Poet Donald Hall died on Saturday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 89. The obit in the New York Times has a photo of him receiving the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2011.
Hall was prolific, writing children’s books, memoirs, and quite a number of books of poetry. His memoir “String too short to be saved” is about farm life in New Hampshire with his grandparents. The title comes from an old story about a very frugal grandmother. After she died they found box with small pieces of string and the label “string too short to be saved.”
Many of his poems were about farming or nature; probably the reason I like them so much. I also was an admirer of his wife Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995. I have left instructions for one of her poems, “Let Evening Come,” to be read at my funeral, and Linda has ordered a quote from that poem engraved on her tombstone.
Hall and Kenyon chose the poems for her collection “Otherwise” just before she died. Here is a portion of a poem entitled “Last Days.” It is lovely and one of the saddest poems I have ever read.
...he saw how weak she felt,
and said maybe not now; maybe
later. Jane shook her head: “Now,” she said.
“We have to finish it now.”
Later, as she slid exhausted into sleep,
she said, “Wasn’t that fun?
To work together? Wasn’t that fun?”
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