ing abroad due to the commencement of World War I and Una’s pregnancy. The beginning of the war caused him great angst because “he was torn between an idealism that drove him toward enlistment despite domestic ties and the beginning of a philosophical pacifism” (Brophy 3). Also very painful for Jeffers was the death of his first daughter, Maeve, one day after she was born (Zaller xiii). In September of 1914, Una and Jeffers moved to Carmel, California whose “rocky, fog-bound coast may have seemed the closest available approximation of England to Jeffers” (Zaller 3). Unfortunately their new-found happiness was not to last. On December 20th of 1914, Jeffers’s father died. Dr. Jeffers’s death was “deeply disquieting” to Jeffers who expressed his mourning through poems such as “To His Father” and “The Year of Mourning” (Butterfield 415). Right around the time Jeffers published his second book, Californians, Una gave birth to twin boys, Donnan and Garth. When the boys were 3 years old, the Jeffers family bought a piece of land that had a magnificent view of Carmel Bay and Point Lobos. Robinson Jeffers immediately began building a stone cottage by hand using only stones from his land. When the house was finished, Jeffers began constructing what would become a “four-tiered, forty-foot tower, five years abuilding, from which he could overlook the Pacific, the coastal landscape south toward the Big Sur, and the night sky filled with brilliant stars” (Brophy 4). This tower was very important to his family and influential and evident in his poetry. Though his building projects took several years, Jeffers was constantly writing in the meantime. “Jeffers’s daily schedule, since the early 1920s expansion of Tor House, was unswerving: writing in the mornings, usually in the upper floor of his cottage, and stone work or tree-planting in the...
