Roared in the gorges then all things stilled and the Was seen rising in divers places and rock-slides Lightning flashed from the ground, the deep earth roared In a dog’s teeth the house danced and bobbled, Rippled, instantly earthquake shook the granite-boned The heads of the high redwoods down the deep canyon Their pang of unendurable release and the old resistances Gnashed together, snapping on each other the powers I love his imagery of rocks as the “bones of the old mother” or the “world’s cradle.” Waves are “drunken quarrymen/Climbing the cliff, hewing out more stone for me.” The surf “cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum.” During erosion the “hills dissolve and are liquidated.”Īnd it is clear Jeffers felt the tremor of at least one earthquake. His passion and intimacy with rock reveals itself in his poetry. Finger trails ran through the mortar, trace fossils of a man and his passion. Barnacles still covered some of the stones Jeffers liberated from the sea. Edges were not perfectly straight but looked weathered and eroded. No two stones were alike and rarely did stones of the same size rest next to each other. Up close, the buildings sustained my first impressions of geology manifest as home. The structures didn’t appear to be built so much as they appeared to emerge geologically from the hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.
#Tor house poet windows
The tower is square, about half the width of the house, and topped by a square turret with two eye-like windows opening out to the ocean behind me. The house is squat with a narrow row of windows just below a small triangle of brown roof. Light green grasses, gray-green shrubs and a few light gray boulders covered the slope leading up to the stone buildings. I first saw Tor House and Hawk Tower in 2002 from the road that runs along the water below them. Looking toward the ocean from the garden at Tor House During the 44 years he lived at Tor House, Jeffers developed what Loren Eisely called “one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background, that I know in literature.”
His intimate knowledge of rocks came from the years he spent finding, carrying, and placing boulders for his exquisite little home. “My fingers had the art to make stone love stone,” wrote Jeffers in a poetic tribute to Tor House. Jeffers built what he and his wife called Tor House and the accompanying Hawk Tower between 19. His transformation occurred during the time he built his house, built on a barren knoll that jutted out into the Pacific Ocean in Carmel, California. Granite so infused the life of Robinson Jeffers that it helped transform him from a imitative, mediocre poet to one of the great American poets of the 20 th century.
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