It would seem, then, that it is through their 'immensity' that these two kinds of space—the space of intimacy and world space—blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical. . . .
     This coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence, is a very concrete thing. . . . In this coexistentialism every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space.... (Bachelard 203)

1. In such lyrics as "To the Stone-Cutters," "To the House," and "To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House" from Tamar and Other Poems (1924), Robinson Jeffers rebuilds his stone house into a metaphor of a dreaming self. The house accrues words and images and expands to inhabit the poetic space of its creator's imagination. His building and writing intertwine to establish a border country between intimate and immense space, between a human, cultured world and the natural world that contains the human. The dreamed reality of the house, rooted in poetic form yet connected to place, becomes a threshold composed of the earth and human that mirrors the fluid nature of the poet's existence as he inhabits the land. Through the parallel creative acts of building and writing, Jeffers attempts to transform the continent's edge into a habitable and meaningful place, a "center of all space" that opens him, intimately, to the immensity of the world. Yet house and universe pull Jeffers in opposing directions. He longs for immersion in the here, in nature and a particular place, yet he seeks transcendence of place for apprehension of a God out there. Jeffers' house and coast landscape, then, form a geography of images—rock, hawk, ocean, cliff, house, continent—that lays out a map of his poetics.

2. In this paper, I will focus primarily on "To the House," a poem that at first glance seems a simple, clear expression of the poet building himself into the land by dreaming its geologic past and handling its stones—the poem a mimesis of building, the way Jeffers imaginatively and psychically immerses himself in a local habitation. "To the House" illustrates a moment of being in which Jeffers attempts to create a harmony between self and nature by imagining the creation of his house from geologic inception to his quarrying and placing of the stones. He contemplates geologic time, records the violence of elemental processes, and yet absorbs and personalizes nature's vastness within the imaginative space of the poem. He even considers a teleological purpose to geologic time and human actions—the earth's organic processes yielding the materials for human habitation. He imagines into poetry an intimate space created "naturally" from the landscape.

3. However, the play of images also raises questions as to how much the poem represents fantasy or desire—the unearthing and heaping of stones and images, and especially Jeffers' ambiguous relationship to an ocean and earth which he needs to engender as masculine and feminine reveal his psychic struggling. Earth, sea, rock, house are shaped as mother, lover, and child, as alchemical elements whose transformations into images of sexual union, baptism, and marriage reveal a crucible of ideas of nature and possibilities for inhabiting the natural world. In this molten mass, "To the House" represents core issues with which Jeffers wrestles as he develops his poetics of nature. It is a complex poem that ultimately turns in contradictory directions, the speaker wishing for a personal meaning, for psychic and physical integration to emerge from his contact with elemental nature that will belie his intimations of inhumanism.

4. In "To the House," Jeffers needs a faith, a dream of reposeful habitation, to establish himself in his landscape. And the act of imposing an image or idea onto home, onto this potent symbol of intimate space, also works to create the landscape in which he establishes himself (as we all dream our way into a home). The psychic landscape becomes superimposed on the physical place, just as the stones in this poem are transformed from quarry rock to house, from granite to "bones of the old mother" to human artifacts.

To the House I am heaping the bones of the old mother to build us a hold against the host of the air; Granite the blood-heat of her youth Held molten in hot darkness against the heart Hardened to temper under the feet Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow And march from the remotest west. This is the primitive rock, here in the wet Quarry under the shadow of waves Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone Baptized from that abysmal font The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you. (CP I: 5)

5. Natural processes are invoked and imagined into forms and relationships that parallel Jeffers' acts of marriage, house-building, and creating. They confirm Jeffers' life by naturalizing his actions and beliefs. Earth and ocean are set (ambiguously, as we shall see) in a nuptial embrace, one that is erotic and violent, that partakes of religious and marital images, as well as martial ones. The child of this passion is stone, which in turn becomes the source of home for Jeffers and his family, the element to be worked creatively into nurturing, protective form. The elemental, inhuman outside is brought inside, into an intimate, humanized space—a place in which poems may be written.

