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Collected Poems
All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the
what else could it do?
―from " After Haying"
Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, New and Selected Poems , published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes― From Room to Room , The Boat of Quiet Hours , Let Evening Come , and Constance ―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils , four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova .
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the
what else could it do?
―from " After Haying"
Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, New and Selected Poems , published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.
Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes― From Room to Room , The Boat of Quiet Hours , Let Evening Come , and Constance ―as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils , four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova .
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2005
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1090 people want to read
About the author
Jane Kenyon
20 books103 followersJane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned both her BA and MA from the University of Michigan. While a student at the University of Michigan Kenyon met her future husband, the poet Donald Hall, who taught there. After her marriage, Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, a New Hampshire farm that had been in Hall’s family for generations.
Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”
The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come, her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”
Constance began Kenyon’s study of depression, and her work in this regard has been compared with that of the late poet Sylvia Plath. Comparing the two, Breslin wrote that “Kenyon’s language is much quieter, less self-dramatizing” than that of Plath, and where the earlier poet “would give herself up, writing her lyrical surrender to oblivion,… Kenyon fought to the end.” Breslin noted the absence of self-pity in Kenyon’s work, and the poet’s ability to separate from self and acknowledge the grief and emotional pain of others, as in her poems “Coats,” “Sleepers in Jaipur,” and “Gettysburg: July 1, 1863,” which imagines a mortally wounded soldier lying in wait for death on the historic battlefield.
New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Kenyon’s verse probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as Gary Roberts noted, her poetry was “acutely faithful to the familiarities and mysteries of home life, and it is distinguished by intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies.”
In Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), a posthumous collection containing twenty poems written just prior to her death as well as several taken from her earlier books, Kenyon “chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures,” according to Nation contributor Emily Gordon. As Muske added in the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon avoids sentimentality throughout Otherwise. “The poet here sears a housewife’
Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”
The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come, her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”
Constance began Kenyon’s study of depression, and her work in this regard has been compared with that of the late poet Sylvia Plath. Comparing the two, Breslin wrote that “Kenyon’s language is much quieter, less self-dramatizing” than that of Plath, and where the earlier poet “would give herself up, writing her lyrical surrender to oblivion,… Kenyon fought to the end.” Breslin noted the absence of self-pity in Kenyon’s work, and the poet’s ability to separate from self and acknowledge the grief and emotional pain of others, as in her poems “Coats,” “Sleepers in Jaipur,” and “Gettysburg: July 1, 1863,” which imagines a mortally wounded soldier lying in wait for death on the historic battlefield.
New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Kenyon’s verse probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as Gary Roberts noted, her poetry was “acutely faithful to the familiarities and mysteries of home life, and it is distinguished by intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies.”
In Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), a posthumous collection containing twenty poems written just prior to her death as well as several taken from her earlier books, Kenyon “chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures,” according to Nation contributor Emily Gordon. As Muske added in the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon avoids sentimentality throughout Otherwise. “The poet here sears a housewife’
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December 29, 2019
Often with a book of poetry--especially a collected book of poetry spanning over 300 pages, you are advised to take it piecemeal and slowly, savoring as you read another book with a plot. In the case of Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems, however, that might not be necessary. Although I can't argue a plot hides in these collected works, I can argue a discernible and growing voice does.
Granted, I'm predisposed to Kenyon's work because she speaks my language: New England, plants, animals, weather, dogs, small towns, small joys, and melancholia. But the deceiving simplicity with which she pulls it off! Almost matter of factly, she always gives you a surprising image, an unexpected adjective, a sharp noun or verb. And yes, quite often, the little unexpected turn that is the life of so many good poems.
Kenyon mines both her past (parents, grandparents, growing up in Ann Arbor, MI) and her latter days (as wife of Donald Hall--who's still kicking!-- in Wilmot, New Hampshire). She notices the little things in a quotidian life and renders poetry from it. Of course, there's her most famous poem, "Let Evening Come," on the back of the hardcover as well as p. 213. And there's the poem I teach each year in school ("Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School"), like an old friend throwing a surprise party as I turned the page to 116. But I was happy to make the acquaintance of many quieter joys--too many to number. I'll share two, though. Two that spoke to me for personal reasons:
Twilight: After Haying
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler,
reluctant to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)
The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed —
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
— sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen...the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses....
The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
It reminds me of Russian novels (which she loved, as these poems reveal)--Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album and certainly Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the scenes where Levin takes to the fields to work with the peasants. And here's another:
Things
The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound--
a small stone falling on a red leaf.
The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it and now she thrives....
Now is her time to thrive.
Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron's
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
The book wraps up with some Kenyon translations of another favorite, Anna Akhmatova. Here Kenyon takes Akhmatova's form verse and renders it into free verse. A kindred soul, Akhmatova also knew the power of the twist, the subtle, unexpected turn, the juxtaposition of the ordinary with a kindred surprise.
Another one of those frustratingly lovely poets who makes it look easy. Until you try to emulate her facility. Still, well worth rereading. As a dipper this time. With an old friend who left unexpectedly and almost cruelly, given she expected her husband to die and had to deal with it before learning that he would miraculously survive while she would be diagnosed--with leukemia-- which killed her at age 47.
For Jane Kenyon, Evening Came much too soon, and it's all our losses....
Granted, I'm predisposed to Kenyon's work because she speaks my language: New England, plants, animals, weather, dogs, small towns, small joys, and melancholia. But the deceiving simplicity with which she pulls it off! Almost matter of factly, she always gives you a surprising image, an unexpected adjective, a sharp noun or verb. And yes, quite often, the little unexpected turn that is the life of so many good poems.
Kenyon mines both her past (parents, grandparents, growing up in Ann Arbor, MI) and her latter days (as wife of Donald Hall--who's still kicking!-- in Wilmot, New Hampshire). She notices the little things in a quotidian life and renders poetry from it. Of course, there's her most famous poem, "Let Evening Come," on the back of the hardcover as well as p. 213. And there's the poem I teach each year in school ("Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School"), like an old friend throwing a surprise party as I turned the page to 116. But I was happy to make the acquaintance of many quieter joys--too many to number. I'll share two, though. Two that spoke to me for personal reasons:
Twilight: After Haying
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler,
reluctant to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)
The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed —
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
— sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen...the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses....
The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
It reminds me of Russian novels (which she loved, as these poems reveal)--Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album and certainly Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the scenes where Levin takes to the fields to work with the peasants. And here's another:
Things
The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow, reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound--
a small stone falling on a red leaf.
The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.
The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it and now she thrives....
Now is her time to thrive.
Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron's
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
The book wraps up with some Kenyon translations of another favorite, Anna Akhmatova. Here Kenyon takes Akhmatova's form verse and renders it into free verse. A kindred soul, Akhmatova also knew the power of the twist, the subtle, unexpected turn, the juxtaposition of the ordinary with a kindred surprise.
Another one of those frustratingly lovely poets who makes it look easy. Until you try to emulate her facility. Still, well worth rereading. As a dipper this time. With an old friend who left unexpectedly and almost cruelly, given she expected her husband to die and had to deal with it before learning that he would miraculously survive while she would be diagnosed--with leukemia-- which killed her at age 47.
