Donald Hall

I read every single one.  I liked many.  I loved some.

My dear friend Ellen's mother, who died this past June, lived in Danbury, New Hampshire, just around the corner from Donald Hall, so I drove past his house several times when taking Ellen to visit her mother.  I stared and stared and stared, as if I might spy a new poem in the yard, while trying to not run off the road.

I feel closer to the poems of his wife, Jane Kenyon, who was nineteen years younger than her husband, and who died in 1995.  Ellen and I once visited her grave in Proctor Cemetery in the adjacent town of Andover but I had neglected to bring my camera.

Here's an architecturally amazing Donald Hall villanelle; it appeared in The New Yorker after the book of selected poems pictured above was published; as in many of his poems, the subject of this one is Jane Kenyon:

NYMPH AND SHEPHERD

She died a dozen times before I died,

And kept on dying, nymph of fatality.

I could not die but once although I tried.

I envied her.  She whooped, she laughed, she cried

As she contrived each fresh mortality,

Numberless lethal times before I died.

I plunged, I plugged, I twisted, and I sighed

While she achieved death's Paradise routinely.

I lagged however zealously I tried.

She writhed, she bucked, she rested, and, astride,

She posted, cantering on top of me

At least a hundred miles until I died.

I'd never blame you if you thought I lied

About her deadly prodigality.

She died a dozen times before I died

Who could not die so frequently.  I tried.