In Igneous Range, the vulture is the firebird, a symbol of ancient Iran, and a symbol of transcendence.
To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes …
Published posthumously in 1963.
Jeffers Literary Properties
Stanford University Press
Reading © 2017 Kaweah
For more discussion on this and other Jeffers poems, see Robinson Jeffers: Fire from Stone.
A kind of Inhumanist tribute to California, from the giant Sequoias to “the one ocean.” A land whose grandeur inspires humility in this particular poet.
© 1928 Robinson Jeffers
There is an outlaw thread in Igneous Range, so one of the Robinson Jeffers poems that it reminds me of is the Summit Redwood:
First published in 1928
Reading by Kaweah
A companion lyric to Cawdor and a splendid fire-poem in its own right, The Summit Redwood has never been selected for any anthology, possibly because it appears to put “people of color” in a bad light, or perhaps because its style appears to be inconsistent. I happen to see it as a marvelous portrait of kindred defiants: a red tree and a red man.
Redwoods don’t often grow on summits, particularly on the coast, but often enough for the purposes of this poem. They are shaken by lightning commonly enough. Continue reading
I wrote most of Igneous Range before I had any idea I was writing a Jeffers novel, thematically anyway: violence, vultures, redwoods, defiance, and above all fire. A repeating theme is the dominance of the subconscious, and there is also a sense of insanity.
Oh, and there’s genocide as well.
Toward the end of the story, Armen encounters a crazy old man in a cave who preaches the insanity of man. He does not mean that man is evil; only that man is not rational:
There are lots of intelligent animals, but there is only one mad animal.
Land of the Esselen
Take the bodies of the land and the sea.
Grind them together for thirty million
summers
and something’s bound to chip off.
Look. Not even the heart is left
unscathed;
hunks of Sierran granite spilled
up and down the coast;
the continent’s bones scattered
across the exposed sea floor
from Bodega Head and Point Reyes in
the north,
past the Farallons, Pinos and Lobos
down to that plutonic shard the Spanish
named
“the South,” where you may have heard
an older people, beyond the cliff,
up the canyon, under the shadows
of the white peak, the red giants; who
spoke in ways foreign to their neighbors.
In that country, all was life,
everything thinking;
rock was memory, and nothing
was too inhuman
to have a name.
He knew her best,
I have no doubt of it.
And didn’t he name her better
Than did the Spaniards? Hah!
What did they know?
They never even approached her.
Today I received another incident report
From the Range. She has
taken to burning again.
It’s inevitable.
If you’ve ever walked her wooded elevations
on a day like this, under the faithful
California sun,
you might reckon the thickets and the woods to be
on the threshold of ignition.
What isn’t burning is baking.
You can smell it.
The cold fire of alpenglow on the high peaks,
That is a reminder.
I remember, John, how you waited out a mountain
fire in the charred heart of a Sequoia,
that Giant among giants who needs
a little fire now and then.
I would have liked to have been on Paradise Ridge,
there with you, that night.
I would have been waiting, a little nervously,
for the right time to say,
Now tell me
you never considered
Range of Fire.