From a later period, "Carmel Point" (1951) speaks the poet's annoyance in urban sprawl as "the spoiler," a personification of all interlopers, arrives in his seaside neighborhood. The meditation, like a sonnet, breaks at line ten with the separation of human subjectivity and nature's objectivity. Human settlers mimic the ocean in their tide, which dissolves earthly works. Although dispersed into fragments of ancient beauty, nature's loveliness survives in minute glimpses of "the very grain of the granite." With a gesture to his contemporaries, the poet urges that we "uncenter our minds from ourselves," the "unhumanizing" effort that Jeffers committed himself to at his seaside hermitage.
"Vulture" (1954), one of Jeffers' clearest statements of merging with nature, is a first-person experience composed in a less gloomy and sorrow-laden period. The unnerving, up-close examination by a flesh-eater gladdens the observer, who lies as still as a corpse to follow the sweep of the vulture's circles. The surprising element of the poem is the notion that human beings die and become "part of him, to share those wings and those eyes." In celebration of such a rebirth, Jeffers looks forward to a sublime "enskyment," his personal notion of "life after death."
