From Tao House to Tor House: Long Days Journey Into Light

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, CA- He built his house by the sea with his own hands. He found the spot on the sparsely settled, ruggedly beautiful California coast just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and he knew it was the place. He came with his love, his wife, his muse, Una Call Kuster to this place above the rocks and the erratic undulation of waves, and together they built Tor House, their haven and home for the rest of their lives. He said “we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.” (Powell, 24) He studied with a stonemason learning the art of making “stone love stone,” and set about his work. He had been using words in the building of poems since he was a child, and Robinson Jeffers was 26 when he came north to create his home and construct his artistic vision on this "perfect" spot with its straight eye view of craggy Point Lobos and the unending ocean beyond. His complementary identities as a worker in stone and a craftsman of words formed the basis for his life and his art. This duality receives a simple but splendid treatment in his poem "To the Stone-Cutter"

To the Stone-Cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart;
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.


The Jeffers had come to Carmel in the wake of their grief over their first baby, Maeve, whom they had lost at birth. Jeffers purchased his remote property, two miles south of the village on a treeless headland. This bold adventure, on the heels of sadness, indeed was the new beginning, and their twins, Donnan and Garth, were born during their first years on the north coast. They were a close and devoted family, much as Jeffers had experienced with his parents growing up in Pennsylvania and California. Tor House, rose up with the careful and tenacious work of “Robin,” as Jeffers was known to his family, and eventually the boys helped out as they grew. Una saw his work in stone as a real kinship which awakened “strengths in himself unknown before” much like a conversion experience. In 1920, Jeffers began to build Hawk Tower, which was for Una. It perched solidly on the other side of the garden looking out into the bay. It had four floors and included a dungeon and a secret staircase. They would often share their last glass of wine together at the end of the day, with the boys climbing up and around the stones, as they gazed from the top out to the ocean and the natural world that surrounded them on every side.

Visiting this place was a real inspiration for me. The town of Carmel, which has become a toney playground for the monetarily gifted, has completely swallowed all of the land around Tor House. Only the original lot with the house, garden and tower remain, and, yes, alas- the view . It is small and personal in scale and yet gigantic in impact and implication. There is power in this place as it contains the mystical energy of the poet unleashed. In the details of family, and celtic folklore, and in the treasures from the Orient and the “Isles,” the sense of something beautifully loved and felt and then expressed comes through with a redolence worthy of the finest reverie.
The front room in Tor House is the guest bedroom which has the best view of the sea. Jeffers wrote a poem to this room or more specifically to the bed which gives it its name.
The Bed By the Window

I chose the bed down-stairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed
When we built the house; it is ready waiting,
Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth, who hardly suspects
Its latter purpose. I often regard it,
With neither dislike nor desire: rather with both, so equaled
That they kill each other and a crystalline interest
Remains alone. We are safe to finish what we have to finish;
And then it will sound rather like music
When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock and sky
Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: “Come, Jeffers.”

Una Jeffers died in Robin’s arms in this bed in 1950. Twelve years later, with his family nearby, Robin heard the “thump of the daemon’s staff” and was gone from his home of stone. His ashes, their ashes were sprinkled in the garden amongst the rocks and flowers between Hawk Tower and Tor House. A fitting epitaph for these two and an embodiment of the place which they created is provided by the final lines of Jeffers’ poem “Credo”

“The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”