Reading Notes B, Week 8: Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers pg. 407-413 poems about the California landscape, granite, and hawks. Jeffers used many different literary devices in his poems.

Continent’s End:

Literary device: Setting –

“when the earth was veiled in late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,

The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat it’s boundary, the ground swell shook the beds of granite.” pg 408

Tor House:

Literary device: Imagery –

Jeffers uses imagery in this poem, when describing the landscape and the possible changes that will occur as time passes on.

Hurt Hawks

I

Literary device: Suspense –

“The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,….. and pain a few days: cat nor coyote.”pg 410 Jeffers is talking about a hawk with a broken wing and is he going to survive and get better, or get eaten by a predator.

The Purse-Seine-

Literary device: Plot –

Jeffers is describing fishermen fishing for sardines. Going into the waters at night, spreading the net off of the coastal waters; Monterey, Santa Cruz, New Year’s Point or Pigeon Point when they see the “lakes of the milk-color light on the sea’s” pg 411. The fishermen bring up the nets full of the sardines, sea-lions come to watch.

Carmel Point

Literary device: Simile –

Jeffers describes a beautiful landscape, “unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled on clean cliffs;” and how it is destroyed by all of the homes. He says no to forget the beauty that surrounds us, “Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff….. We must uncenter our minds from ourselves.” Pg 413