Tor house carmel inside9/7/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In the 1932 poem "The Bed by the Window," Jeffers foretold "the bed downstairs by the sea window" as his deathbed. We didn't get to see the upstairs room where Jeffers worked at his art, but Van Dam did walk us through the guest room, which is significant for other reasons. On visits to see Jeffers in the 1930s, celebrities such as George Gershwin and Charlie Chaplin played the instrument. A Steinway grand piano sits near a window that provides a panoramic view of Carmel Bay. Fireplaces - 11 in all - are in every room. Inside, the house looks like something straight out of a Dickens novel. ![]() "From the very beginning, it was much more than just a place to live." "So much of them is in this house," Van Dam said. ![]() As the building came together, Jeffers incorporated gifts from friends and other items of sentimental value: a green tile from a temple in Beijing, a child's gravestone from Ireland, a piece of lava from Kilauea in Hawaii. This process prompted the poet to name the structure Tor, a Celtic word meaning "high cliff."īecause Jeffers and his wife shared a passion for Ireland, England and the romanticism of the Old World, the poet modeled the house after a Tudor barn in England. My tour began in the garage, where docent and retired English professor Denis Van Dam explained how Jeffers and his wife, Una (pronounced you-na), purchased the land in 1914 and deemed it their "inevitable place." The docent used photos to depict how Jeffers lugged granite boulders from the shoreline up the hill to build the house. The experience gives visitors a heartwarming insight into the isolated but intriguing life of Carmel's only laureate. Tours cost $7 and include readings of some of Jeffers' most enduring poems. Today, visitors to Carmel can explore the eccentric house and tower on an hourlong tour guided by volunteers from the nonprofit Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation. He wrote all of this poetry in an upstairs room in Tor House, which he built almost entirely by himself. From 1919 to 1962, Jeffers wrote about 400 free-verse poems extolling the natural beauty of the Monterey County coast. That poet was Robinson Jeffers, an underappreciated California scribe who, in his heyday, was more prolific than Robert Frost. ![]()
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