Colloquial being a name for our familiar, everyday speech, there is also a pattern of thought, a structure, that could be called colloquial, one that we make out of ready-to-hand materials. Concreteness of the kitchen table. Solid red brick of a rising sun. Stone wall of one’s rough-edged moods. As nimble as a tongue feels among its commonest sounds, the mind, too, slips into customary household rhythms: the usual meals, the weekly chores, a day’s first and last light, the weather between. And though their repetition becomes tedious, such concerns are, at least, immediate; that the brain should involve itself with them seems perfectly natural. That it should write poems about them seems natural.

What the imagination does with a perception is as various as the perceivers. E.E. Cummings: “Spring is like a perhaps hand / (which comes carefully / out of Nowhere).” William Carlos Williams: “Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches.” Edna St. Vincent Millay: “April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” Donald Hall: “in May, / green generates again.” To write of the ordinary—minor themes, as opposed to lofty ones—can be liberating for a poet unfortunate enough to live after the production of “Adonais,” “Paradise Lost” or “The Iliad.” Yet some poetry born from colloquial thought, as Donald Hall’s is, does not necessarily profit from the freedom. Because the subjects of his consideration, characters animate and inanimate, the sources of his metaphors—all the material of his poems—are drawn from what most nearly surrounds them, his work is in some ways the hardest to make out, in the way that a book held an inch from one’s nose refuses to come into focus. At times of grief, his poems do no more than grieve; if they stare at a mountain, they describe a mountain, in more or less mountainous terms; when his poems cannot find a subject, they talk of poetry.

It is a question of content, not poetic craft, for Hall changes style over and over again, having experimented with the form, the diction, the tone of voice, and the genre of his poems, having written eulogies in the highest register (“Let us praise death that turns pink cheeks to ashes…”) and a series of lowbrow imitations of Horace (“Let many bad poets praise the Grand Canyon…”). His language, unerringly precise, never lapses into cliché, dead metaphor, or banality, but neither does it (“green generates again”) challenge the self-evident. His manner is not always colloquial: his imagery is. One poem pictures Hall’s ancestors as a row of urinals (“these old men / who are only plumbing”); another, as a pantryful of cheeses (“Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner; / the clipped speech of Roquefort”); a third, as a single roasted pig on a platter, first whole, then carved, then eaten. It is as if, knowing how far afield the imagination can range, how high its flights, he is bent on tethering his every creation firmly to the earth, replacing their wings with what Keats calls “a pair of patient sublunary legs.” If they hold a mirror up to nature it is one that seems, at first, fogged with familiarity, the all-too-closeness of the merely circumstantial. I say “at first,” but even this does not change after repeated readings—what changes is our dawning sense of the poems’ darker purpose, the way their demotic (and democratic) song invites us into the woods, only to abandon us there.

This autumn Donald Hall becomes this country’s latest Poet Laureate, a post that the Library of Congress describes as “the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans,” as though the Department of Homeland Security were eager to siphon off the dangerous artistic electricity in the atmosphere. (Did Yeats’s “Scholars” recognize, wearing the carpet with their shoes, this excess charge inside them?) A position inaugurated under the former name “Consultant in Poetry” in 1937, the Laureate receives a $35,000 stipend and serves from October to April. He has few official duties aside from the commitment to “raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” Past appointees have used their position to advance initiatives in the school systems, arrange a series of poetry readings, or, in the case of Joseph Brodsky, to distribute cheap copies of verse in airport terminals, motel rooms and grocery stores; Hall has hinted he will try to involve the media, possibly through a weekly show on National Public Radio or a cable TV channel. This year also saw the publication of his fourteenth volume of poetry, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (431 pp., Houghton Mifflin, $30.00). The book has the airtight heft of a life’s design brought to fruition. It includes nineteen previously uncollected poems and a CD of the author reading his work. He has always read beautifully, his voice made a little shadowy by heavy breathing, but still deep and clear, with an almost operatic vibrato in some of the vowels. The last word of his poems often rises in pitch, as though he were looking up from the podium to peek out at his audience.

Born in Connecticut in 1928, Donald Hall should by rights have been a product of the suburbs. His work, however, is decidedly rural. As a boy he spent summers on his grandmother’s farm in New Hampshire, and it cast an irrevocable spell over him; decades later, he returned there for good. He writes of the place obsessively and ecstatically, as one might of a recurring vision of heaven: its compass points are Eagle Pond across the way, the piney shoulders of Mount Kearsarge—“blue ghost,” he calls it—visible from his front porch, Ragged Mountain’s granite ledges and blueberry bushes across its treeless head, the no-stoplight towns at its feet, the inhabitants of those towns, the curt dialect of the inhabitants. The farmhouse itself, birthplace of his mother and grandmother and built in the era of wagon traffic, sits too close to the road, as if impatient for news. From a steeply pitched roof the dark shutters of a dormer window stare out like raccoon eyes. All the angles are a little less than right: everything—foundation, steps, porch, eaves—has an acquired slope, hunched with wear and repair and hard weather. In 1975 Hall took a leave of absence from the University of Michigan and moved here with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. A year later they decided there was no going back, and he gave up teaching for the free-lance life. 

“That life seemed so adventurous, like a pirate’s….It was the notion of the improvised day—getting up in the morning and not knowing what you would be working on but that you would be working—its freedom, its solitude.” Hall has a way of speaking about his own life as if it was already an achieved thing. Pride at having supported himself by writing, at not being beholden to any institution or organization, his penchant for the apothegm, the way he tells an anecdote too well not to have told it before—all these give a listener the impression of a man who has turned the red pen upon himself, culling, amending, refining a continuous life into a series of individual lines, striking out the ones that jar, underscoring the resonant.

Hall came to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1948 and soon joined the editorial staff of this magazine, whose members at the time included John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, and Peter Davison. And, though not part of the Advocate, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara, and Robert Creeley were also studying at Harvard. “In general we were not a mutual admiration society,” Hall said in a 1991 Paris Review interview. “In general we were murderous….We would stay up until two or three in the morning arguing about whether a poem was good enough to be in the magazine.” Hall succeeded in getting five of his poems published in it before he left, each a compact, rigorously formal, Hardy-esque lyric. One is a dialogue with a corpse beyond the grave, another is addressed to a “Toy Lady,” another to “My mouse, my girl in grey”—beneath a hard veneer of artifice, there is something in them that heralds the poems as yet unwritten. Fifty-odd years later he shakes his head, smiling: “Then, I only wrote about love and death. I was at a library fundraiser not too long ago. One of the bored businessmen across the table said to me, [in a gruff mumble] ‘So, whaddya write about?’ I said, ‘Love, death, and New Hampshire.’”

All three have proven to be not only subjects for his work, but the reasons for it. After the move back to the East, his pen his one source of income—“and without insurance!” as he frequently points out—he became a true jack-of-all-word-trades, turning out essays, short fictions, memoirs, magazine articles, English textbooks, and stories for children. He spent a year covering basketball as a beat reporter for the Boston Celtics; wrote a book on the English sculptor Henry Moore; edited the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes; co-authored a biography of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis; and once, after reading that Gertrude Stein adored Ford cars, dashed out an article about her and sold it to the Ford Times, the auto manufacturer’s official periodical: “Nothing worthwhile, but it was still using the language, still using syntax and rhythm, albeit in a trivial way….Even there, I’m working with my material.” He has said this before, but he speaks with feeling. From a deep armchair, the fabric faded and in some places worn to the wood, he watches his two cats, Thelma and Louise, pick their way across the creaky living room. The uneven floor is punctuated here and there with small piles of manuscript and collections of new verse by new poets. The cats pad serenely over the poet’s feet, rub up against the legs of his visitor, and stretch out on the floor, offering up their bellies to be scratched. The door thumps shut behind the housekeeper on her way in, thumps shut behind her on her way out. All is rehearsed motion. Choreography of the day-to-day. Habitual gestures, habitual talk.

Curious: that a poetry could spring from the dried-up, the mundane, the barest circumstance. When Donald Hall’s first book of poems, Exiles and Marriages, appeared in 1955 to much critical acclaim, no less a reader than Randall Jarrell laid this heavy hand upon it:

The observation, insofar as it pinpoints Hall’s primary interest (the commonplace) and his style (complacent—that is, at ease), applies to almost all of Hall’s work—not only the first volume of poems but the fifteen others that have followed. And yet Jarrell mistakes the effect of this combination: we are not shocked into awareness of his poems’ limitations but disappointed into it, as one feels a certain disappointment on finally being let in on a secret long withheld from him. In the simplicity of the poems, in the way the sound and syntax and logic of their imagery move without interruption, in their concentration, there is an honesty that invites one in, makes one feel at home. They work differently from other poems that astonish by force of invention or estrange us from what we know. Rather, admiring their transparency, we begin to put our faith in them as we would put faith in another human being. Hall makes us realize, over and over again, that the last secret a poem withholds is the knowledge of its own mortality, that sweet apple we long to hang back on the tree.

In the bliss of routine

—coffee, love, pond afternoons, poems—

                                    we feel we will live

forever, until we know we feel it.

