Wayne County Wanderings: Donald Hall provided a window on the American soul

As I sit here at my keyboard in an eerily quiet newsroom, there are two things on my mind: windows and poets.

Three windows and one poet, to be exact.

The first window is located in Lake Ariel. It's on the second floor of my grandparents' farmhouse.

I've looked through that window many times since childhood, facing out on what was once the pasture and apple orchard.

This particular window lets sunlight into the old master bedroom.

For well over a century, the circle of life has played out here. Children opened their eyes for the very first time on the big old bed.

Decades later, those children… now tired old men and women… have sunk down on that same bed and closed their eyes for the final time.

The second window is located in White Mills. It looks out over my own backyard… across an expanse of grass, down the hill, past the creek and onto the Lollipop Pond.

Through this window, I've seen knobby-kneed fawns, bulgy bears, twitchy-nosed rabbits and too many bird types to count.

My house was built in 1867, so looking out on a quiet summer's night, I can almost feel the presence of those who came before me… a deep and humbling connection to the past.

The third and final window was owned by a cranky old New England poet. It's a window through which he watched the snows come and go as his circle of existence grew steadily smaller.

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Revelations

Donald Hall died on Saturday, June 23 at the family homestead in Wilmot, New Hampshire.

Hall was one of the most interesting writers I've ever encountered. Not only was he a brilliant essayist, but his poetry defied categories and blurred boundaries.

I first encountered him by seeing his picture on a bulletin board in the office of my college advisor.

Hall was clad in a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball uniform and sporting a long, shaggy beard. He was winding up to fire the ball, his eyes locked on the target.

“Who's this?” I asked the grizzled old Jesuit, books and papers covering every square inch of his desktop.

“That is Donald Hall,” he said, looking up at me, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

“Huh,” I replied intelligently. “Never heard of him. Is he a pitcher?”

“No, Mr. Edwards,” he intoned with that trademark baritone of his.

“Donald Hall is a poet.”

My initial reaction to that bit of information was confusion. From this picture at least, he looked more like a hippie or a rock star suited up for a charity baseball game than a poet.

Later on, I did a little bit of research on him at the university library and, the more I read, the more interested I became.

For example...

“In the country of baseball, time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same.”

Now, that's the kind of poetry I can relate to!

Poet Laureate

As it turns out, Donald Hall was a fascinating guy.

He was the only child of dairy farmers. His parents encouraged him from an early age to pursue his passion, which as it turned out, was writing poetry.

Hall attended Phillips Exeter Academy, then went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard. He traveled to Stanford, then back to Harvard, and finally to the University of Michigan were he began a brief teaching career.

In 1975, Hall made the most important decision of his life. He left academia and took up permanent residence at the farm in New Hampshire. There, he wrote prolifically and managed to earn a living as a freelancer.

It was a brave decision, one that had serious ramifications for his own life and for the life of American Letters.

Hall would go on to create some of the best poetry, and prose, of the past 50 years. Along the way, he won the National Book Critics Award and the Robert Frost Medal.

The crowning achievement of Hall's career, however came in 2006 when he was named United States Poet Laureate

Hall lived out his amazing life on that farm in Wilmot. He survived battles with cancer and outlived two wives before finally passing away in 2018.

Hall wrote more than 40 books during his nearly 90 years. My favorite (Essays After Eighty) and the only one ever to appear on the Best Seller List, was published in 2014.

The first chapter is entitled Out the Window.

“Whatever the season, I watch the barn,” he wrote.

“I see it through the snow in January and in August I will gaze at trailing vines of roses on a trellis against the vertical boards.

“I watch at the height of summer and when darkness comes early in November.

“Down the road I see the ghosts of elm trees which lined the road when Route 4 led to the Grafton Turnpike. A hundred and fifty years transformed them from green shoots to blighted bark.

“Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again.”

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Window on Time

Looking out my own window here on Charles Street, I can't help but think of the future. I'm a grandfather now and it changes one's perspective.

One hundred and fifty years from now, I wonder who'll be looking out this same window.

I wonder who'll be listening to the burbling brook and watching kids fish in the Lollipop Pond… maybe even thinking back to the “olden days” when a cranky old Sports Writer and his friendly little dog watched quietly as the seasons came and went.

On this particular night, I'm hunkered down in front of the computer writing blog entries about the PIAA state wrestling tournament.

It's cold and quiet here on Eighth Street. The MLB and Players Association finally agreed on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement today, so I'm trying hard not to daydream too much about Spring and the baseball season.

Speaking ow which, one last quote from Donald Hall drifts into my mind, an observation about our National Pastime that seems a perfect way to close out this week's column.

“It is by baseball, and not by other American sports, that our memories bronze themselves,” Hall wrote. “By baseball we join hands with the long line of forefathers and with the dead.”

The older I am, the more often I find myself searching for just these kinds of connections.

Be it communing with the past while looking through an old window, listening to a game or doing research for my writing, I get the distinct impression that we each serve as a living nexus… one that joins the past, present and future.