6. The poem is about building, merging, settling, yet this settling is fraught with difficulties and comes about only through conflict between the poet and nature's elemental forces which he must name, define, and order. In many ways, the poem is about marriage—the desires and fantasies and necessities. The poem is addressed to the house itself, but Jeffers speaks to "us" in the second line—seemingly to Una and himself.¹ This blurring of address signals a pervasive blurring of identities: earth/mother/house/lover, as well as the protean sexual identity and role of the ocean.

7. Through the acts of building and poetic rendering and contemplation, Jeffers attempts to unite these various elements and loves, to create a house that is home, that makes the "us" an organic part of the land. His building becomes a matrimonial act in the final "bonds," but an intimate wedding to the land achieved only through witnessing the violent struggle of elemental forces. The house is created from the earth and ocean's stone children ("each stone/ Baptized from that abysmal font"), yet it is also a fortress built as "a hold against the host of the air." The poem is a dream of finding place, of rooting through the placing of rock on rock, of fulfillment or the promise of fulfillment, yet a fulfillment wracked with the anxiety of struggle and an undertone, as constant as the waves, of nature's final disinterestedness.

8. Jeffers attempts to "affirm" the house, the place where the dreaming self takes root in the landscape, by constructing an intimate relationship between elemental and human lovers. This relationship, though, includes a mimesis of violence. The ocean cavalry tempers the molten earth under its feet into bone (and then, in a transformed relationship, embraces or "mouths" with its waves the bone quarry before marriage "bonds" may be given). This bone is exhumed by the speaker to build his house, his sanctuary for "us." The mother seems to be killed in the first line, or is already dead. In essence, Jeffers naturalizes this act and his own alteration of the landscape by equating it with the geologic processes of transformation described in the poem. The weird and violent edge remains, though, in the fusions of geologic/sexual imagery. Even the stone children take on an ominous nature, seeming to exist only by the mother being cannibalized—the stones are "the bones of the old mother."

9. The nature of this intimacy, then, becomes a primary focus of the poem, manifested both through the play of elements and Jeffers' engenderings of earth and ocean. Even as he depicts humans as fragile and severed from the natural world in the first lines—the need to build a house to protect "us" from the "host of the air"—he also constructs a poem that coalesces and creates order—a house—out of the elements. But as the ambiguity of "host" suggests, this intimacy cuts several ways. Jeffers uses host in the sense of a swarm, an army, a frightening and destructive force which he witnesses the coast wind and storms to be. He portrays his stone house as a hold against the wind. The wind is also a host of the land, one of its elemental owners who threatens to destroy human settlers. Building becomes a battle, at least a defensive one, against the elements with which the poet/builder seeks harmony.

10. The house as fortress protects while the act of construction engages the inhabitant in the land. Building provides a way to actively inhabit a violent landscape that finally yields a wedding of self and nature. As phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, "We have to participate in the dramatic cosmic events sustained by the combatant house." A house threatened by storm

invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. . . . Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. (46-47)

11. This image of the house as a place that secures for the inhabitant an intimate contact with even the most violent elements of nature has a fascinating precedent in Una's and Robinson's relationship, one which sheds light on their shared dream of their house as a mythic center of intimate being. Their son, Donnan Jeffers, reports in "Some Notes on the Building of Tor House" that his mother kept over her desk, among many cherished pictures and photographs, the picture of an isolated hut:

Amongst these is a little etching of a cottage at sunset on a rugged shore, surrounded by outcroppings of stone, a dim light shining from one window. The sky is dark with storm clouds and a high wind is blowing, as is evidenced by the smoke which is hurled almost horizontally from the chimney and by the bending branches of the tortured tree which stands beside the cabin.      . . . Una Jeffers once said that this little etching was the first gift to her from Robinson when he was courting her, far in the southland, before either of them had ever seen Carmel. If so, the gift was a singularly prophetic one. (111)

