Writing Spaces: Living Poetry

A few notes from a recent visit to Tor House and Hawk Tower in Carmel, on the ocean, the poetic domain of Robinson and Una Jeffers. The structures built of coastal stones brought up one by one from the beach (mornings for writing poetry, afternoons for hauling and situating stones).  Hawk Tower evokes the sixty-five Irish round towers from early Medieval times—originally bell towers and lookouts, or used to collect magnetic energy. The place is quintessential poetry—words everywhere.  On beams, over door frames, chiseled in stones, in the very fabric of the house and gardens.

A Welsh epigram, "Let the grandchildren gather the apples"; lines from The Faerie Queen; a motto in French, "Do well and let them talk"; another in Latin, "Lovers construct their own dreams"; Vergil's "Easy is the descent";

and on a stone in the garden, "County Mayo." The date of Thomas Hardy's death chiseled into a stone in the front room; a headstone for the English bulldog in the garden, honored also by a poem.

. cabinets of books

. an unabridged dictionary lying open, as my father's always did

in house and garden, pieces of stone or tile from all around the world:  tiny faces from Teotihuacan, lava from Mt. Vesuvius and from Hawaii, glassy obsidian, fossil shells, green Connemara marble (with Celtic cross), Big Sur jade, ballast from ships and slate from billiard tables, painted tiles on the garden path from Italy and Spain, Babylonian temple tile (recalling the many languages spoken by Jeffers's father and himself), fragments of Ossian's grave and of green ceramic from the Temple of Heaven in Peking, Roman mosaic from North Africa, a mill stone from a visit to Taos

. a Roman statue from John Singer Sargent, boy and dolphin

. a little worn stone goddess, Chinese

. gargoyles (rain gutters) on the tower

. the kitchen, also with a sea window, built over an Ohlone cooking site (fragments of abalone shell); a stone mortar and pestle also invokes them

. a Welsh dresser in the kitchen, with earthenware dishes (deep orange Jugtown pottery from North Carolina) and more mottos; a bell from the Carmel Mission

. in the dining room:

wood carvings by a gravestone cutter from Monterey

handmade floor tiles (pink dust from the soft tiles loosened by square dancing)

Una's grandmother's spinning wheel

a Narwhal tusk (evoking Una's unicorn)

. the moor gate and the sea gate

. map of Ireland marking the round towers

. the window beside the bed holding the ocean

. Una's desk for writing letters

. music everywhere, a melodeon in every room; playing a chord on the piano also played by Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, James Cagney, Martha Graham

image:  Hawk Tower