1989 Book Prize Winner: Poetry : The Late Spring of Donald Hall

“Real Life Rock, Top Ten.” I read it in the Village Voice last January, compiled by the music critic Greil Marcus--a list of heterogeneous items linked by their energy and their iconoclasm, the characteristics of rock ‘n’ roll. And No. 1 (just above Keith Richards live in Oakland) was “Prophecy,” a ranting curse out of 60-year-old Donald Hall’s “The One Day,” a book-length poem:

Your children will wander looting the shopping malls

for forty years, suffering for your idleness,

until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot

.. the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up,

Marcus quotes and compares the prophetic voice to that of the early Dylan, of Isaiah, of Johnny Rotten, “defining what rock ‘n’ roll no longer dares to say.” Something about Hall’s poetry always has made it timely, a part of the news as well as of literature.

He started, as do most writers, embedded in the idiom of his time. It was the 1950s, and his early, prize-winning poems were about exile and existential estrangement. Holding his new-born child in his arms, he addressed it as “my son, my executioner”; he mourned the decay of rural New Hampshire, where he had spent this school vacations, and he detailed the dull, familiar features of the suburbia in which he had been raised. Those almost identical “dark houses harden into sleep,” he wrote, and it was a sleep where he saw no refreshment, no waking into vigor.

But he was looking for something more. Searching for an imagery equivalent to the heartland from which we have been exiled, he entered next upon a different kind of poetry. In “The Long River” he rows into a dark, mysterious interior:

The musk-ox smells

in his long head

my boat coming.

The musk-ox is both ominous and vital; his appetites have become forgotten in suburbia. The spondaic phrases give the writing a slowness, a weight, that it has not had before. And its syllabic form--Hall was the inventor of syllabics in our time--make for a more unpredictable verse-movement than in the earlier poetry, with which it has little in common.

It was now the ‘60s, and he moved into different kinds of free verse. “The Alligator Bride” embodies a kind of jocular surrealism. Such investigations of the irrational, however, led him eventually to the true sources of the rural nostalgia that always had haunted him. He quit teaching at Ann Arbor in 1975, remarried, and moved back to the farmhouse of his maternal grandparents, not as farmer himself but as a writer who wanted to raise poetry on farmland. And he succeeded, writing poems that were less elegies for the past than realizations of it--about the cart horses and the hen yard, the Holsteins and the ox-cart man, their lives thick with things. He lifted the recurrent rhythms of the farming year into the present tense.

His career seemed inconsistent and unpatterned, as Herman Melville’s must have looked during his time, or Shakespeare’s. But he has always been consistent in his subject matter, his poetry being preoccupied with the shared rather than the exceptional experience, with what we have or could have in common.

Thus “The One Day” consists of the voices of all of us. The poem is in three parts. The first opens with an aging man daydreaming and smoking in his yellow chair, “unfit/to work or love.” His voice is joined by a woman’s but they are the same voice, though they speak of different lives, and we come to understand that they have led the same life, in which the promise of fullness has been answered only by the fact of emptiness. They speak of a self without center, an existence without revelation or joy. “The world is a bed,” they say; that is, the world has become reduced to a bed of adultery, a bed of insomnia, a bed of sleep only after pills chased down with whiskey. The voices weave and alternate, but they speak of the same dead end; of having been herded unwillingly into a present with no real connection to past or future, a present in which they find neither rest nor meaning.

It is written in a line based on the Old English accentual line as it was loosened and revised by Pound, one of the most useful and flexible technical innovations of the century. The collage and juxtaposition of experience that he uses also is a modified Poundian method, making possible the economical inclusion of a great deal of specific heterogeneous material.

For this poem is all detail and circumstance, the one day made up of many specific days, the one life of many lives, though they lead the speaker into the same narrow place, at the end of which is only fear. At the end of the first part, the female voice tells, with a deadly flatness, how she prepares to give her children pills which will kill them. Then there enters someone whose identity hovers just out of sight, the way a beekeeper’s mask darkens a face, who picks up a rag doll and starts to demonstrate on it the proper ways to dismember a child, as one might a dead fowl, by cutting its limbs carefully into sections.

