To The House

By Robinson Jeffers 1887–1962 Robinson Jeffers

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.

Robinson Jeffers, “To the House” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988).© 1938, Robinson Jeffers, renewed 1966 and copyright © Jeffers Literary Properties. Used by permission Stanford University Press.

Source: The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford University Press, 1988)

Biography

Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical languages. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania; when his family moved to . . .

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