For Jane Kenyon, Evening Came much too soon, and it's all our losses....
August 8, 2008
She makes it look easy. Deceptively simple writing. Blows me away every time I read it.
June 3, 2013
I love still lives. I don't know why. I know nothing about art, really. But a still life just lets me sit and look and think in a way that other art sometimes doesn't. I was thrilled when this book came in the mail, and I saw the cover up close. I pondered the cover for minutes before cracking the spine.
I don't always "get" poems that read like prose, and yet aren't prose poems. There may be nothing syntactically unique about them, although I am sure the words are chosen with care. They don't utilize meter or rhyme (or do they and I didn't notice?), they don't utilize sweeping metaphors, so why do they bother with line breaks at all? They read like someone speaking, and I sometimes just don't understand why that had to be said in a poem, if at all. The topics are often mundane as well, not overtly poetic - walking the dog, for instance. The part I love the most is one line, where the dog "imagines to the end that he is free." (After an Illness, Walking the Dog). So what purpose does the other 99% of the poem serve? Is it all just wasted words, telling the context simply to get to the point of the poem?
And then, I realize, maybe these poems are the still lives of the poetry world. After all, what point is there in a block of cheese and a knife resting on a plate? What is the point to the tablecloth? What was the point of painting it at all? And yet, how stunning, at the same time.
I really enjoyed these poems. They have subtlety. They make me sit and think. They make me reanalyze the kinds of poetry I am drawn to. I loved reading them in chronological order, seeing the massive shift after a death in the family. I need to read them again.
My favorites include but are not limited to "Woman, Why are you Weeping?", "The Shirt" (of course), "Depression", "Wash", "Dutch Interiors", the "Siesta" poems...
Here is a link to some online - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/j...
I don't always "get" poems that read like prose, and yet aren't prose poems. There may be nothing syntactically unique about them, although I am sure the words are chosen with care. They don't utilize meter or rhyme (or do they and I didn't notice?), they don't utilize sweeping metaphors, so why do they bother with line breaks at all? They read like someone speaking, and I sometimes just don't understand why that had to be said in a poem, if at all. The topics are often mundane as well, not overtly poetic - walking the dog, for instance. The part I love the most is one line, where the dog "imagines to the end that he is free." (After an Illness, Walking the Dog). So what purpose does the other 99% of the poem serve? Is it all just wasted words, telling the context simply to get to the point of the poem?
And then, I realize, maybe these poems are the still lives of the poetry world. After all, what point is there in a block of cheese and a knife resting on a plate? What is the point to the tablecloth? What was the point of painting it at all? And yet, how stunning, at the same time.
I really enjoyed these poems. They have subtlety. They make me sit and think. They make me reanalyze the kinds of poetry I am drawn to. I loved reading them in chronological order, seeing the massive shift after a death in the family. I need to read them again.
My favorites include but are not limited to "Woman, Why are you Weeping?", "The Shirt" (of course), "Depression", "Wash", "Dutch Interiors", the "Siesta" poems...
Here is a link to some online - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/j...
September 10, 2007
Don't fuck with this book.
September 8, 2022
Like spending time with a dear old friend. How could I give it anything less than 5 stars?
April 30, 2020
I think Jane Kenyon's most famous, or at least her most popular, poem must be "Let Evening Come," but there are so many others in this evocative collection that are just as worthy, moving, meditative. This is a volume I'll keep close (I've tagged my favorites). If you are a lover of poetry, particularly the likes of Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, I hope you'll add Kenyon to your reading list. (This volume also contains some poems of Anna Akhmatova translated from the Russian by Kenyon, and these are stunning too.)
September 17, 2022
Like some people, Kenyon's poetry leaves me with the longing to return and enter its dance of dialogue. Its simplicity is initially off-putting, but it doesn't let you go so easily. While there were only about a handful of poems that I really liked ("Let Evening Come" and "Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks" among them, of course), I couldn't have enjoyed them so much without having read the entire collection. I know I will return to these poems again.
December 30, 2007
It's not as if you read a good book of poems and then never look at them again. If you like poetry, you'll re-read something you love over & over, discovering different angles of the thing each time. That's the story for me with this collection. This volume is an anthology of Kenyon's published works. It may contain some newly published pieces as well but I'm not sure. Whatever the case, this is the 'essential Kenyon' as it were and if you've read her before you'll want this. If you've not, maybe this is the writer who will hook you on poetry. Kenyon's pieces evoke a range of emotion and not all of it (not by a long-shot, really) pretty but it's gritty and appealing in the sense of being quite real. This one I'll keep within arm's reach for a long time.
July 9, 2008
i love jane kenyon. the sad fact that she's dead and will no longer produce great poetry is borderline devastating for me. i have this book by my bed and turn to it whenever i feel the need for some profundity, but not in a difficult to grasp sort of way, but in the moments of day to day life sort of way. simple imagery that seems benign, but i'm gasping and frequently teary as i read the last lines of her poems.
January 26, 2008
My words cannot do Jane Kenyon's poetry justice, so I'll just say: her poems are full of quiet peace and wisdom, and light. They make you seek out the quiet.
December 21, 2023
Given to me by my dear friend Amy, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed a book of poetry more than this one. I’ll keep coming back to this and continue to savor and rediscover.
These poems feel, on the face of it, very attainable. Especially for those of us who don’t typically pick up poetry on the regular. A lot of them feel very earthy and observational, but they are quite profound. And some are very amusing. Loved it all and highly recommend!
These poems feel, on the face of it, very attainable. Especially for those of us who don’t typically pick up poetry on the regular. A lot of them feel very earthy and observational, but they are quite profound. And some are very amusing. Loved it all and highly recommend!
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April 17, 2017I’ve returned to a favorite poet this week in honor of National Poetry Month. Jane Kenyon died so young that we have no idea what sort of beautiful work she would be bringing us now, but the poetry found within her Collected Poems is definitely among some of the finest I know. I have owned this book for years and it is heavily dog-eared (my apologies to those of you who are offended by dog ears and marginalia!) and much read and loved. Each time I return to it, as I have this week, I find myself once again in awe and in love with the words of this miraculous poet. These poems express a love of nature, a frustration with illness, a belief in a higher being, a painful melancholy. Speaking of melancholy, there is my favorite of her poems (other than “Let Evening Come“) which is “Having it Out with Melancholy” that ends with a breathless, heartbreaking hopefulness:
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye. —Myf (https://www.bookish.com/articles/frid...)
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye. —Myf (https://www.bookish.com/articles/frid...)
September 10, 2018
Earthy, accessible, and brilliant.
October 24, 2024
People seem to be reading Kenyon again! Some for the first time. I think that's great. Since, sadly, she died young, her "Collected Poems" isn't gigantic, and she published carefully so there aren't very many duds in this book. I made it the centerpiece of a big review/essay I did a number of years ago in Michigan Quarterly. You can link to it below:
THE PRESENCE OF JANE KENYON
KEITH TAYLOR
Collected Poems. By Jane Kenyon. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005. Pp. 320. $26.00 hardcover.
Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life. By John H. Timmerman. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Pp 246. $28.00 hardcover.
Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Edited by Joyce Peseroff. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005. Pp. 288. $17.00 paper.
