robinson jeffers tor house and hawk tower

The family wanted to preserve the famed stone house, tower, and gardens, but they lacked the financial means. The poet’s son Donnan had died some years earlier, leaving a widow and a mortgage. In this time of sheltering in place, best to learn “the extraordinary patience of things.California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, and Jack HicksĪ little more than fifteen years ago, I joined a small group in Carmel that was raising money to save Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House. “The living presences” of Tor House continually summon us back to this sacred place at continent’s end. As I walk through the deserted gardens and the empty rooms, I sense the “living presences,” whether in the histories of the stones-imagine the pudding stones, taken from Una’s family farm in Mason, Michigan, embedded in the east wall of Tor House, two billion years old! or in the poetry-“sometimes harder than granite”-that lives everywhere on site or in the people whose spirits populate this place: those of “the brown people who…/Built fires…and nestled” by Thuban, a cornerstone of the house Jeffers’, “a dark one, deep in the granite ” Marina’s, a light one, at the top of Hawk Tower reading one last poem to her tour group under open sky. Jeffers, the combined imagination of nature and humankind alike.Įvery time I come to Tor House, I feel the sacredness of this place. “…it seems to me,” Santos continues, “that one might rightly consider the Jeffers house a sacred place,”įor what is our definition of a sacred place, except some location inhabitedīy living presences, some location where people feel summoned back to aĬlear coherence between time, and space, and some larger collective: for

On the rain-washed paving near the West Wing of the Jeffers house. When we come to touch, mindfully or not, that small stone fragment We too, visitors to Tor House, all add our own dimension of time The presence of a poet whom both of them loved. The tower the personal time of Robin and Una’s walk together in Water: the geologic time of the stone itself the historical time of Of adding time to time, memory to memory, like water poured into Knew, is written in stone, and taking that rock home…proved a way Yeats, picked up a small rock from beside its walls. On a walk around the tower in Galway that had once belonged to Other memory-like the warm spring evening when Robin and Una,

Up draws that stone out of the river of time, attaching to it some If I’m not making too much of this, it might be said that in Jeffers’Ĭosmology a stone is infused with the abiding presences of the past, In On the Memory of Stone, Santos talks “about the experience of living for several years, from high school on, in close proximity to the Jeffers house,” as well as “the influence that Jeffers’ lingering presence exerted on my decision to become a poet.” But he also talks about stone, and what he discovers about its nature. Her son donated her library to Tor House, and it was while looking through the box of Jeffers-related books that I found the little volume. The text of a talk Santos gave at the 1994 Fall Festival, the chapbook was from the collection of Marina Romani, a tour docent for many years and a dear friend, who died earlier this year.

I recently came upon On the Memory of Stone: A Tor House Legacy by poet Sherod Santos. There is something more, something that gives Tor House the distinctive quality that almost everyone who visits experiences. When I do my solitary rounds of the property, checking to make certain all is in order, I never feel alone. Not just life from the profusion of flowers and birds. They disappear into the sweet alyssum, geranium, stasis, rose campion, that section of garden close to the graves of the house-dogs, True Winnie Darling and Dear Haig.Īs if on cue, a hawk-a red-tail I would guess-glides quickly across my view, appearing from behind Hawk Tower and disappearing behind Tor House.Įven without the people that normally animate Tor House-the visitors from as nearby as down the street in Carmel to as far away as Brunswick, Maine, Holmestrand, Norway and Beijing, China the tour docents revealing the wonders of Tor House to these visitors the flower, music, archival, bookstore, and special occasion docents-even without this flow of people, Tor House and Hawk Tower are filled with life. As I write this, looking out over those gardens from the second story of the East Wing, a covey of quail darts along the brick patio, adults and chicks so numerous and moving so quickly that I can’t count them. The Tor House gardens have been spectacular this year.

Robinson jeffers tor house and hawk tower