Poetry in Stone

One of My Favorite Buildings

I have been lucky enough this past week to spend time in Carmel, California, and to get to visit one of my favorite buildings: Robinson and Una Jeffers’ home, Tor House and Hawk Tower. Built between 1919 and 1925 on a barren knoll that juts out into the Pacific Ocean, the house and its construction helped transform Jeffers from a imitative, mediocre poet to one of the great American poets of the 20th century.

Tor House and Hawk Tower

“My fingers had the art to make stone love stone,” wrote Jeffers in a poetic tribute to Tor House. His intimate knowledge of rocks came from the years he spent finding, carrying, and placing boulders for these exquisite buildings. During the 44 years he lived at Tor House, Jeffers developed what Loren Eiseley called “one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background, that I know in literature.”

Tor House and Hawk Tower face the ocean just above Scenic Road. Light green grasses, gray-green shrubs and a few light gray boulders cover the slope leading up to the stone structures. The house is squat with a narrow row of windows just below a small triangle of brown roof. 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 water. The buildings don’t appear to be built so much as they appear to emerge geologically from the hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.

Soon after completion, long before Jeffers planted the trees that surround the property, and long before newer and uglier houses loomed nearby.

Up close, the buildings sustain my first impressions of geology manifest as home. No two stones are alike and rarely do ones of the same size rest next to each other. Nor are their edges straight but instead look weathered and eroded, with some still bearing barnacles. Running through the morter are finger trails, trace fossils of a man and his passion.

Building Hawk Tower with boulders harvested from the shore, about 50 yards distant.

Jeffers’ devotion to what he called “my loved subject: Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees” is what makes his poetry resonate with me, particularly his shorter poems. He wrote precisely and knowledgeably about landscape, both solid and oceanic, and its inhabitants. Seasonal change plays out in the mountains as they “vibrate from bronze to green,/Bronze to green, year after year.” Gulls are the “slim yachts of the element.” Pelicans flying over Tor House “sculled their worn oars over the courtyard.” Cormorants “slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves.” Solomon’s seal makes “intense islands of fragrance” and eucalyptuses bend double “all in a row, praying north.” One can learn so much about the natural world from Jeffers’ poetry that it is almost as if he has written a field guide to the Carmel coast.

But Jeffers use of geology and geologic metaphors shines above all else. Weathering is “the endless ocean throwing his skirmish-lines against granite…that fierce music has gone on for a thousand/Millions of years.” 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.”

And it is clear Jeffers felt the tremor of at least one earthquake. He wrote:
…the teeth of the fracture
Gnashed together, snapping on each other; the powers
of the earth drank

Their pang of unendurable release and the old resistances
Locked. The long coast was shaken like a leaf.

In a second, haunting description:
The heads of the high redwoods down the deep canyon
Rippled, instantly earthquake shook the granite-boned
ridge like a rat

In a dog’s teeth; the house danced and bobbled,
lightning flashed from the ground, the deep earth roared
yellow dust
Was seen rising in divers places and rock-slides
Roared in the gorges; then all things stilled and the
earth stood quiet.

Jeffers clearly paid attention to the natural world around him. Ever since his childhood he had had a connection to nature but not until he settled in Carmel and worked on the land did he develop the knowledge that gave him a voice to describe place. And this relationship centered on the house and tower he built from granite boulders on his tor overlooking the sea.

“The place was maiden, no previous/Building, no neighbors, nothing but the elements, Rock, wind and sea,” wrote Jeffers in a poem titled The Last Conservative. How could he build any other type of structure? How could I not love that building? How could not love his poetry? In his ode to Tor House, Jeffers concludes “My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably here, but a dark one, deep in granite.”

This newsletter is derived from my book Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology.

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A new feature - Word of the Week
Tor - The OED defines tor as “a high rock; a pile of rocks, gen. on the top of a hill; a rocky peak; a hill.” Perhaps of old Old English, Welsh, or Gaelic origin, it is derived from terms related to heap, pile, eminence, and mound.