Sorry Jen, I have either a terrible cold or allergies and am in a cranky mood. There is one Jane Kenyon poem I like, but I wonder how much of her reputation is built on sympathy. Certainly Hall is making a new career for himself as a Professional Widower. I was in a bookstore with a friend of mine who saw one of the newest Hall books and she said, "Oh God, not another 'Jane Is Dead And I Will Never Be Happy Again' screeds. It isn't that I'm not sorry he lost his wife, but there are limits!" I guess what I object to most in that statement is that it limits poetry to feelings, as if that is the ONLY reason people read and write it. In some ways, it is such a middle-class statement: "We have the consolation of beauty" is quite a lovely sentiment, but if I were late with my rent I could not tell my landlord, "But let me cheer you up with a beyooteeful po-eme." (But wouldn't it be nice if I could?)
Hall did edit a wonderful anthology I used in a college class: To Read Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama." It may be out of print, but snatch it up if you find it. He does a devastating deconstruction job on Rod McKuen that alone is worth the price of the book. And it has the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Good stuff.
This is the Kenyon poem:
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Oh, and being a fan of the paintings, I like this one as well:
Dutch Interiors
(for Caroline)
Christ has been done to death
in the cold reaches of northern Europe
a thousand thousand times.
.........................Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.
Now tell me that the Holy Ghost
does not reside in the play of light
on cutlery!
A woman makes lace,
with a moist-eyed spaniel lying
at her small shapely feet.
Even the maid with the chamber pot
is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl. . . .
And the merchant's wife, still
in her yellow dressing gown
at noon, dips her quill into India ink
with an air of cautious pleasure.
There--perhaps I am not so unredeemable!
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