12. This cottage, with its solitary light shining from a window, provides the dream archetype of their dwelling. The "prophecy" seems a self-fulfilling one, whether conscious or not. The etching of the cottage provided an image for their building outward, for making an intimate, shared space in the world. And through the image they moved inward, into the values and meanings contained in the archetype of the hut. Bachelard muses on the meaning of just such an image of a cottage, or "hermit's hut":

A hermit's hut. . . . Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb 'to inhabit.' The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend there exists no adjoining hut. . . . our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God.... And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches 'of this world.' It possesses the felicity of intense poverty.... (31-32, 36)

13. The cottage becomes a physical hold against elemental hosts, as well against the human world; it simultaneously transforms into a cosmic house in the dweller's mind where a sacralized universe of self may dwell "outside" of the material universe, even as the cottage locates the inhabitant within the world. For Jeffers, to build his house out of the earth itself becomes at once a way to wall out and intimately locate himself at the core of violent, elemental creation.

14. In "To the House" (which resembles a poetic rendering of the "little etching") Jeffers attempts to wed human and natural experience when he invokes and orders the four elements in a crucible of creation that parallels the imagery of medieval alchemy. The poem moves from earth and air in the first two lines to fire in the "molten" rock held in "hot darkness against the heart," to water in the "ocean cavalry" that "tempers" the passion/fire/molten rock into stone. Further, just as medieval alchemists cast their art in language and images that "wed" metals and other elements (associated with the humours, or human emotions), often defining elements as masculine and feminine to create a hermaphroditic or androgynous "gold," Jeffers similarly engenders and weds earth and ocean to yield a stone child, the "gold" of granite which composes his home. Ocean and earth are established, in traditional terms, as sexual opposites: the earth is molten, blood-hot, dark; the sea is cold with its snow-maned waves whose surfaces are light-struck as they mouth the dawn. Further, the classical image of the sea as thundering horses rides on a poetic tradition that defines the sea, temporarily at least, as a masculine, active, shape-giving force. These opposites converge on the shoreline (the "wet quarry" suggesting a vaginal entrance to the mother's, or lover's, womb), where their energies collide—the "feet/ Of the ocean cavalry" temper the earth's blood-heat and create the stone.²

15. Crucial to this dynamic is that the poet identifies himself with this masculine sea. Notably, his one visible act is "heaping the bones of the old mother"—quarrying, moving, and shape-shifting the rock. Just as the sea transforms the earth, the stone is again "tempered" or transformed by the speaker into a home, and poem. He may all but disappear from the poem's scene and action, except as agent of abstract thought and the word-tissue of images at play, but he implicitly enters and emerges from the mother as a source of creative energy. The poet/builder himself becomes the active and ordering principle, in essence taking over the ocean's efforts. The mother herself is more passive—old, perhaps dead as the first line suggests, inactive and there to be acted upon. Or if she is not dead, she is being ritually dismembered for the sake of the lovers' home, the locus of the poets' creative journey—a naturalized ritual that replicates the action of the ocean upon this old mother.³

16. But how does this mother earth become a lover by the poem's conclusion, when feminine earth and masculine sea become generative lovers, their marriage "bonds" affirming the creation of Jeffers's house? Erich Neumann's comparative analysis of ancient art and mythology in The Great Mother helps to shed light on Jeffers's shifting uses of gender images and roles for the earth and ocean, as well as how these work for the poet to achieve his bonds between home and the natural world.