Though Part One ends thus in nightmare, it has been moderate in tone, that of someone no longer possessing the energy to direct his or her own life. By contrast, Part Two, with the title “Four Classic Texts,” starts with rage. “Prophecy,” which reminded Greil Marcus of Johnny Rotten, is a curse--against our civilization and against life itself. It is succeeded by the rage of satire, a bitter satire of love and sex and marriage, in “Pastoral”. The work is still a bed, in which “we pull off our clothes like opening junk mail.” “History” follows, rage against the past, and consists of a terrible parody of what already parodies itself, the list of human destructiveness, and Tiberius melts into Stalin. The fourth classic text, though, is not like the others: “Eclogue” replaces their destructive rage with its opposite extreme--a visionary certainty, the return to an age of gold through a cyclical process in which we recapture innocence, “the vector of greed withdraws” and there is a “restitution of lost things.”

We are to make what we will of this middle section. The “Four Classic Texts” are thrust between Parts One and Three, and we must supply the connection for ourselves. What I think is implied is that his composite protagonist has been moved out of the earlier quiet and rational despair into a full-bodied irrationality, of crazy angers and equally crazy hope, which are at least signs of energy, of not surrendering to the presence with the darkened face.

So that when in the last part we return to the original speakers, though they are still old and in the same world, they are changed-- enabled. The brushes with craziness have released them from their inertia. They still live in the present, but now they live in it fully. No longer “unfit/to work or love,” they now find joy in both--

When my body shook again with the body’s passion,

it was impossible only because I expected nothing.

--and a proposition is reversed, in a kind of echo of John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”: “A bed is the world,” inclusive, and receptive to possibilities. The polysyllabic ironies from earlier in the poem are replaced by praise, not only of blossoms and old lilacs but of “fried Spam and onions on slices of Wonder Bread.”

What Hall achieves in this third part is an extraordinarily complex presentation of the grounds for joy, difficult enough to describe at any time, a joy that has nothing in common with complacency, for it is active, intelligent and completely aware that it is to be ended by death, which in fact helps to define it. The rage and satire have been worked off, but the promise of a cyclical return is in its way kept.

On the first Sunday of every month we assemble

molecules of Jesus from their diaspora, he says, while a few lines farther down:

When the rain drives on the poppies they hold bright petals to the rain. Raindrops recur and disappear, as the molecules of Jesus disappear and recur. There is one day: Past and future are contained in the present of the one day as the whole world is contained in the one bed. Everything is present at the same time:

The tomcat plays with his mother, sucking and teasing; he cuffs

his mother’s jaw. The tomcat limps home in the bloody

morning, ear torn. The tomcat sleeps all day

in a portion of the sun, fur tatty over old scars, pulls

himself to the saucer of milk, and snores going back

to sleep, knowing himself the same. The kitten leaps

in the air, her paws spread like a squirrel’s. The beauty of this writing is not merely in what it says, that the stages of our lives are in some way co-existent, but in the way it so actively is what it says, in the specifics of the cat and in the pacing of those specifics. The joy and the acceptance are neither glib nor unexamined.

Among his numerous prose books, Hall has written at least one, “Remembering Poets” (1978), which is of permanent value, not only for its observant memoirs of Dylan Thomas, Frost, Eliot and Pound but also for the brilliant way he moves from them into his reflections about the nature of poetry itself. He says:

poetry attempts ... to add old or irrational

elements to the light of consciousness by

means of language, which is the instrument of consciousness. The poet thus adds unreason to reason, “making a third thing.” It seems to me that this describes well what Hall has done in “The One Day”: Mere reason was combined with mere irrationality and the two in combination produce the refined and alert awareness, the late spring, of the third part, a life going through the same processes as a poetry.

And this poem, as a whole, may indeed be seen as the synthesis of a whole life’s work. It is one of those books, like Elizabeth Bishop’s last collection, which alters the way we look at the jumbled contents of the poetic career preceding it, giving it retrospectively a shape, a pattern, a consistency it didn’t seem to have at the time.

Poetry Nominees A Soldier’s Time by R. L. Barth (John Daniel) Streamers by Sandra McPherson (Ecco) The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts by Donald Hall (Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin) Sarah’s Choice by Elanor Wilner (Phoenix Poets/ University of Chicago Press) The Wonder of Seeing Double by Robert B. Shaw (University of Massachusetts Press)