The river’s granite boulders and jade waters teach firsthand how water takes the path of least resistance. Since I have been visiting this same place for the last forty-five summers and with the exception of a new wash of gravel or a fallen tree that changes the depth of a hole, I tell him that the river will remain the same. This point in Robinson Jeffers’ literary career represents an extension of his work into a greater awareness of wilderness, and also an extension of “Jeffers Country” up the Big Sur River beyond the town of Big Sur.My son and I sit on a boulder in the Yuba River when he asks if the river looked this way a hundred years ago. This great wall of stone might be seen by the poet as the very womb of the stone on which he’d been reborn.Ī poem from the following winter, Night Without Sleep, presents a more hauntingly beautiful image of Ventana Creek’s “pathless gorge.” The 1936 lyric The Beaks of Eagles, which inspired the Beach Boys song of the same name, also appears to have been inspired-in part-by the same backcountry trip. There is a intimate, personified presence in the rock, for this monolith hidden alone in the mountains is made of granite-the very rock that gave birth to the poet himself at Carmel Point years before. The title of the poem, Oh Lovely Rock, might seem rather trite, though there is a sense in which the title may be appropriate, in that it relates to rock’s “childlike loveliness.” The rock’s face appears aside the face of Jeffers’ son Garth and Garth’s friend in the poet’s mind. It might not have helped that he didn't bring a bedroll.

The poem imparts a sense of the poet standing watch past midnight, but it is more likely he simply had trouble sleeping on gravel. No granite rock in the canyon of Ventana Creek compares to it. Photos: The only likely match, IMHO, for the rock that inspired this poem is the cone-shaped granite rock below Ventana Double Cone, slightly to the right. Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938).

Tor house jefferson