We were saddened this week to learn of the death of Donald Hall, one of the great formalist poets to arise in the second half of the 20th century. Hall wrote scores of works. He was a talented playwright, a superb memoirist, and an omnicompetent anthologist.
As a poet he was a perfectionist, revising each poem and revising it again until it satisfied him. For Hall, as for all great poets, writing was work, not the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as the equally hardworking William Wordsworth rather misleadingly put it. Hall attended Phillips Exeter and Harvard, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1951. But although he is sometimes called an “academic” poet because he held teaching posts—Stanford, Bennington, Michigan—there is little recondite and nothing pretentious about Hall’s poems.
Hall’s verse is clearly the product of a keen intelligence, and it is often unearthly, but it appealed far beyond the suffocating confines of poetry magazines. In 1972 he married the poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995. Just before she died he wrote “An old life,” first published in the New Criterion.
Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day’s lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.