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon. By Donald Hall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Pp 258. $23.00 hardcover.
Letters to Jane, Hayden Carruth. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2004. Pp. 107. $24.00 hardcover.
Just a couple of weeks before Donald Hall was named Poet Laureate of the United States, my wife and daughter rented the movie In Her Shoes. Except for one interesting place in the middle, it’s a predictable film about resolving sibling rivalries, done with obvious plot turns and the usual happy ending. Mostly it’s a vehicle for Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine to show off their comedic talents. But right in the middle something unexpected happens. The Cameron Diaz character—the obligatory ne’er-do-well sister who has tried to get through life simply on her beauty, and who is only marginally literate—attempts to remake her life by taking a job as an aide in a nursing home. An elderly former English professor, now blind, asks her to read poetry to him. She struggles through a reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and—at the wise prodding of the blind English teacher—she does an interesting interpretation of the poem. In a quick cut meant to show that this process was ongoing, we hear Cameron Diaz read a few lines from Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” although neither the poem nor the author are acknowledged within the film.
Since I had already been reading for this piece, and had been thinking about Kenyon and her work for several weeks already, I was struck again how quickly and deeply her poetry has penetrated the cultural landscape. Of course there were intimations that Kenyon’s work would find a significant audience before her early death from leukemia in 1995, particularly given the success of A Life Together, Bill Moyers’ award-winning television documentary about her and her husband, Donald Hall. Her poems had begun to appear regularly in the kinds of magazines—The Atlantic, The New Yorker—read by that quasi-mythical character known as the General Reader. But the posthumous success of her Otherwise: New and Selected Poems has few parallels in contemporary poetry. The last figure I heard of the number of copies in print was seventy thousand, a number even a novelist striving to be popular would be pleased to see. A few of her poems are quoted regularly. The remarkable “Having It Out with Melancholy,” from Kenyon’s 1993 volume, Constance, is often quoted in small excerpts in newspapers and psychological studies, both to show a sympathetic understanding of chronic depression and as an example of the artistic temperament’s proclivities toward illness. “Let Evening Come” has become a standard at funerals because of its stirring last stanzas:
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Although this reading, the immediate association of evening with death, limits the possibilities of this poem, I suspect that Kenyon might be pleased to find that her work has served as a consolation to many people at difficult moments. She might be less pleased to find that poem the subject of what must be several hundred essays written each term in undergraduate writing courses, where the assignment is to compare and contrast “Let Evening Come” with Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle.”
Even the fact that her publisher, Graywolf Press, has decided to do a Collected Poems, given its ongoing success with Otherwise, is an indication of the unique presence Kenyon and her work can claim in contemporary letters. Already, barely a decade after her death, it seems clear to her publisher that many people are interested in reading Kenyon’s work in its entirety; the process of her writing has become as interesting as the polished gems that have entered the larger culture. Anyone who reads Kenyon will be happy to see the extra thirty-five poems in this volume, most of which appeared in her earlier volumes but were not selected for Otherwise. Here they are restored to their rightful places in their respective volumes, although a few uncollected lesser poems are also included. It is both instructive and a pleasure to see the Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, together with the work they have influenced, although the reader will have to make the effort to place that work between From Room to Room (first published in 1978) and The Boat of Quiet Hours (from 1986). The original books were organized into sections, and that feature has been restored.
These sections were carefully constructed and provide their own way of understanding the poems and their interrelationships—as Steven Cramer has shown in his essay, “Home Alone: Self and Relation in Part I of The Boat of Quiet Hours,” one of the most helpful interpretive essays included in Joyce Peseroff’s Simply Lasting: Writers On Jane Kenyon. There is a recovered masterpiece, the late “Woman, Why Are You Weeping,” that Hall originally published in A Hundred White Daffodils, a collection of Kenyon’s miscellaneous pieces that came out in 1999. In the introduction to that volume, he tells us that Kenyon was adamant about not including it in Otherwise, as she and Hall worked quickly to assemble the selection shortly before she died (a task movingly described by Hall in the afterword to Otherwise and in the last chapter of his The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon). Apparently she felt the poem was unfinished, and it is a bit more talky and less polished than most of her published work. Still, in its willingness to confront spiritual malaise and its abilities at combining Biblical reference, the personal life, and images from her travels in India, in its very willingness to sprawl, “Woman, Why Are You Weeping” gives us at least a glimpse of the kind of work Kenyon might have done had she survived. The poem’s effort to confront the poet’s own doubt, coming near the end of this volume of collected verse, at the end of what was obviously a spiritual journey toward a certain kind of Christian sensibility, can almost be labeled by that overworked word—brave.
Most of the poems Kenyon had excluded from Otherwise, however, were excluded for more understandable reasons. They did not seem to measure up to the two standards that recur in many discussions of Kenyon’s aesthetics and her accomplishments. Both Joyce Peseroff and Alice Mattison—the two friends of Kenyon’s unofficial workshop who read everything Kenyon wrote before she submitted it to journals—in Simply Lasting, and John Timmerman—Kenyon’s first biographer—in his Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life, come back time and time again to Ezra Pound’s dictum in Make It New—“The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Kenyon seems to have repeated it almost like a mantra. The second and related standard is that summarized by the phrase “the luminous particular,” which may have been first used by Kenyon in discussions of Anna Akhmatova. It seems clear, looking through the poems she excluded from Otherwise, that these poems may have seemed contrived or a bit clever and derivative when she looked back on them, that they did not measure up to her two exacting standards.
“At a Motel near O’Hare Airport,” one of the early poems excluded from Otherwise and returned to its place in the Collected, seems to be almost a playful exercise in simile. Planes are compared to horses clearing a jump, to something seen under a woman’s skirt, to a fox about to steal a chicken, to whales, to a basketball player. It is slight and playful, but it certainly doesn’t stand next to the most powerful of Kenyon’s lyrics, the ones that often turn on one luminous image. In this poem the natural object was not the adequate symbol. On the other hand, to have the poem here in a more expansive volume, in a place where we can enjoy seeing a poet mastering her craft rather than crafting masterpieces, seems right. A shorter poem like “After Working Long on One Thing,” returned now to its place early in the 1990 volume, Let Evening Come, might feel just a bit derivative of certain approaches to the poem overused in the 1970s:
Through the screen door
I hear a hummingbird, inquiring
for nectar among the stalwart
hollyhocks—an erratic flying
ruby, asking for sweets among
the sticky-throated flowers.
The sky won’t darken in the West
until ten. Where shall I turn
this light and tired mind?
I think I may be hearing an echo of some early Bly in this poem, or perhaps something of James Wright, although he usually handled this kind of thing a little more comfortably. Still, Kenyon may have realized that and, on her deathbed, took it out of Otherwise. I suspect that may have been because she found nothing particularly luminous about this particularity. Still if we are trying to get a sense of her entire writing life, it is important for us to see this side of Kenyon’s work, too, a poem that doesn’t find a way to rise out of itself into a reader’s imagination.
