The Fountain and the Net: Archetypes in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

[...]a metaphor may substitute a quality or attribute of a thing for the thing itself, as waves signify the motion of a body of water, or suggest a signification beyond customary usage, as heavens connotes a realm of being or value beyond the visible atmospheric environment. Because a metaphor is not technically an equivalent, as half a dozen is for the number six, it is a conveyer of meaning that complicates the term it simultaneously subsumes and replaces. In part because Jeffers wanted to describe the primary datum of experience-the sensory world, observed as scrupulously as possible-he was particularly chary of metaphor, utilizing instead action verbs that depicted process. [...]in the opening lines of "Salmon Fishing," The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now, The south wind shouts to the rivers, The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon Race up into the freshet. [...]metaphor, ill-used, takes one not into but away from the actual world. Because Jeffers wishes to evoke particular objects in as direct a fashion as possible, situating them by position and function, he is often indicted for simplicity, and even as sympathetic an observer as Czeslaw Milosz could see in his descriptions "too much ... of the amateur painter who sets up his easel on a wild promontory" (90). (CP 2: 409) Considered individually, the "things" of Jeffers appear innumerable (and of course from one perspective contain the "thoughts" with which he contrasts them), but as a category external to the human they represent a grounding in natural order that provides relief and renewal from mental phantasm-even the phantasm of creativity by which the poet seeks to hold fast the world itself.