17. Jeffers reaches for the "primitive rock," for primal energies of passion and creation, and this quest takes him into an earth mother who begins to sound not old but like a procreative lover—the "wet/ Quarry under the shadow of waves/ Whose hollows mouthed the dawn." The ocean—for a moment a masculine principle that conceives stone children—reverts to a Jeffersian feminine principle, an "abysmal font" —the deep ocean, not merely its surface—whose wave-mouths cover the wet quarry. Neumann points out:

The positive femininity of the womb appears as a mouth. . . and on the basis of this positive symbolic equation the mouth, as 'upper womb,' is the birthplace of the breath and the word, the Logos. (168)

18. The font and waves of the ocean merge with the earth's wet quarry to invoke an image of the Great Mother's womb. This primal place is associated for Jeffers with a feminine abyss—bottomless and unknowable, though alluring and generative. The language of "darkness," "shadow," "hollows," "abysmal" all suggest a descent into a netherworld, held in awe yet longed for. That this quarry is filled with the granite stones, the mother's bones as Jeffers names them, suggests another link with ancient symbology regarding the womb in the motif of the "vagina dentata." Neumann, scanning images and myths from Africa, Egypt, and the New World, writes:

Similarly, the destructive side of the Feminine, the destructive and deathly womb, appears most frequently in the archetypal form of a mouth bristling with teeth. ...[T]he hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman. (168)

19. In light of this, the poem holds elements of the masculine hero's descent into a feminized shadow world, into the anima, the return from which yields creative energy, insight, and integration, all represented in this poem through the final image of the integrated, "affirmed" house. Stone and word become integrated. The quarrying of rocks to build the house becomes entwined with the poet's journey to quarry the inspirational "breath and ... word, the Logos" from the ocean/earth's womb. Intimate and immense space (to return to Bachelard)—the poet's breath and vast creation— are bound together. Further, quarrying the bone-rocks (or teeth, meat-eating fish, hellhounds, and so on in various myths) transforms the terrible mother into a woman apparently 'safe' for the male hero, a woman who can become a lover.

20. This consummation is followed by a giving of bonds between sea and earth that even completes the alchemical marriage of sexual opposites. "Bonds" seems a playful choice for Jeffers. Most essentially, it means a binding or uniting force that maintains a union—a meaning, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, commonly associated with phrases referring to "marriage bonds." Yet "bonds" is also a masonry term for binding bricks or stones into a structure by overlapping them. The house, then, provides form for a human alchemy through the bonding of lovers. And the house is "affirmed" by the giving of bonds between the sea and earth, the elemental lovers whose union both creates and baptizes—legitimates and makes holy in a kind of natural religion—the stones. The house becomes bound to the natural scheme of creation, and by extension so do its inhabitants. Jeffers thus requires the earth to fulfill dual needs: to simultaneously be ancient mother, the source of his geologic and transcendent vision, and the youthful, procreative source of stone (and word) by which he may inhabit the land.

21. This ending, though, occurs only by means of a hermaphroditic sea that slips back and forth between traditionally conceived gender roles. The images themselves resist yielding a clear schema of masculine/feminine creation for which Jeffers seems to strive, and the language modifying these images reveals another level of energy, of erotic energy that reveals both a longing for and awe of a feminine other. The final affirmation and baptism are arrived at only by passing through images of a violent passion. Nevertheless, this alchemy fits with the traditionally-conceived masculine principle of the mysterium tremendum, of power and wrath, which Everson, in The Excesses of God, borrows from Rudolf Otto to explain Jeffers's poetry (98), and which he elsewhere calls Jeffers's sexuality of wrath (152).

22. While it seems natural for the shape-shifting sea and shore to carry so many meanings, this conflation of masculine/feminine and mother/lover images is a great deal for one poem to sustain. It suggests that Jeffers struggles against accepting the word as coming from a purely feminine source—a struggle elucidated in "Continent's End" when he turns from the "mother" ocean to a transcendent sky-god in the "eye of fire" as his ultimate font of inspiration (CP I: 16-17). Even in "To the House," though, Jeffers's vacillating images of the ocean's gender suggest his resistance to relinquishing the oceanic source of his poetic creation to a purely female Logos. By tempering, and dismembering, the dominant mother, the poem works toward creating a feminine force bound to the masculine (and vice versa). The masculine sea, an inseminating force, becomes necessary for the earth's solidity and productivity. The "secret earth" allures Jeffers, yet he must expose and order it—"bond" it to a masculine principle before each stone may be baptized and thus ordained in a holy religion of nature that embraces his "little house."