There are others among the poems returned in the Collected Poems, however, that we can welcome back to the Kenyon canon without any reservation at all. A wonderful poem like “Killing the Plants” from The Boat of Quiet Hours, shows Kenyon looking for metaphor with unabashed enthusiasm, even as she is writing again about the effects of her depression, although here with a lovely sense of wry humor at her condition. The poem begins with an easy stretch toward finding the metaphor:
That year I discovered the virtues
of plants as companions: they don’t
argue, they don’t ask for much,
they don’t stay out until 3:00 A.M., then
lie to you about where they’ve been. . . .
After admitting that she barely has enough energy to give them even a drop of water and that “like Hamlet I rehearse murder” and thinks about dumping the plants in the compost or at the town dump, she concludes back at her opening metaphor, but she extends its range:
The truth is that if I permit them
to live, they will go on giving
alms to the poor: sweet air, miraculous
flowers, the example of persistence.
Without trying to put too many words in Kenyon’s mouth, I’ll guess that she may have found this poem just a tad too sentimental when she came to do Otherwise. Now it assumes a very interesting place in the entire development of her work, an indication of her willingness to write about her depression, and her efforts to find those “adequate symbols” among the natural objects. Perhaps in some Borgesian twist “the example of persistence” takes on new meaning as we look back on Kenyon’s writing life and at the continuing presence her work clearly has.
In Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life, the first big critical biography of the poet, John H. Timmerman doesn’t spend a great deal of time with the poems that didn’t meet Kenyon’s standards when she selected the poems for Otherwise. He is very good, however, discussing the composition of many of the better known poems. For years we have heard from the interviews she gave, from Hall, and from others, that Kenyon made many drafts of her poems, working and polishing and chiseling, sweating through the process of finding the right form and the exact words. All those papers are now collected at the University of New Hampshire. Timmerman has spent a good deal of time in that archive, and he gives us our first extensive look at Kenyon’s actual working practice.
His discussion of the composition of the poems is the great contribution of this book. “Let Evening Come,” for instance, has often been thought of as the quick poem Kenyon now rather famously described to Bill Moyers in the interview Hall reprinted in A Hundred White Daffodils. Kenyon says “That poem was given to me. . . . [by] the muse, the Holy Ghost.” Without doubting Kenyon’s sense of its composition, Timmerman shows how much sweat or supplication went into that gift. He reproduces the first handwritten draft:
Let the cricket begin
to chafe (indecipherable) [in the long grass]
Let the dew gather on every blade and leaf and on [the
abandoned hoe]
Let the red fox turn toward
its sandy hole. Let the stars appear
from east to west. Let the moon display
its silver horn. Let songbirds cease
their song. Let evening come.
Let me learn to fear neither life nor death.
Let me learn to give without counting.
The thousands of readers who love this poem in its final form might be startled to see this loose prosy draft, with no hint of the controlled, almost regular lines in the elegant three line stanzas of the finished poem. The anaphora of “let” is here, but only one use of the imperative of the title, the repetition of which finally gives the poem its commanding presence. Kenyon’s diction is already present, and with this poem and others Timmerman does a nice job risking pedantry to quantify the choice of words in the final poem. “There are a total of 107 Old English words (86.3%),” Timmerman writes. “In terms of diction, then, the poem is heavily slanted toward the ‘low’ or plain style.” Although I admit to first being amused by Timmerman’s use of the calculator when discussing Jane Kenyon poems (86.3%!), I think his point is very well taken. In an age and of a generation that was turning away, often noisily, from “plain style,” Kenyon embraced it, worked for it, and it is a partial explanation for the way the poems have moved into the culture.
If Timmerman’s book is the first critical biography of Kenyon, its merits are certainly on the adjective in that phrase and not the noun. He has highlighted several of Kenyon’s accomplishments within an interesting critical context. He has, however, left the door wide open for later biographies. Her early years are given very short shrift, and much of the context of her life is summed up in vague generalities. For instance a whole period of turmoil is summed up like this—“During the 1960s, public torment often took precedence over personal joy. As the 1960s deepened into history, the national mood grew more grim and frenetic.” And he goes on, never quite adding anything we don’t know to that summary nor ever connecting Kenyon to her time. The fact that she was born and raised in Ann Arbor where these politics were often in the street, and was a student at the University of Michigan where much of the “public torment” was on daily display, gets little discussion, yet it was clearly important to Kenyon’s development and later choices. He is better with the move to New Hampshire in 1975, although since Kenyon and Hall have written so much about that, it is an easier subject to explore.
Timmerman is reserved about discussing Kenyon’s Christianity and hints at the place it assumed in her major work, but he still doesn’t engage it as the central thematic concern it obviously became. In the fifth section, entitled “Once There Was Light,” of “Having It out with Melancholy” Kenyon described what literary critics might want to call an epiphany, but what she understood as a kind of conversion experience:
Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Though Timmerman takes Kenyon’s Christianity seriously, he is most comfortable, as are most of the friends and critics who have written about it, interpreting her assumption of religious understanding primarily as a manifestation of the community she chose to enter in New Hampshire. Although partially true, it is an incomplete understanding of the thoughtful religious life expressed in the poems.
Some of this discussion of Kenyon’s Christianity, coupled with the memory of the suffering Kenyon endured during her last year of life, gets turned into a discussion of her personality, which occasionally begins to sound uncomfortably like a hagiography. In Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, edited by Joyce Peseroff, there are several examples of this:
. . . her life, her work, and her legend have arrived at this power of healing, the way saints were imagined to be able to intercede for us. (Gregory Orr)
Jane was a beacon. She illuminated every picture with her eyes, and her mind’s eye. (Caroline Finkelstein)
Her eyes had also become more beautiful, her body more beautiful, and her maturity and sympathy for all that lived had become painfully beautiful, startling, ennobling. She had the sense of pietà we find in Rilke. (Liam Rector)
And I could go on. While I do not doubt for a moment the genuine emotion for a lost friend and admired poet that informs these quotes (I, too, knew Kenyon slightly and had also noted the physical changes and the quiet strength that seemed to come from her in her last years), I do think that this attitude has allowed many of her readers to avoid a serious engagement with the spiritual and specifically Christian search that unifies the Collected Poems.
Still I think it is important that this attitude is preserved in Simply Lasting, because it, too, is part of how Jane Kenyon is read. This collection of personal and critical essays helps to establish the framework for understanding Kenyon. Several of the pieces are reprinted from Bert Hornback’s Bright Unequivocal Eye, a memorial volume from 2000 that might have been the first attempt to co
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
THE PRESENCE OF JANE KENYON
KEITH TAYLOR
Collected Poems. By Jane Kenyon. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005. Pp. 320. $26.00 hardcover.
Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life. By John H. Timmerman. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Pp 246. $28.00 hardcover.
Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Edited by Joyce Peseroff. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005. Pp. 288. $17.00 paper.
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon. By Donald Hall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Pp 258. $23.00 hardcover.
Letters to Jane, Hayden Carruth. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2004. Pp. 107. $24.00 hardcover.
