over the more implicit aspects of poetry. Like all of Jeffers’ best poems, it is something of a masterclass in how to “tell”, and how to do it well. There is a Negatively Capable power in, for example, the moment where a narrator suddenly interrupts the plot with philosophy.
Humanity is the start of the race; I say…..
The atom to be split.
[……]
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape….
You are cued for something strange after reading this. The alignment of California’s fixations with scientific inquiry is a highly unexpected turn. Yet it prepares the reader for the following beautiful passages that describe her horseback ride across the hilltops, and her worship before her equine god.
Two figures on the shining hill, woman and stallion, she kneeling to him, brokenly adoring.
He cropping the grass, shifting his hooves, or lifting the long head to gaze over the world,
Tranquil and powerful.
[…..]
She lay a long while, as if asleep, in reach of the fore-hooves, weeping. He avoided
Her head and the prone body. He backed at first; but later plucked the grass that grew by her shoulder.
The small dark head under his nostrils: a small round stone, that smelt human, black hair growing from it….
[I]t was not possible for any eyes
To know what throbbed and shone under the sutures of the skull.
I’ll return, for a minute, to Yeats’ aforementioned poem. Its interpretation of Leda’s divine violation remains fresh and provocative, as she momentarily gains sacred insight through the act. Jeffers takes this idea a step further. Reversing the classic theme, his heroine imbues a mere animal with her own human longing for transcendence. She is not a passive victim, but the instigator of her attempted communion with the numinous. Her desires are sexually charged, but it is made clear that this is impossible outside of her imagination: “No way, no help, a gulf in nature.” The sexual bent merely underscores the futility and absurdity of her yearnings.
This is very much a Modern take. Rather than partaking in prophetic visions from beyond, California scrapes the sacred only in her mind—emblematic, here, of the ultimately fragile and delicate springs of all human culture:
The fire threw up figures
And symbols meanwhile, racial myths formed and dissolved in it, the phantom rulers of humanity
That without being are yet more real than what they are born of, and without shape, shape that which makes them:
[…..]
Figures and symbols, castlings of the fire, played in her brain; but the white fire was the essence,
The burning in the small round shell of bone that black hair covered, that lay by the hooves on the hill-top.
Ultimately, “Roan Stallion” is not a story about transcendence, but about its impossibility. California’s final murder of her horse-god makes for a powerful ending to this myth, muted in its telling by being shown from a distance. Her precise motive is wisely left ambiguous:
Yet California
Stood carefully watching, till the beast having fed all his fury stretched neck to utmost, head high,
And wrinkled back the upper lip from the teeth, yawning obscene disgust over—not a man—
A smear on the moon-lake earth: then California moved by some obscure human fidelity
Lifted the rifle
Considering this ending, another writer that came to mind was Loren Eiseley—his evocations of humanity’s existential separation from the natural world, “the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself”. There is a philosophical kinship between him and Jeffers; in the latter’s writing, many characters’ tragic actions brim from a loyalty to this loneliness above all else. There is something in that “obscure human fidelity” that suggests the inability of people to ever fully get themselves out of the way, regardless of the suffering inflicted as a result. Robinson Jeffers devoted a poetic career to castigating such limitations, attempting to wriggle out of such blinders in each poem—however much he may have succumbed to them in life. Reading him is to assume this lens; for a time, feign the shedding of your own nature.
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