by Mike Bendzela
Back when our local university still believed that a survey of English literature was a prerequisite for a “higher” education; before a drop in enrollments triggered a huge budget crisis culminating in hiring freezes, “retrenchments,” and amputated departments; I still taught an Introduction to Literature course that allowed me the freedom to construct a syllabus of my choosing (a boon for an adjunct like me). Just before the ax fell, I added Yeats’ famous visionary poem “The Second Coming” to the poetry list, which turned out to be a mistake I would never get an opportunity to repeat.
Things start explosively in the poem. I don’t know that any poet has ever created such a stark, terse, quotable abstract of his dire times as Yeats does in that first stanza. Many of the lines are so often quoted and interpreted that they can go unremarked here. The stanza is a compendium and summary of Europe flattened by the First War, bloody revolutions, and the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918. Writers reach in here for commensurate phrasing whenever things ain’t going so well. The closing lines of the stanza are so apt that I’m getting tired of hearing commenters in the US quoting them these days: Yes, the “best” people do seem demoralized and hapless; yes, the “worst” idiots are yapping and animated.
Yeats’ eye so far, as it sweeps over his contemporary landscape, is accurate and scathing. Then he turns that eye inward . . . and begins hallucinating. The results are not so laudable. Quotable, yes. Memorable, yes. But crazy, even full-on bonkers. It is only much later that I am able to articulate what irks me about that second stanza: Yeats indulges in such tawdry mysticism, trafficks in so many moth-eaten biblical tropes, and heaves such breathless portentousness, that he alienates my modern, agnostic sensibilities. Why cavort with that crank, John of Patmos, rather than with someone more relevant to the times, like Charles Darwin? But such phrasing! . . . “moving its slow thighs” . . . “twenty centuries of stony sleep” . . . “Slouches towards Bethlehem”!
Engagement with students becomes problematic at this point, especially with believing Christians in class. Trying to follow the textbook instructions with students, I explain that the stanza is an “allegory of Yeats’ visionary theory of the cyclical nature of history, blah blah.” This is met with glazed eyes. Instead, a few Christian students are happy to see Yeats agreeing with them: The End Really Is Near, after all. The poet says so. “Second Coming,” “revelation,” “beast,” “Bethlehem.” See? It’s about the End Times. Full stop.
When I have them reread those last two lines of the first stanza, (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”), I get responses like: “That means the saved have surrendered themselves to the coming destruction, while the damned are wailing and gnashing their teeth.” I wish I had known Robinson Jeffers’ equally visionary poem “The Purse-Seine” back then; I’d show them what a relevant, plausible, terrifying vision of the future — a true apocalypsis — looks like! But Introduction to Literature was abruptly consigned to the trash bin of history, almost as an illustration of how suddenly things can go awry, and discussion of poetry was foreclosed upon altogether.
*
“The Purse-Seine” is now almost forgotten; you don’t find it in most anthologies. In fact, as an undergraduate back in the eighties taking a course called Early Twentieth-Century American Poetry, we never looked at Robinson Jeffers at all. It was all (expectedly) Pound, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Cummings, etc. (The professor was a Pound scholar.) There was lots of fulminating against the state of the world, with Pound and Eliot leading the way.
Only much later in life did I learn of Jeffers’ trip onboard a fishing vessel off the coast of California in the early 1930s, amidst an economic depression, between wars, in a world as ruined as that in Yeats’ poem. He stayed out for two days, coming home to tell his wife, Una, of the Italian crew and their catch of 70 tons of sardines! This experience he then channels into a narrative poem of haunting complexity. When he begins describing the labors of “Our sardine fishermen,” he puts us on notice that he is describing a collective enterprise: We are at one with these working men, who struggle hard with the nets to supply the burgeoning populations of the American West with sardines for food, bait, and fertilizer.
The fishing boat coasts way off Santa Cruz and Monterey, “at night in the dark of the moon,” because “daylight or moonlight” would not allow the fishermen “to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.” I immediately think of Darwin aboard The Beagle a century before, off the coast of Patagonia, plowing through “liquid phosphorus.” This is the phenomenon of bioluminescence, and it allows these fishermen to spy their catch: The movement of the little fishes disturbs bioluminescent algae in the water, causing “lakes of milk-color light” to appear “on the sea’s night-purple.” The fishing boat then
circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.
[Jeffers’ form is an unusual blend of long verse lines verging on prose, so some quoted lines will appear idiosyncratic.]
In the next stanza the poet becomes rhapsodic, observing with both wonder and horror that
the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame . . .
He sees the body of each fish “sheeted with flame,” like a little comet. The closer the mass of them gets to death, the brighter the glow. Meanwhile, “outside the narrowing / Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark;” and above the poet:
the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.
*
It’s a moment Jeffers must have sat with a long while, contemplating how the image of the desperate sardines caught in the seine-net fits with his view that “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must unhumanize our views a little,” in order to see that we are the same stuff as “the rock and ocean that we were made from.” A vision comes to him, not out of some “Spiritus Mundi,” as Yeats proclaims, but as he is “looking from a night mountain-top / On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light”; suddenly it occurs to him that all the dwellers in that city (possibly Los Angeles) are like those glowing sardines flailing in the net:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
The net is an ambiguous image, full of symbolism. In his parable of the fishing net, which appears in Matthew 13, Jesus tells his disciples of the prototypical apocalyptic net:
[T]he Kingdom of Heaven is like a fishing net that was thrown into the water and caught fish of every kind. When the net was full, they dragged it up onto the shore, sat down, and sorted the good fish into crates, but threw the bad ones away. That is the way it will be at the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked people from the righteous, throwing the wicked into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The net or web is also a common trope in biology, used to show interrelationships both ecological and phylogenetic. Darwin even enthused once in his notebook,
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine — our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements — they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor — we may be all netted together.
In “The Purse-Seine,” Jeffers brilliantly knits together the ecological and the apocalyptic, symbolizing a human destiny both interwoven with nature and of our own making. Human appetites are intimately bound up with the earth’s ecosystems. But such webs of complexity are fragile and thus susceptible to collapse. Casting his vision over the shimmering city, Jeffers thinks:
We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already.
Jeffers does not leave us in the lurch with murky symbolism, as Yeats does: He foresees something that looks a lot like ecological and/or civilizational collapse. As if to confirm this view, shortly after Jeffers wrote this poem the sardine fishing industry in California did indeed collapse. By the end of World War Two the industry was finished. Jeffers’ vision of human collapse is even more catastrophic, by orders of magnitude. He speaks of “inevitable mass-disasters,” and governments that will “take all powers,” even “more than all,” adding to “kept bodies kept souls.” Finally, while “we and our children . . . watch the net draw narrower,” “anarchy” threatens.
Paradoxically, though, Jeffers claims, “These things are Progress”; the rise and fall of civilizations are all part of the natural cycle of things. It’s a rather deterministic view: We should not be surprised to find nature doing to us as we have been doing to it, with our fishermen, hunters, and city-builders. We should not think it odd that people “incapable of free survival insulated / From the strong earth” will come to a sorry end. It’s striking how the image of the net finds a serendipitous connection with today’s wired life, the internet, the worldwide web, a global meshing of fates. One Carrington Event-like solar flare, and it’s Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
Those “vast walls of night” that “Stand erect to the stars” show that even the poet is encircled in a cosmic net of interdependency, though he seems to stand apart from it. He notes that the poem “keeps its reason” even though the tone is “troubled or frowning.” In the most opaque lines of the poem, he compares his troubled detachment to some “recent young men” who fall into “mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter.” These are other poets of his time, whose heads are not as cool, it would seem.
[Aptly enough, T. S. Eliot had earlier published a short prose poem called “Hysteria,” in which the speaker gawks at a woman laughing loudly in a restaurant, all the while imagining himself being sucked bodily down her throat!]
Jeffers says these poets would be “quite wrong” to lose their minds over such “inevitable” catastrophes, ecological and societal. “There is no reason for amazement,” he closes:
surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
Jeffers’ vision is as apocalyptic as Yeats’ but much more plausible. “The Purse-Seine” is no farrago of defunct symbols. With an awareness of how human folly is entangled with life on the planet, the poem foretells a collapse of complexity that is well within the realm of possibility.
Sources
“The Second Coming.” Written in 1919.
The Wonderful & Frightening World of W. B. Yeats. A lecture about Yeats’ excursions into mysticism.
“The Purse-Seine.” Written in September 1935.
Robinson Jeffers’ “The Purse-Seine”: A Panel Discussion. Some background to the poem, plus clarification that “the recent young men” probably refers to poets such as Pound and Eliot.
The Collapse of California’s Sardine Fishery. The authors argue that the collapse may presage the effects of climate change on the fishing industry.
Darwin Online. Some transcribe Darwin’s phrasing as “we may all be melted together.”
Image
Los Angeles by night. Kimble Young. CC BY-SA 2.0
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