Just a couple of weeks before Donald Hall was named Poet Laureate of the United States, my wife and daughter rented the movie In Her Shoes. Except for one interesting place in the middle, it’s a predictable film about resolving sibling rivalries, done with obvious plot turns and the usual happy ending. Mostly it’s a vehicle for Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine to show off their comedic talents. But right in the middle something unexpected happens. The Cameron Diaz character—the obligatory ne’er-do-well sister who has tried to get through life simply on her beauty, and who is only marginally literate—attempts to remake her life by taking a job as an aide in a nursing home. An elderly former English professor, now blind, asks her to read poetry to him. She struggles through a reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” and—at the wise prodding of the blind English teacher—she does an interesting interpretation of the poem. In a quick cut meant to show that this process was ongoing, we hear Cameron Diaz read a few lines from Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come,” although neither the poem nor the author are acknowledged within the film.
Since I had already been reading for this piece, and had been thinking about Kenyon and her work for several weeks already, I was struck again how quickly and deeply her poetry has penetrated the cultural landscape. Of course there were intimations that Kenyon’s work would find a significant audience before her early death from leukemia in 1995, particularly given the success of A Life Together, Bill Moyers’ award-winning television documentary about her and her husband, Donald Hall. Her poems had begun to appear regularly in the kinds of magazines—The Atlantic, The New Yorker—read by that quasi-mythical character known as the General Reader. But the posthumous success of her Otherwise: New and Selected Poems has few parallels in contemporary poetry. The last figure I heard of the number of copies in print was seventy thousand, a number even a novelist striving to be popular would be pleased to see. A few of her poems are quoted regularly. The remarkable “Having It Out with Melancholy,” from Kenyon’s 1993 volume, Constance, is often quoted in small excerpts in newspapers and psychological studies, both to show a sympathetic understanding of chronic depression and as an example of the artistic temperament’s proclivities toward illness. “Let Evening Come” has become a standard at funerals because of its stirring last stanzas:
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Although this reading, the immediate association of evening with death, limits the possibilities of this poem, I suspect that Kenyon might be pleased to find that her work has served as a consolation to many people at difficult moments. She might be less pleased to find that poem the subject of what must be several hundred essays written each term in undergraduate writing courses, where the assignment is to compare and contrast “Let Evening Come” with Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle.”
Even the fact that her publisher, Graywolf Press, has decided to do a Collected Poems, given its ongoing success with Otherwise, is an indication of the unique presence Kenyon and her work can claim in contemporary letters. Already, barely a decade after her death, it seems clear to her publisher that many people are interested in reading Kenyon’s work in its entirety; the process of her writing has become as interesting as the polished gems that have entered the larger culture. Anyone who reads Kenyon will be happy to see the extra thirty-five poems in this volume, most of which appeared in her earlier volumes but were not selected for Otherwise. Here they are restored to their rightful places in their respective volumes, although a few uncollected lesser poems are also included. It is both instructive and a pleasure to see the Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, together with the work they have influenced, although the reader will have to make the effort to place that work between From Room to Room (first published in 1978) and The Boat of Quiet Hours (from 1986). The original books were organized into sections, and that feature has been restored.
These sections were carefully constructed and provide their own way of understanding the poems and their interrelationships—as Steven Cramer has shown in his essay, “Home Alone: Self and Relation in Part I of The Boat of Quiet Hours,” one of the most helpful interpretive essays included in Joyce Peseroff’s Simply Lasting: Writers On Jane Kenyon. There is a recovered masterpiece, the late “Woman, Why Are You Weeping,” that Hall originally published in A Hundred White Daffodils, a collection of Kenyon’s miscellaneous pieces that came out in 1999. In the introduction to that volume, he tells us that Kenyon was adamant about not including it in Otherwise, as she and Hall worked quickly to assemble the selection shortly before she died (a task movingly described by Hall in the afterword to Otherwise and in the last chapter of his The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon). Apparently she felt the poem was unfinished, and it is a bit more talky and less polished than most of her published work. Still, in its willingness to confront spiritual malaise and its abilities at combining Biblical reference, the personal life, and images from her travels in India, in its very willingness to sprawl, “Woman, Why Are You Weeping” gives us at least a glimpse of the kind of work Kenyon might have done had she survived. The poem’s effort to confront the poet’s own doubt, coming near the end of this volume of collected verse, at the end of what was obviously a spiritual journey toward a certain kind of Christian sensibility, can almost be labeled by that overworked word—brave.
Most of the poems Kenyon had excluded from Otherwise, however, were excluded for more understandable reasons. They did not seem to measure up to the two standards that recur in many discussions of Kenyon’s aesthetics and her accomplishments. Both Joyce Peseroff and Alice Mattison—the two friends of Kenyon’s unofficial workshop who read everything Kenyon wrote before she submitted it to journals—in Simply Lasting, and John Timmerman—Kenyon’s first biographer—in his Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life, come back time and time again to Ezra Pound’s dictum in Make It New—“The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Kenyon seems to have repeated it almost like a mantra. The second and related standard is that summarized by the phrase “the luminous particular,” which may have been first used by Kenyon in discussions of Anna Akhmatova. It seems clear, looking through the poems she excluded from Otherwise, that these poems may have seemed contrived or a bit clever and derivative when she looked back on them, that they did not measure up to her two exacting standards.
“At a Motel near O’Hare Airport,” one of the early poems excluded from Otherwise and returned to its place in the Collected, seems to be almost a playful exercise in simile. Planes are compared to horses clearing a jump, to something seen under a woman’s skirt, to a fox about to steal a chicken, to whales, to a basketball player. It is slight and playful, but it certainly doesn’t stand next to the most powerful of Kenyon’s lyrics, the ones that often turn on one luminous image. In this poem the natural object was not the adequate symbol. On the other hand, to have the poem here in a more expansive volume, in a place where we can enjoy seeing a poet mastering her craft rather than crafting masterpieces, seems right. A shorter poem like “After Working Long on One Thing,” returned now to its place early in the 1990 volume, Let Evening Come, might feel just a bit derivative of certain approaches to the poem overused in the 1970s:
Through the screen door
I hear a hummingbird, inquiring
for nectar among the stalwart
hollyhocks—an erratic flying
ruby, asking for sweets among
the sticky-throated flowers.
The sky won’t darken in the West
until ten. Where shall I turn
this light and tired mind?
I think I may be hearing an echo of some early Bly in this poem, or perhaps something of James Wright, although he usually handled this kind of thing a little more comfortably. Still, Kenyon may have realized that and, on her deathbed, took it out of Otherwise. I suspect that may have been because she found nothing particularly luminous about this particularity. Still if we are trying to get a sense of her entire writing life, it is important for us to see this side of Kenyon’s work, too, a poem that doesn’t find a way to rise out of itself into a reader’s imagination.
There are others among the poems returned in the Collected Poems, however, that we can welcome back to the Kenyon canon without any reservation at all. A wonderful poem like “Killing the Plants” from The Boat of Quiet Hours, shows Kenyon looking for metaphor with unabashed enthusiasm, even as she is writing again about the effects of her depression, although here with a lovely sense of wry humor at her condition. The poem begins with an easy stretch toward finding the metaphor:
That year I discovered the virtues
of plants as companions: they don’t
argue, they don’t ask for much,
they don’t stay out until 3:00 A.M., then
lie to you about where they’ve been. . . .
After admitting that she barely has enough energy to give them even a drop of water and that “like Hamlet I rehearse murder” and thinks about dumping the plants in the compost or at the town dump, she concludes back at her opening metaphor, but she extends its range:
The truth is that if I permit them
to live, they will go on giving
alms to the poor: sweet air, miraculous
flowers, the example of persistence.
