On the Passing of Donald Hall
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On the night I met him, my teacher introduced him as a giant in the world of American Letters. He was bent under his years, but his voice was a soaring growl dancing over syllables and silence. Before I came to the reading that February evening, I had finished his desperately broken Without; a book about the loss of his wife, the exceptional and beautiful poet, Jane Kenyon. When we shook hands, I was not so much starstruck as aware of Donald Hall’s scale, both in years and in greatness. Let me explain what I mean by that, because we hear about “greatness” a lot often as a term more or less interchangeable with other superlatives.
Perhaps you have had occasion to encounter California’s Giant Sequoias. Some of them were young when Rome fell, and some were already old before the birth of Christ. The depth of their roots, the height of their tops, their sheer mass, is breathtaking. I would compare Hall to such a thing; he was a man who wrote for over seven decades with blistering honesty, humanity, grace, and terrible sorrow. His learning, his erudition, and his depth of knowledge made me feel like a chicken tree shot up one Spring next to a tree so big and so wide and so deep that I couldn’t really even take its measure.
So, when I read yesterday that he died at 89, it felt like I had rounded a corner and come upon a freshly fallen Sequoia; one that had been a point of reference in my life. I carry Hall’s book Writing Well into every composition class I teach. I went to my shelf and took down his book White Apples and the Taste of Stone, (which sits next to Otherwise by Jane Kenyon) and read his poem, “Affirmation,” whose last line has stayed with me for ten years:
“Affirmation”
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
So, weighted with years, a giant has fallen back to earth as he knew he must. He was a giant who held up light for the rest of us to see ourselves by, and now those poets he leaves behind must gather what light they have and hold it high in a darker sky.
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