Donald Hall--Interview by David McDonald

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by McDonald, David

DM: I have heard you say that the 17th-century poem "An Exequy to His Matchless, Never-to-Be-- Forgotten Friend" by Henry King is the best poem of grief in the English language. What makes it so wonderful?

DH: "The,Exequy," despite King's belief in paradise, despite (because of?) its wit, seems to me one of the greatest poems of mourning. . . . It's the strength of the feeling of loss.

DM: In the opening story of your collection String Too Short to Be Saved, "The Wild Heifers," you recount how your grandfather hesitated to acknowledge a fellow farmer's comment about getting old. Because he didn't want you to know about his sense or fear of aging and death. Yet all his stories were, according to you, his way of giving his life to you, a passing of the baton. Are you doing that now with your son or daughter? Or are you doing that through your public writing?

DH: One of the major goals of my writing-look at the children's books like Ox-Cart Man, Lucy's Christmas, and The Milkman's Boy-has been to preserve the past and pass it on. Yes, I want to hand on a sense of old times, not only in my writing, but to my children and grandchildren.

DM: In the Epilogue to the reissue of String Too Short to Be Saved, written in 1979, you said that for the first time you were living in the present. That you no longer required a wished-for future to cancel the present and that you were in daily touch with the past without living there. I think your way of putting it was that you were living both horizontally and vertically in the enduring present. Are you still living in that enduring present? Has the death of your wife Jane Kenyon changed the place in which you are living?

DH: After Jane's death, I live in past and present. I have dear children and grandchildren, but I feel peripheral to their present. I look ahead to my associations with women. Otherwise, my present is largely empty.

DM: You also said in the Epilogue to String Too Short to Be Saved that time elongates as you watch old Mount Kearsarge from the porch of Eagle Pond Farm. That you were looking into fir and granite that four generations of your family have looked at. And that such gazing has braided together ribbons of sight, invisible strands holding generations together-living, dead, and unborn. Does this braiding remain for you?

DH: I think that the braiding has taken place so firmly after twenty-five years that I am no longer continually aware of it.

It is difficult in the United States to find people who live in a place that brings the generations together. I am fortunate.

DM: In your "Notes on T. S. Eliot" from Their Ancient Glittering Eyes you commented on the physical improvement you saw in Eliot in 1959 from his appearance in your first meeting with him in London in the early y5os. Eliot had just married a much younger woman. Can marrying a new young wife or husband, or having a relationship with a younger person, inspire great poetry in a poet's later years? Or is it just a matter of happiness for the aging artist or combating the dread of approaching death, unconnected to the art?