Without trying to put too many words in Kenyon’s mouth, I’ll guess that she may have found this poem just a tad too sentimental when she came to do Otherwise. Now it assumes a very interesting place in the entire development of her work, an indication of her willingness to write about her depression, and her efforts to find those “adequate symbols” among the natural objects. Perhaps in some Borgesian twist “the example of persistence” takes on new meaning as we look back on Kenyon’s writing life and at the continuing presence her work clearly has.
In Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life, the first big critical biography of the poet, John H. Timmerman doesn’t spend a great deal of time with the poems that didn’t meet Kenyon’s standards when she selected the poems for Otherwise. He is very good, however, discussing the composition of many of the better known poems. For years we have heard from the interviews she gave, from Hall, and from others, that Kenyon made many drafts of her poems, working and polishing and chiseling, sweating through the process of finding the right form and the exact words. All those papers are now collected at the University of New Hampshire. Timmerman has spent a good deal of time in that archive, and he gives us our first extensive look at Kenyon’s actual working practice.
His discussion of the composition of the poems is the great contribution of this book. “Let Evening Come,” for instance, has often been thought of as the quick poem Kenyon now rather famously described to Bill Moyers in the interview Hall reprinted in A Hundred White Daffodils. Kenyon says “That poem was given to me. . . . [by] the muse, the Holy Ghost.” Without doubting Kenyon’s sense of its composition, Timmerman shows how much sweat or supplication went into that gift. He reproduces the first handwritten draft:
Let the cricket begin
to chafe (indecipherable) [in the long grass]
Let the dew gather on every blade and leaf and on [the
abandoned hoe]
Let the red fox turn toward
its sandy hole. Let the stars appear
from east to west. Let the moon display
its silver horn. Let songbirds cease
their song. Let evening come.
Let me learn to fear neither life nor death.
Let me learn to give without counting.
The thousands of readers who love this poem in its final form might be startled to see this loose prosy draft, with no hint of the controlled, almost regular lines in the elegant three line stanzas of the finished poem. The anaphora of “let” is here, but only one use of the imperative of the title, the repetition of which finally gives the poem its commanding presence. Kenyon’s diction is already present, and with this poem and others Timmerman does a nice job risking pedantry to quantify the choice of words in the final poem. “There are a total of 107 Old English words (86.3%),” Timmerman writes. “In terms of diction, then, the poem is heavily slanted toward the ‘low’ or plain style.” Although I admit to first being amused by Timmerman’s use of the calculator when discussing Jane Kenyon poems (86.3%!), I think his point is very well taken. In an age and of a generation that was turning away, often noisily, from “plain style,” Kenyon embraced it, worked for it, and it is a partial explanation for the way the poems have moved into the culture.
If Timmerman’s book is the first critical biography of Kenyon, its merits are certainly on the adjective in that phrase and not the noun. He has highlighted several of Kenyon’s accomplishments within an interesting critical context. He has, however, left the door wide open for later biographies. Her early years are given very short shrift, and much of the context of her life is summed up in vague generalities. For instance a whole period of turmoil is summed up like this—“During the 1960s, public torment often took precedence over personal joy. As the 1960s deepened into history, the national mood grew more grim and frenetic.” And he goes on, never quite adding anything we don’t know to that summary nor ever connecting Kenyon to her time. The fact that she was born and raised in Ann Arbor where these politics were often in the street, and was a student at the University of Michigan where much of the “public torment” was on daily display, gets little discussion, yet it was clearly important to Kenyon’s development and later choices. He is better with the move to New Hampshire in 1975, although since Kenyon and Hall have written so much about that, it is an easier subject to explore.
Timmerman is reserved about discussing Kenyon’s Christianity and hints at the place it assumed in her major work, but he still doesn’t engage it as the central thematic concern it obviously became. In the fifth section, entitled “Once There Was Light,” of “Having It out with Melancholy” Kenyon described what literary critics might want to call an epiphany, but what she understood as a kind of conversion experience:
Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Though Timmerman takes Kenyon’s Christianity seriously, he is most comfortable, as are most of the friends and critics who have written about it, interpreting her assumption of religious understanding primarily as a manifestation of the community she chose to enter in New Hampshire. Although partially true, it is an incomplete understanding of the thoughtful religious life expressed in the poems.
Some of this discussion of Kenyon’s Christianity, coupled with the memory of the suffering Kenyon endured during her last year of life, gets turned into a discussion of her personality, which occasionally begins to sound uncomfortably like a hagiography. In Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon, edited by Joyce Peseroff, there are several examples of this:
. . . her life, her work, and her legend have arrived at this power of healing, the way saints were imagined to be able to intercede for us. (Gregory Orr)
Jane was a beacon. She illuminated every picture with her eyes, and her mind’s eye. (Caroline Finkelstein)
Her eyes had also become more beautiful, her body more beautiful, and her maturity and sympathy for all that lived had become painfully beautiful, startling, ennobling. She had the sense of pietà we find in Rilke. (Liam Rector)
And I could go on. While I do not doubt for a moment the genuine emotion for a lost friend and admired poet that informs these quotes (I, too, knew Kenyon slightly and had also noted the physical changes and the quiet strength that seemed to come from her in her last years), I do think that this attitude has allowed many of her readers to avoid a serious engagement with the spiritual and specifically Christian search that unifies the Collected Poems.
Still I think it is important that this attitude is preserved in Simply Lasting, because it, too, is part of how Jane Kenyon is read. This collection of personal and critical essays helps to establish the framework for understanding Kenyon. Several of the pieces are reprinted from Bert Hornback’s Bright Unequivocal Eye, a memorial volume from 2000 that might have been the first attempt to co
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
January 9, 2011
Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems chronicles works of deceptive simplicity, usually rooted in pictures of nature and domestic life. They are often straightforward descriptions of moments, told more through images than through metaphor or linguistic acrobatics. Perhaps this is why Kenyon seems to be ignored by the poetic community—I rarely see her name or work mentioned in poetry journals and interviews with poets. This is a shame, because her poems thrum with the kind of life and power that makes reading poetry such a moving experience.
I wasn’t that familiar with Kenyon when I received this book as a gift, and it was only after reading through some of the poems that I began to understand what was happening in them. Or maybe understand is the wrong word; it was more of an unconscious insight into the resonances latent in the images, which don’t always make their connections or implications explicit. The stark and focused works, often around twenty lines, occasionally a few lines or a few pages, are like extended haiku, conveying transcendence in snapshots of life.
Kenyon lived with her husband, poet Donald Hall—nineteen years her senior—at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire for 23 years, from 1972 to 1995. Her poems abound with descriptions of the rural area. Though she was obviously inspired and sometimes awed by her surroundings and the fellow creatures inhabiting them, she neither displays the sentimentalism towards nature as some poets such as Mary Oliver, nor sees nature as threatening. Sometimes she is simply an observer, sometimes a participant in her landscape. What makes Kenyon so effective is the way she makes her images do double work. The world she describes can be taken by itself: the images sound alive and fitting. Yet they also reflect human emotion, anywhere on the spectrum from bliss to despair—these poems are imbued with intense feeling. Two poems, on opposite pages, illustrate this well.