23. Jeffers' choice of "secret" is itself somewhat mysterious. Is this the sexual, generative "secret" of the earth's creative forces which, finally, Jeffers cannot fully know but only imagine, in spite of the penetration of his scientific and poetic mind? Is it the secret earth or the earth that secretes its secrets—the molten lava emerging and hardening, the earth at its openings serving as mimesis of human sexuality, our organs that secrete and allure, and that remain secret, mysterious?

24. Perhaps the metamorphic imagery reveals an anxiety that emerges in many of Jeffers's poems, such as "Post-Mortem" and "Continent's End." Jeffers wrestles with a vision of elemental nature that refuses to yield for him a masculine source or root, that returns relentlessly to an utterly feminine source that he sees as regenerative and, therefore, trapped in cycles of passion and death as in so many poems.

25. The symbol of stone for Jeffers, though, ultimately lies beyond this play of creation and also confirms his quest for a passionless (equated for him with masculine) power. In "Rock and Hawk," Jeffers admires

. . . the falcon's Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, . . . . (CP 2: 416)

26. Jeffers ultimately longs for "Fierce consciousness joined with final/ Disinterestedness." The falcon represents an observing self divorced from desire and passion, and rock is the inhumanist God, is "calm death," the end of any ego-self.

27. However, to impose this symbolism, which developed over time for Jeffers, upon the much earlier "To the House" could imply a resolution to the poem that does not cohere. Jeffers does not arrive at this vision of a stony, ascetic mysticism here. He seems more concerned with finding a way into the mother /lover earth. It seems he feels a deep need to "affirm" his life, to himself be "baptized" through his house on the coast before he may move toward his later poems and images of a universe indifferent to human needs and desire, before he may move poetically toward the "shore opposite humanity." However, "Rock and Hawk" helps to explain Jeffers' ambiguous representations of an engendered earth and sea. As "Continent's End" and other poems in Tamar reveal, Jeffers is already seeking a way beyond the cycles of creation and death which he witnesses in the natural world.

28. I think it is fair to say that the poem raises but fails to resolve issues of the sources of creative energy, both human and elemental, as well as the relationship between the two. But this failure signals powerful and real ambiguities which feed Jeffers' poetry. While his alchemy may not always yield gold, it often yields strange and interesting poetic substances. Jeffers repeatedly focuses on how the natural world creates and destroys through passion and violence. He desires a mystic's vision and experience of a oneness that takes him out of time, out of a material, passion-bound creation often encoded as feminine, though he repeatedly seeks this vision through immersion in the processes of time and the natural world. That this way involves denial, or transcendence, of a feminized principle of generation, of an earth configured as mother-source but also death, suggests that Jeffers absorbed cultural stereotypes of representations of the earth and the feminine. It also reveals the Oedipal pattern embedded in his representations of earth, the here, as mother, and the beyond, the out there of a god/father. ⁴

29. Yet "To the House" and his other house-building poems provide Jeffers an essential contact with the land. His rock-building feeds his poetry, both arts opening him to perceptions of how we are bound to the world. Words and muscle and bone transform rock into foundation and walls. The house is naturalized. The elemental and human worlds give bonds to one another. Outside is brought inside, so that to go inside is to enter the mother's bones, to wander over millions of years of geologic life.

