Fathers and Sons, Faith and Faithlessness: A Sonnet by Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers tended to write in long-lined free verse in which ideas and images were mortared together like stones. The lines are well and patiently built. Although one might be tempted to compare his verse to that of Whitman or Sandburg--other American masters of the long line--Jeffers is much more rhetorically and metaphorically restrained; unlike Whitman, he's not an excitable poet. He tends to stalk his subject coldly.

It was interesting to me, then, to run across a sonnet Jeffers wrote. I found it in a lovely pulp paperback, The Penguin Book of Sonnets (1943), the kind of compact paperback published on cheap paper that I remember fondly from my childhood. The westerns by Zane Grey and Max Brand that my father read--in bed, while smoking a cigar--came in this form. I think most people who love books love them not just because of the reading but because of the physicality, and one may cherish a cheap paperback--the feel of the thing--as much as an expensive leather-bound book with exquisite paper and printing. An old soft paperback is like an old soft baseball glove, in some respects.

In any event, here's Jeffers's sonnet:

To His Father

Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
He fails the world but you he did not fail,
He led you through all forms of grief and strife
Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
With coronal age and death like quieting balm.
I Father having followed other guides
And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,
Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides
For trophies on a savage temple wall
Hardly anticipate that reverend stage
Of Life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

Jeffers does well in the sonnet-form here, in my opinion, but I feel him straining against its limits, sense his wanting to let the lines find their own length, rather like the Pacific coastline on which he lived. Jeffers here is like a fine athlete who's been asked to perform within the proscribed limits of a team-sport; you can feel him wanting to overwhelm the sonnet-form.

And Jeffers's characteristic brutal honesty is by no means discarded in the sonnet form. Faith in Christ served his father well; that's the truth, and Jeffers speaks it, and he explains precisely how that faith worked in his father's life. The faith helped the father through "all forms of grief and strife," and it kept his father noble and calm.

The surprising adjective "coronal" is terrific. Because of his father's faith, his father's age became a kind of crown, and death became a kind of balm.

This is a Shakespearian or English sonnet in form, but, like an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, it breaks after line 8, and "turns" to another view of the topic. Now we learn that Jeffers couldn't imitate or adopt his father's Christian faith. He has followed "other guides," namely Classical models, including Stocism and Greek tragedy. But how brutally honest Jeffers is about his own lack of faith; often the guides he's chosen have not soothed his pain, have not helped him through grief and strife, and the years lived in faithlessness are compared to "nailed up" "dripping panther hides/For trophies on a savage temple wall." How wonderful of Jeffers to find a pagan image for what he admits is his own version of paganism, and to state that such trophies can't do for him what faith in Christ did for his father. Nor does Christ escape Jeffers's honest assessment. He claims Christ "fails the world," meaning what? Meaning, one supposes, that Christ has not returned yet, and that evil marches on? Perhaps. The final hard truth Jeffers leaves for himself: His worldview will not leave him in as good a shape, spiritually and philosophically, as his father when he, Jeffers, is old; "extreme age" will not be the equivalent of a "snow-wreathed honor." He's not looking forward to growing old. Old age will be harder for Jeffers, in the absence of faith in Christ, than it was for his father. I find this to be a bracing poem in which Jeffers honors his father and his father's faith without being sentimental and in which he honestly contrasts his own world-view with his father's without being argumentative or combative.