"The Poet Is Dead" is a moving elegy [to Robinson Jeffers] in which the living poet who is with us now, mourned the passing of the poet recently dead. But instead of writing a conventional elegy, Everson remembered Jeffers' own earlier poetry, especially "Post Mortem"; and, borrowing some of Jeffers' imagery and poetic phrases, spoke as it were with the tongue of the dead poet, in order to realize his presence in the world which he had just left. These two poems complement each other—the first looking forward to the time when the poet should have died; the second remembering the dead poet and naturalizing him in our living world. (p. 4)

The strophes of "The Poet Is Dead" alternate between images of nature (the natural environment in which Jeffers lived), and images of human nature (the nature of the dead poet)…. The parallelism and repetition of the...