“Heavy Summer Rain” juxtaposes the effect of heavy rain on the landscape with the narrator’s longing for a loved one, ending with this exquisitely painful image:
Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.
The poem on the opposite page, “September Garden Party,” shows the happiness in reunion. It is short enough to quote in its entirety:
We sit with friends at the round
glass table. The talk is clever;
everyone rises to it. Bees
come to the spiral pear peelings
on your plate.
From my lap or your hand
the spice of our morning’s privacy
comes drifting up. Fall sun
passes through the wine.
Kenyon also often deals with the quotidian—hanging laundry, shopping, or walking her dog, but these events are always endowed with larger emotion or meaning. Here is an example from “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”:
Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
By the end of the poem, however, she puts a new spin on things; despite feeling recovered and glad that the rain is over, there is a sense that the troubles are not over:
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
This kind of shift at the end is characteristic, perhaps most poignantly illustrated by “Otherwise”:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
With the poem ending:
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
In fact, depression creeps into many of these poems, despite an also ever-present sense of love and connection with her husband, dog, the landscape, literature, and writing. This is perhaps most famously explored in “Having It Out with Melancholy,” a somewhat atypically long and comparatively abstract/general poem, that is nevertheless a powerful chronicle of her struggle with depression. With touches such as a list of anti-depressant medications, or “advice” from friends (“You wouldn’t be so depressed/if you really believed in God”), it is perhaps the most intensely personal of the pieces. Despite feeling that “A piece of burned meat/wears my clothes,” she manages to “come back to marriage and friends/to pink-fringed hollyhocks; come back/to my desk, books, and chair.” I prefer another of her most famous poems, “Let Evening Come,” which seems to me to embody the same ideas in a more concise way, through a series of images and the daring and brave repetition of the titular phrase. The sentence “Let the stars appear/and the moon disclose her silver horn” is one of my favorites of the book. Of course, it is not directly about depression as “Having It Out with Melancholy” is, nor does it tell the personal side of the story, but they seem to me to be the same poem told differently.
Physical sickness (Kenyon died at the early age of 47 from cancer, and Hall suffered his own bout of colon cancer), death, faith in God, societal/cultural concerns, the works and lives of other writers (particularly the Russians—references to Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov abound, and twenty translations of Anna Akhmatova Kenyon did with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham are included at the end), also find expression in Kenyon’s work, though for me these poems were not as effective. Not that they aren’t decently crafted, enjoyable poems. It’s just that, when she talks directly about someone being ill, or dying, or comments on larger social issues, or the lives of others, the writing does not flow as naturally, and the images are not as strong. A few of the poems that deal with her cancer are evocative, such as “The Sick Wife,” but even then, it’s hard to tell whether the power comes from the poem itself, or from knowing the heartbreaking story of her early death. (Donald Hall has written a memoir about their life together which I plan on reading.) I also did not find the references to God and faith that interesting, whether in belief or doubt (her ambiguous faith seems to have been shaken at the end of her life), with the rare exceptions of instances like the end of “Let Evening Come.” Other poets have written about these things well. Kenyon’s power largely resides in her precise descriptions of rural life. Her poems may at first appear simple and literal, but careful attention reveals the transcendent insights which connect the ephemeral with the timeless, the personal with the larger landscape of the world. In short, the kind of insights that make poetry truly alive.
I wasn’t that familiar with Kenyon when I received this book as a gift, and it was only after reading through some of the poems that I began to understand what was happening in them. Or maybe understand is the wrong word; it was more of an unconscious insight into the resonances latent in the images, which don’t always make their connections or implications explicit. The stark and focused works, often around twenty lines, occasionally a few lines or a few pages, are like extended haiku, conveying transcendence in snapshots of life.
Kenyon lived with her husband, poet Donald Hall—nineteen years her senior—at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire for 23 years, from 1972 to 1995. Her poems abound with descriptions of the rural area. Though she was obviously inspired and sometimes awed by her surroundings and the fellow creatures inhabiting them, she neither displays the sentimentalism towards nature as some poets such as Mary Oliver, nor sees nature as threatening. Sometimes she is simply an observer, sometimes a participant in her landscape. What makes Kenyon so effective is the way she makes her images do double work. The world she describes can be taken by itself: the images sound alive and fitting. Yet they also reflect human emotion, anywhere on the spectrum from bliss to despair—these poems are imbued with intense feeling. Two poems, on opposite pages, illustrate this well.
“Heavy Summer Rain” juxtaposes the effect of heavy rain on the landscape with the narrator’s longing for a loved one, ending with this exquisitely painful image:
Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.
The poem on the opposite page, “September Garden Party,” shows the happiness in reunion. It is short enough to quote in its entirety:
We sit with friends at the round
glass table. The talk is clever;
everyone rises to it. Bees
come to the spiral pear peelings
on your plate.
From my lap or your hand
the spice of our morning’s privacy
comes drifting up. Fall sun
passes through the wine.
Kenyon also often deals with the quotidian—hanging laundry, shopping, or walking her dog, but these events are always endowed with larger emotion or meaning. Here is an example from “After an Illness, Walking the Dog”:
Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
By the end of the poem, however, she puts a new spin on things; despite feeling recovered and glad that the rain is over, there is a sense that the troubles are not over:
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
This kind of shift at the end is characteristic, perhaps most poignantly illustrated by “Otherwise”:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
With the poem ending:
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
In fact, depression creeps into many of these poems, despite an also ever-present sense of love and connection with her husband, dog, the landscape, literature, and writing. This is perhaps most famously explored in “Having It Out with Melancholy,” a somewhat atypically long and comparatively abstract/general poem, that is nevertheless a powerful chronicle of her struggle with depression. With touches such as a list of anti-depressant medications, or “advice” from friends (“You wouldn’t be so depressed/if you really believed in God”), it is perhaps the most intensely personal of the pieces. Despite feeling that “A piece of burned meat/wears my clothes,” she manages to “come back to marriage and friends/to pink-fringed hollyhocks; come back/to my desk, books, and chair.” I prefer another of her most famous poems, “Let Evening Come,” which seems to me to embody the same ideas in a more concise way, through a series of images and the daring and brave repetition of the titular phrase. The sentence “Let the stars appear/and the moon disclose her silver horn” is one of my favorites of the book. Of course, it is not directly about depression as “Having It Out with Melancholy” is, nor does it tell the personal side of the story, but they seem to me to be the same poem told differently.
Physical sickness (Kenyon died at the early age of 47 from cancer, and Hall suffered his own bout of colon cancer), death, faith in God, societal/cultural concerns, the works and lives of other writers (particularly the Russians—references to Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov abound, and twenty translations of Anna Akhmatova Kenyon did with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham are included at the end), also find expression in Kenyon’s work, though for me these poems were not as effective. Not that they aren’t decently crafted, enjoyable poems. It’s just that, when she talks directly about someone being ill, or dying, or comments on larger social issues, or the lives of others, the writing does not flow as naturally, and the images are not as strong. A few of the poems that deal with her cancer are evocative, such as “The Sick Wife,” but even then, it’s hard to tell whether the power comes from the poem itself, or from knowing the heartbreaking story of her early death. (Donald Hall has written a memoir about their life together which I plan on reading.) I also did not find the references to God and faith that interesting, whether in belief or doubt (her ambiguous faith seems to have been shaken at the end of her life), with the rare exceptions of instances like the end of “Let Evening Come.” Other poets have written about these things well. Kenyon’s power largely resides in her precise descriptions of rural life. Her poems may at first appear simple and literal, but careful attention reveals the transcendent insights which connect the ephemeral with the timeless, the personal with the larger landscape of the world. In short, the kind of insights that make poetry truly alive.
