(Donald Hall, who died on June 23, was buried on Saturday at Proctor Cemetery in Andover beside his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. At his funeral at the South Danbury Christian Church, Hall’s friends Mike Pride and Wesley McNair were the eulogists. Here is Pride’s eulogy.)
By MIKE PRIDE
Donald Hall lived his last 43 years on a farm. There he celebrated life’s joys and endured life’s sorrows. He lived on a farm but made a point of saying he was not a farmer. And yet as we look back on those years now, it is fair to say that he inherited from his grandfather the work ethic of a farmer. He became the Ox-Cart Man of his poem and children’s book. He chose a literary task, he labored till it was done right, he sold it, and he started the cycle again.
Through loss and illness and depression, he maintained this work ethic nearly to the end of his life. And, thank goodness, he also retained his sense of humor. Wes McNair and I opened an email from Kendel Currier a few weeks ago with a message from Don. He was coming home to hospice care and wanted us to speak at his funeral. The request came with an apology: “Tell them I can’t give them an exact date.”
Now this date has arrived, and while we grieve for Don and his family, surely this is a day to celebrate his work and his long life well lived.
What better way to begin than with a poem he called, “The Poem.” It is a brief ode to Don’s mania for revision, including his habit of sticking his drafts in a drawer and seeing them anew when he next opened the drawer.
.
It discovers by night
What the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a quiet row of machines.
Who knows
what it is thinking?
.
If Don were here today, he would have raised his hand and said, “Hold it, I’ve made some changes to that poem.”
Don and I met in 1979 when my publisher at the Concord Monitor asked him to speak with our news staff in Concord. We wanted to improve the writing in the paper and give young staffers from away a taste of New Hampshire. The session went so well I asked Don back again and again over the years to share his ideas about word choice, economy and concision, the mortal sin of dead metaphors, and the way good writing sounds, whether it is prose or poetry.
To one of these sessions, I brought a well-read copy of The Alligator Bride. As we talked about one of the poems in it, “The Man in the Dead Machine,” Don said: “Oh, I’ve made some changes in that.” He took my book and scribbled the revisions on the page in green ink. When I brought the book to a later session to use the story of these revisions in introducing Don, he grabbed it again and made more changes in red ink. When he published the poem in a later collection, he had changed it again.
This is all in keeping with Don’s own words about the mission and ambition of a poet. “I suggest,” he wrote, “that poets have a duty to write good poems and that their duty ends there.” “Remember that you work to make a star that will burn – outside you and even for a while after you – high in the sky.” And: “The poet’s role is to sit at his desk every morning and make poems until they are perfect.”
Don was a poet of place whose work transcended that place. He once told me: “Even people who live in southern California can imagine a maple tree.”
But place mattered, as family mattered. Don’s sense of place began, of course, when he was a boy who came during the summer to sweat in the fields of Eagle Pond Farm with his grandfather, Wesley Wells. Here is a poem called “The Whip-poor-will”:
.
As the last light
of June withdraws
the whip-poor-will sings
his clear brief notes
by the darkening house, then
rises abruptly from sandy
ground, a brown bird
in the near-night, soaring
over shed and woodshed
to far dark fields. When
he returns at dawn,
in my sleep I hear
his three syllables make
a man’s name, who slept
fifty years in this bed
and ploughed these fields:
WES-LEY-WELLS . . . WES-LEY-WELLS . . .
It is good
to wake early in high
summer with work to do,
and look out the window
at a ghost bird lifting away
to drowse all morning
in his grassy hut.
.
This poem conveys the essence of Don’s working life. The bond remained. Like grandfather, like grandson. Same bed, same place, and it was good to wake early in high summer with work to do.
Don and I became closer as the years passed. He began signing his notes to me, “Love, Don.” This took some getting used to. It did not seem “normal,” whatever that means. But I came to like it and to respond in kind. For all the talk about love in our culture, there isn’t enough of it.
What did this love mean? We never talked about it, but for him I think it meant admitting someone from a younger generation into his circle of friends. Death and dementia were shrinking this circle. I came to know the story of Don’s life as well as any younger man could. He said what he thought about everything. I’m a journalist, but he trusted me as a friend and confidant. For me, love meant helping Don in his declining years: visiting him, giving him a helping hand during his physical decline and connecting him with audiences. He loved it when a crowd gathered to hear him read and speak.
Our relationship took a turn after Don gave up poetry and began writing the pieces that became Essays after Eighty. I was writing history books by then, and we critiqued each other’s work. Sometimes love means telling hard truths.
Don had a habit of sprinkling commas in his prose as if from a salt shaker. Along with Alice Mattison and Linda Kunhardt and possibly others, I struck out all the stray ones I could find. “You CARE about commas!” he wrote, making this sound like the highest of praise.
The editor in me found it alarming that when it served the story, Don altered the facts. One time he even considered changing the year of his father’s death to improve the narrative. “1955, 1954,” he wrote me. “Who will notice?” In his great essay “Out the Window,” he named a few of the birds at his feeder in wintertime. I knew that only one of the birds he mentioned actually wintered in New Hampshire, and I sent along a couple of replacement birds.
And what did he give me? His critiques were written, but I could hear his bellow as I read them. “It’s discouraging to hear, but . . . I think it needs lots and lots of work. The paragraphing drives me nuts. . . You need to put action on the page, not a summary of action.”
Don was a poet of love, of course, and I am going to close with a love poem.
This poem – “Summer Kitchen” – also has a story behind it. Years ago, I drove Don to Cambridge for our regular annual session with the Nieman Fellows at Harvard. When he read “Summer Kitchen,” one listener described it as a scene observed through a poet’s eyes, much as an artist might see and paint it. No, no, not at all, Don replied. The poem began with sounds. He rattled off the long vowels of “Summer Kitchen” — “high, light, wine, sunshine” — and spoke of his pleasure in working “candle” and “miracle” into the rhyme scheme. With a poem, he said, if you get the sounds right, the scenes and the narrative will take care of themselves.
“Summer Kitchen” is about Don’s life with Jane Kenyon, who died at Eagle Pond Farm 23 years ago. Often in his poetry he sought to collapse time and history into a day or even a moment.
.
In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.
.
I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
.
“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
(Mike Pride is the editor emeritus of the “Monitor” and the retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. He lives in Bow and Goshen.)