Just Because: 'Wonder and Joy'

Tor House and Hawk Tower                                         Hella Mitschke Rothwell

In a happy example of things going around and coming around, an appreciation of this poem by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) led to the discovery that he was the one who built a fascinatingly quirky home in Carmel that many often wonder about. Born in Pennsylvania, Jeffers was accepted into Occidental College in Los Angeles at the age of 16, graduated, and moved on to the University of Southern California. He adopted the state as his own, and many of his poems celebrate its central coastal area. In 1913, Jeffers and his wife (after a sojourn in Europe to escape the commotion caused by their pre-marriage affair) moved to Carmel, where they built Tor House and later added the rather Gothic Hawk Tower (http://www.torhouse.org/history.htm), which Jeffers built himself. In 1922, he wrote, "Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has ... ." from Poem-a-Day:

The things that one grows tired of—O, be sure
They are only foolish artificial things!
Can a bird ever tire of having wings?
And I, so long as life and sense endure,
(Or brief be they!) shall nevermore inure
My heart to the recurrence of the springs,
Of gray dawns, the gracious evenings,
The infinite wheeling stars. A wonder pure
Must ever well within me to behold
Venus decline; or great Orion, whose belt
Is studded with three nails of burning gold,
Ascend the winter heaven. Who never felt
This wondering joy may yet be good or great:
But envy him not: he is not fortunate.