Read
May 11, 2024Didn’t read every poem but most! Wonderful.
Read
June 29, 2024We would have been friends. Deep, deep, beautiful resonance. Just language, insight, and revealed emotion, unveiled reality.
July 5, 2018
I had read just a couple of Kenyon's poems and decided that I need to read more of her work. I really enjoyed this rather large collection. Her poems remind me just a little of Robert Frost and Mary Oliver. But she seems closer to her own humanity than some poets which is refreshing. It's such a joy to read poetry that reaches somewhere inside and causes you to say "yes."
March 2, 2019
Not the kind of poetry I enjoy, however, out of 357 pages I found a dozen poems worth a reread. My commitment to read came from reading her husband, Donald Hall's writings for which I especially liked "Essays after 80" I was curious, Donald a former US Poet Laureate, what his wife writings would be like. Took me 2 years off and on to finish Jane's Collected Poems.
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December 22, 2015What i love best about her poems are how she descends into darkness and then back into gratitude and life. She captures hope alive in the dark.
March 21, 2018
I always feel I don't 'get' poetry, but I love the poems of Jane Kenyon.
April 30, 2019
With attention to rich sounds and sensory detail, Kenyon invites the reader into her daily life, whether it’s surprise at her husband’s lie to organize a birthday party behind her back, sitting in a parking lot at the grocery store, going through her mother in law’s drawers, returning from a trip to India, visiting a thrift store in a small town, or watching evening come on. She often ends her poems abruptly, as if the details of watching house painters work or mice burrow in the barn are enough and need no superfluous exclamation. She ruminates on gaining weight and on driving home from the city with as much detail as she does questioning her faith in the god of her life. She uses ellipses, something I rarely see in contemporary poetry. It’s as if, like Dickinson, her poems are crafted in her mind and jotted down on scraps of paper. Here are two short poems that captured my heart:
The Socks
While you were away
I matched your socks
and rolled them into balls.
Then I filled your drawer with
tight dark fists.
And this breathtakingly sexy poem:
The Shirt
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt -
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
I think I may love everything about Jane Kenyon poems.
The Socks
While you were away
I matched your socks
and rolled them into balls.
Then I filled your drawer with
tight dark fists.
And this breathtakingly sexy poem:
The Shirt
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt -
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
I think I may love everything about Jane Kenyon poems.
May 7, 2022
This collection is a long book of poems, and I took my time getting through it. To my surprise, I found I liked the earliest poems best. Kenyon perfectly captured a moment in time, a quiet moment that may have seemed inconsequential as it was happening, but later in memory the sweetness is clear and so precious. People mourn the loss of other people, but we will all be gone eventually, and a little nuthatch will still be cracking sunflower seeds. Time passes all of us so quickly, and it is impossible to savor each moment, but it is a great sorrow that we cannot. Poetry helps.
This Morning
The barn bears the weight
of the first heavy snow
without complaint.
White breath of cows
rises in the tie-up, a man
wearing a frayed winter jacket
reaches for his milking stool
in the dark.
The cows have gone into the ground,
and the man,
his wife beside him now.
A nuthatch drops
to the ground, feeding
on sunflower seeds and bits of bread
I scattered on the snow.
The cats doze near the stove.
They lift their heads
as the plow goes down the road,
making the house
tremble as it passes.
January 31, 2017
I love Jane Kenyon. I'm finally finishing this book of her collected poems that I received as a Christmas gift a few years ago. It was worth the dawdling over the poems. Here's one of my favorites, "Briefly It Enters, Briefly It Speaks":
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .
I am the heart contracted by joy . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .
I am the heart contracted by joy . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .
I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .
I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .
physical-tbr
August 27, 20241. From Room to Room (1978)
my favorites:
◆ "Title"
my favorites:
◆ "Title"
April 9, 2021
"Things: simply lasting, then / failing to last: water, a blue heron's / eye and the light passing / between them: into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen" (138).
If I can leave behind a collection of poetry this rich and attentive when I die, I will be utterly content. The way God drops books into my life with perfect timing never ceases to astonish to me. I've been inexplicably thinking about Keats' death this spring and about Anna Akhmatova since I read her incredible work in January ("I taught myself to live simply and wisely, / to look at the sky and pray to God, / and to wander long before evening / to tire my useless sadness"), and Kenyon meditates beautifully on both of these artists.
If I can leave behind a collection of poetry this rich and attentive when I die, I will be utterly content. The way God drops books into my life with perfect timing never ceases to astonish to me. I've been inexplicably thinking about Keats' death this spring and about Anna Akhmatova since I read her incredible work in January ("I taught myself to live simply and wisely, / to look at the sky and pray to God, / and to wander long before evening / to tire my useless sadness"), and Kenyon meditates beautifully on both of these artists.
May 16, 2019
Jane Kenyon's poetry is so clear and accessible - her poems read like very understandable journal entries that comment, in unsentimental poetic language, on very ordinary observations in her day to day life. There are references to rural life in New England, her home, her dog, her husband, parents, friends, children, neighbors, strangers, nature, gardening, weather, a vacation. She was plain-spoken and at the same time enormously inventive with language. Frequently a poem makes an unexpected twist near the end that both surprises and amazes. My mother gave me this book as a birthday present before she died.
November 11, 2020
I’ve spent the whole fall with this book, reading a couple of poems during breakfast most days and sometimes one or two more last thing at night. I was sad to reach the end of it. I enjoyed seeing the evolution of Kenyon’s poetry over the decades following her move to the rural New Hampshire home she shared with her husband and fellow poet Donald Hall. Many of my favorites of these poems capture the cycle of the seasons in the natural and human worlds there. Kenyon’s poems about her experience of depression have also been very meaningful to me, having recently received my own diagnosis of that illness. Thanks, Jane.
February 26, 2018
An excellent collection of poems that spans the authors writing lifetime. You begin to feel you know the author as she goes through different phases of life and her writing reflects that. Like a friend you stay in touch with, even though you don't live close anymore. I read it over the course of about a year and enjoyed picking it up now and then to read another batch of poems before setting it down for a little bit. A lovely collection, particularly covering topics relating to country life and the loss of someone you love.
October 30, 2019
Jane Kenyon's voice is the sound of the trusted clock that never stops. A metronome, its music and clarity dwell in her lines. This is the best of her work, though I hope no reader is satisfied by it and goes in search of more. She is not edgy or abstract. She is clear and solid and names things simply, with their form and color and resonance wholely intact. She illumines small, everyday things as miraculous, and brings large forces of nature into a cup as reflections, shadows and tonics to taste and utlimately, savor.
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