30. Jeffers's early house-building poems, then, reveal his longing for a habitable world, a domestic space in wild and elemental nature that protects and nurtures the dreaming human inhabitant. They also reveal the fantasies and contradictions that arise when human desire and imagination shape perceptions of the land. His very determination to see nature objectively feeds the tensions in his poems, for his vision reveals to him how nature resists his longings. Jeffers is moving away from humanist and romantic resolutions that seek ultimate meaning and value in the human mind and imagination, even as his poetry at times continues to be influenced by a romantic dialectic of art versus nature—where the very acts of creating and thinking seem to separate the self from the matrix of creation. Still, in many poems Jeffers uses the fierce consciousness of his existence (to modify Bachelard) in relation to immense nature to achieve a powerful vision of nature that asserts its inhuman reality. He sees this as a necessary truth in any honest search for an honest life, a search that also offers us a perception of how one's home can become "the center of all space"—a meaningful, human place to live and create within the natural world.

Santa Clara University, California

1.    And perhaps this 'us' includes his sons. The poem fulfills and affirms mythically the life he is already leading: by the time Jeffers writes this poem, he has already completed this settling and is a father as well as husband.

2.    Passion and violence create. This "fact" of the natural world is at the core of Jeffers' poetic vision. The harsh coastal landscape that Jeffers inhabits feeds and reaffirms this vision, but it is also a way of seeing existence that is part of his character. As William Everson argues at length in The Excesses of God:, Jeffers arrives at a vision of an impersonal God, a masculine, emotionally detached Uranian figure, who creates through the violence of conflict. This God is a fusion of the Calvinism under which Jeffers was raised by his father and the facts of scientific naturalism which Jeffers embraced. Jeffers looked out upon the natural world and could not otherwise resolve the violence he witnessed with any idea of a loving God. Yet Jeffers himself is aware of his proclivity to gaze upon the violence of the world and to frame out of his picture signs of harmony. (He is the polar opposite of John Muir, who claims for nature a similar primacy but who focuses almost exclusively on processes of harmony and creation, attempting to elide the violent side of nature). In the dialogue of "Self-Criticism in February," (CP, 2, 561), he chides himself:

      It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.

Even as he accepts this criticism, he responds:

      But the present time is not pastoral, but founded      On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not      Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.

This need is to present "the real God," the inhuman God who is not "love" but the beauty of the elemental play of energy in the universe. As in his poem, "The Excesses of God," Jeffers' God signifies 'himself' by the "unnecessary excess" of beauty in the world.

As Robert Zaller argues in The Cliffs of Solitude, Jeffers' God is a negation of the self, but if the self remains quiet, contemplative, removed from passion, one experiences God as a positive force in "natural beauty." Zaller sees this "aesthetics" of natural beauty as replacing Jeffers' earlier "pure pantheism." Yet it leads Jeffers to the paradox of renunciation of desire as a desire in itself. A dialectical tension is created between desire for and renunciation of the objects of natural beauty. Zaller claims that Jeffers' Oedipal gratification of the mother is sublimated in his artistic and "primitive religious apprehension of the landscape." Jeffers comes to a romantic conception of the landscape, realizing it as divine immanence: "landscape is not the visible world as such but man's transcendent revisualization of it" (78-80). In "Credo," though, Jeffers attempts to distinguish between the human-imagined landscape and a visible world indifferent to our creations. It seems only sometimes divine immanence.

3.    This identification of the poet with a primal masculine force is made even more explicitly in the final lines of "Continent's End," though this poem reveals Jeffers' need to move beyond the natural world for the identification to hold.

4.    Zaller, in The Cliffs of Solitude, has traced out the Oedipal patterns in many of Jeffers' poems, primarily his narratives, but they hold true for many of the lyrics as well. He shows how Jeffers repeatedly, in various forms, yields to the Mother, associated with death and earth, yet seeks apotheosis through an internalized Father (which Zaller sees as a central problem of Jeffers' work, recovering and transforming into the poetic self the absent father). This father takes on Nietzschean dimensions of the detached, indifferent hermit (living, one might say, in his hermit's hut), a representation that also informs Jeffers' conceptions of God (5-14). Zaller's Oedipal reading of Jeffers' career insightfully analyzes how Jeffers's "absent father" raised questions in his psyche of an absent God (45-65), and the ways that images of mother, earth, death, and a feminized passion become entwined in the poetry.