#Donald Hall

[havingapoemwithyou]

summer kitchen by Donald Hall

[apoemaday]

White Apples

by Donald Hall

when my father had been dead a week I woke with his voice in my ear I sat up in bed

and held my breath and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again I would put on my coat and galoshes

[soracities]

Donald Hall, on solitude and the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, pub. The New Yorker (2016) [ID'd]

[uwmspeccoll]

Happy New Year!

What better way to begin the New Year than with wood engravings of serene winter scenes by the New England wood engraver Thomas W. Nason (1889-1971). These images are from Here at Eagle Pond by the America poet, writer, and U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018), published in New York by Ticknor & Fields in 1990. Hall, along with his wife, poet and author Jane Kenyon (1947–1995), lived at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, a small town in Merrimack County, from 1975 until his death. This book is a meditation on life at Eagle Pond. When he moved there from Michigan, Hall, a New Englander himself, writes:

For me, it was coming home, and it was coming home to a place of language. . . . When I was twelve or thirteen, it was here that I began writing poetry. This farm provided the subject matter for the first poems I published, when I was sixteen. . . .

The evocative wood engravings of Thomas W. Nason were reproduced for this publication from the prints in the collection of the Boston Public Library. Our copy is another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

We wish you a bright and wonderous New Year!

View posts from New Years past.

View more wood engravings by Thomas W. Nason.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[batglare101]

I’m a HUGE fan of DC/WC AUs!! May I ask if you have any concepts for Hawk and Dove?

52. Doveheart

yes!!! hopefully this is the correct hawk and dove you were expecting - they are in my au! c: (hawk is on the following post)

[thesunpersists]

The Third Thing, Chapter 4

"We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing."

Snapshots of Katniss and Peeta's post-war life. Each chapter is inspired by and loosely based on a quote from "The Third Thing" by Donald Hall.

—

Chapter 4: “For many couples, children are a third thing.”

Read on ao3!

[vedantvarma]

What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.

Beautiful words that tell a beautiful story.

The concept of ‘the third thing’ resonated with me deeply.

So much of love is rooted in the everyday. Little things that will not make it into a diary or journal. And yet, when it matters the most, when you seek to remember a loved one, it is to the routine that we shine a spotlight on; of stories and things shared, discussed, agreed or disagreed upon. Some seminal life events, but mostly the mundane.

[dc-tournaments]

Why do they deserve to win?

Iris West

Dove

[dk-thrive]

as if everything heavy and cold vanished at once... / weightless as clouds in the great day’s windy April.

Donald Hall, from “Great Day in the Cows’ House” in “Great Day in the Cows' House” (Published by Ives Street Press, Mt. Carmel, CT, 1984)

[rachelspoetrycorner]

Afternoon at MacDowell (1993) by Jane Kenyon Summer Kitchen (1999) by Donald Hall

In Episode 263, Rachel shares one of the greatest poet romances of all time!

Rachel: I wanted to talk about Jane Kenya for a minute. So she is 20 years younger than him. Um, and that is significant because it makes kind of what happened in their relationship kind of all the more tragic. So in 1989, Donald Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer, and even though his chances of survival were really slim, he ended up going into remission. Five years later, Jane Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died only 15 months later at age 47.

In those last months of her life, they were putting together an anthology of her work. And at the time she was kind of commenting on his health issues. So I wanted to read one of her poems about his illness, and then read his poem kind of about her. Because I think like, you appreciate his more if you have read hers.

[His poem] is lovely in the context of her poem, particularly because they both used the word "miracle", and her miracle is kind of in the context of poetry and art and this kind of high concept, you know, of what is spectacular. And then his is just kind of like, we had an incredible life, and that was a miracle, too.

This segment is such a gem. When Rachel pointed out the miracle link, I was blown away because I hadn't even noticed. Adding my two cents to the cause -and just like Rachel, I don't pretend or assume this is an actual connection meant by Hall- I like to think Donald was also echoing the use of the chair, and the use of light in his poem.

If you’d like to hear more about this poet romance, you can do so here: BoPo, from 8:01 - 17:56

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The Stump

Donald Hall

Today they cut down the oak.

Strong men climbed with ropes

in the brittle tree.

The exhaust of a gasoline saw

was blue in the branches.

It is February. The oak has been dead a year.

I remember the great sails of its branches

rolling out greenly, a hundred and twenty feet up,

and acorns thick on the lawn.

Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree.

Today they run over the snow

squeaking their lamentation.

Yet I was happy that it was coming down.

"Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself

with a joy that was strange to me.

Though the oak was the shade of old summers,

I loved the guttural saw.

"Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle... And Other Modern Verse" - compiled by Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith

[shy-girl04]

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

                                           I sat up in bed

and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes

By Donald Hall

[lunchboxpoems]

WEEDS AND PEONIES

Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls, with red flecks at their shaggy centers in your border of prodigies by the porch. I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors and float it in a glass bowl, as you used to do.

Ordinary pleasures, contentment recollected, blow like snow into the abandoned garden, overcoming the daisies. Your blue coat vanishes down Pond Road into imagined snowflakes with Gus at your side, his great tail swinging,

but you will not reappear, tired and satisfied, and grief’s repeated particles suffuse the air like the dog yipping through the entire night, or the cat stretching awake, then curling as if to dream of her mother’s milky nipples.

A raccoon dislodged a geranium from its pot. Flowers, roots, and dirt lay upended in the back garden where lilies begin their daily excursions above stone walls in the season of old roses. I pace beside weeds

and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots. “Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.” Your peonies lean their vast heads westward as if they might topple. Some topple.

DONALD HALL

[davidhudson]

Donald Hall, September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018.

[starssssss]

“Renaissance artists utilized doves primarily in religious artwork to depict the third element of the trinity, the Holy Spirit.”

[withnailrules]

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

— sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall