Donald Hall: Exile and the Kingdom

Abstract

Donald Hall:Exile and the Kingdom Peter Makuck (bio) In his classic essay "Poetry and Ambition" Donald Hall writes that "for almost every poet it is necessary to live in exile before returning home—an exile rich in conflict and confirmation." He goes on to say that certain places may "shine at the center of our work and lives; but if we never leave these places, we are not likely to grow up enough to do the work." After being graduated from Harvard College in 1951, Hall left his New England home for Great Britain to attend Oxford University, where he wrote "Exile," a one-hundredline poem in rhyming iambic, which earned the Newdigate Prize in 1953. This poem gives voice to what will become major themes in his work—death, loss, memory, exile, and the kingdom: Exiled by death from people we have known,We are reduced again by years, and tryTo call them back and clothe the barren bone,Not to admit that people ever die.(A boy who talked and read and grew with meFell from a maple tree.) As with Thomas Hardy, one of his most admired poets, Hall often presents poems that have a retrospective quality and what might generally be called a dark outlook, but they are not focused exclusively on the past and are not always dark. The Hall poem is not, as some might think, merely a thermometer that gauges the chill of the present against the warmth of the past. More like Proust than Hardy, he often recaptures the past and makes it live vibrantly in the present. Exile, however, must be overcome. Also written during Hall's stay at Oxford is "Elegy for Wesley Wells." Wells was his maternal grandfather and owned a farm in New Hampshire, where the poet enjoyed summers from the time he was a small boy, learning about cows, hens, horses, and black-faced sheep, as well as about haying, sugaring, and hard work in general. This elegy is among the first poems to emerge from that deep shining place Hall would explore for decades. Five lines in, we realize he is writing from exile in England: "I think across the clamorous Atlantic / To where the farm lies hard against the foot / of Ragged Mountain, underneath Kearsarge." Ragged Mountain and Kearsarge are two place-names that will be sounded [End Page 139] many times in years to come. The great distance from his home country both deepens his sense of loss and highlights the exemplary life of Wesley Wells with whom he identifies himself. One section describes how, since the Civil War, the fortunes of rural New Hampshire changed for the worse, farming having become a dying way of life. But the poem's emotional charge comes from his grandfather. Quickly we feel a devastating sense of loss, a haunting absence, the incipient disorder and chaos that his death has brought to the farm: His dogs will whimper through the webby barn,Where spiders close his tools in a pale gauzeAnd wait for flies. The nervous woodchuck nowWill waddle plumply through the world of weeds,Eating wild peas as if he owned the land,And the fat hedgehog picks the apple trees.When next October's frosts harden the groundAnd fasten in the year's catastrophe,The farm will come undone—The farmer dead, and deep in his plowed earth. Though Hall's vocabulary can sometimes force you to a dictionary, what we have here is the Frostian plainspeak of a rural poet who is measuring his ties to a place and describing a man whose work and seasonal rhythms he admires and loves. The redemptive nature of work, too, will become a central theme for Hall. Concrete diction, sharp images, and declarative sentences quickly engage a reader, even a common reader not initiated to poetry, which in a small way helps explain Hall's wide readership. Though his often anthologized "Maple Syrup" would not appear for another twenty years, the Wells elegy sets the stage for this compelling story of a visit to the cemetery where his grandfather lies buried, then to the farmhouse "where no one lives." Hall will...