Word: jeffersian
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...their arrival, Hawl finds his wife and son drowned, kills his brother for failing to save them, then burns the house down over them all. To his mother, who says, "Hawl . . . kill me before I burn," he replies: "Find a knife for yourself." With obvious Jeffersian irony, the poet allows her to escape and live. Hungerfield hardly proves a favorite Jeffers point-"There is no consolation in humanity"-but he avoids satisfactory motivations for his piled-up horrors by intoning: It is thus (and will be} that violence Turns on itself, and builds on the wreck of violence...
...Maternal incest and suicide are thereafter overwhelmingly indicated, but Author Jeffers finally prescribes his hero's self-sacrificial surrender to the Law to put his story out of its misery. From the residue of ideological wreckage readers may salvage some souvenirs of sense by recalling that incest, in Jeffersian prophecy, symbolizes "racial introversion: man regarding man exclusively-founding his values, desires, a picture of the universe, all on his own humanity...
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