                                                            (“Routine”)

To end in an awakening of this sort, the poem must first set up a valid dream. When the end is death, the dream is one of eternity. It comes as little surprise, then, to observe that Donald Hall’s best poems, without exception, latch onto some perpetual cycle—the round of the seasons, for instance. The rhythm can be auditory or imagistic or both. It repeats, and its repetition comforts us. In the first six quatrains of “Names of Horses” we follow a horse through the duties of his life and the months of the year, as he hauls “sledges of cordwood” in winter, spreads manure in spring, pulls the mowing machine in summer, until, in the October of his old age, his owner digs a grave for the horse, puts a shotgun to his head, and fells him into it.

            For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,

            roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,

            yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter

            frost heaved your bones in the ground—old toilers, soil makers:

            O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

For seven stanzas there was a beautiful illusion: The Horse (capital H) had its own seasons, persisting in a loop of time all its own, immortal by the routine that governed it, tilling the soil, being tilled into it, blossoming anew. It was an existence that the human race might hope for. Oh! Each of the names in the last line stuns with the crack of its own bullet: the illusion cannot withstand a catalog of those individual deaths. That final, heartbreaking “O,” falling just when one expects the poet to draw tight his vision of eternity, is the open mouth through which it slips away. The parabolic trajectory of the poem, as we enter into some enduring cycle and then participate in its end, is at the heart of Hall’s work. And often he does not need the conclusive “O” to undercut what comes before: the poem itself, its images, its sounds, are a turning wheel—of the seasons, of the stages of life, even of the poem’s own metrical form (as in “Sestina” or his long sequence in syllabic lines, “Baseball”)—so that the very act of finishing the poem, stopping it short, is one of dissolution. “Ox-Cart Man,” made familiar to many as a children’s book illustrated by Barbara Cooney, follows a farmer through his autumn work as he counts and bags potatoes, collects honey, goose feathers, and February’s maple sugar, all of which he puts in the cart to sell at Portsmouth Market.

                        When the cart is empty he sells the cart.

                        When the cart is sold he sells the ox,

harness and yoke, and walks

home, his pockets heavy

with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold

stitches new harness

for next year’s ox in the barn,

and carves the yoke, and saws planks

building the cart again.

That “again” marks the passage of a year (which will renew itself in spring), and of a year in the life of a man (who remains living only so long), and of a bygone era (which has disappeared entirely). The poem’s language—anaphoric, declarative, unadorned by adjective or metaphor—means to stay out of the way; what is memorable are the larger gestures, the overriding rhythm, the plot, and often the plot dictates that the poem itself must cease. The same pattern, with variations on the theme, underlies “Old Roses,” “The Days,” “Great Day in the Cows’ House,” “Kicking the Leaves,” and the poems written in the wake of his wife Jane Kenyon’s untimely death—indeed, almost every last one of Hall’s creations contains some form of this myth, continually reworked, reimagined.

Can the dissolution of a poem be compatible with, even necessary for, the achievement of the poem’s aim? The effect of any art, seemingly by definition, is a mortal enemy to the ephemeral; if it is not, we judge it a poor effort. Even if the work itself is temporary, the artist intends that it live on in the minds of those who partake of it; when the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy made cairns on the beach, piling stone upon stone with such infinite care, knowing full well that the incoming tide would wash them away, he had the enterprise filmed in order to extend it. In poetry, certainly, there is a long tradition of imagining one’s craft as a means to live beyond oneself; one’s words, sown in the wind, travel far more widely than the poet’s self could ever hope to, and their sounds, continually resurrected by new pairs of lungs, outlast the poet’s own.

            So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

            So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

                                                [Shakespeare, Sonnet 18]

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;

                                    [Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”]

Donald Hall himself has spoken of “trying to make the sentence an artifact,” and wrote an essay entitled “Poetry and Ambition,” in which he argues that “true ambition in a poet seeks fame in the old sense, to make words that live forever.” Yet he goes on to say that “ambition is not a quality of the poem but of the poet,” and concludes: “Maybe ambition is appropriately unattainable when we acknowledge: No poem is so great as we demand that poetry be.” If that holds true, we might imagine that a poem is equal parts success and failure, and even, perhaps, that the one is contingent upon the other.

In 1979, for a new edition of String Too Short To Be Saved, his first collection of memoirs, Hall added an epilogue, which ends,

Time elongates as I watch the old mountain. I look into fir and granite that four generations of family eyes have looked at. Sitting on the porch in my great-grandfather’s captain’s chair, I feel as if our eyes’ gazing has braided ribbons of sight that reach from this farm to the slopes five miles away, invisible strands holding generations together, the living and dead and unborn braided together—permanent mountain attached to disappearing flesh.