I learned of a poet named Jane Kenyon when I first
came to the mountains and began studying poetry with Nancy Simpson. I don’t
remember where I found the first poem I read by Jane Kenyon, but I know I
immediately felt a kinship for this woman. Her poems spoke to me like no other
poems I had read. I bought her poetry books, and I read
them over and over. That was in 1996. She was my favorite modern poet.
I learned she was married to noted poet, Donald
Hall, and then I learned a terrible
fact. I learned she was dead. She died from leukemia in April, 1995, the year before I discovered her. I felt as though I had lost a dear friend, and no one had told
me about it. Jane was too young to die, only 47 years old. I realize now that her poems reflected
her feelings about her illness. I sensed the depressed woman she was when I
read her poems, and I felt such empathy for her.
 |
| Jane Kenyon |
Donald Hall has written many poems about his wife. He
published a collection about her after her death. I hated it. He seemed to be angry, a
common emotion after losing a loved one, and I didn't like the foul language he
used or the mood he was in when he wrote that book. I felt Jane deserved
better. I know from losing my own beloved, that fresh grief doesn't make one
the best writer, only a writer who needs to
pour out his pain on paper.
When I discovered the following poem by Hall in a
book of poems collected by GarrisonKeillor, Good Poems, as heard on TheWriter’s Almanac, my displeasure at Donald Hall and his book I had hated, dissipated like early morning fog. I hope you like it.
Her
Long Illness
By Donald Hall
Daybreak
until nightfall,
he
sat by his wife at the hospital
while
chemotherapy dripped
through
the catheter into her heart.
He
drank coffee and read
the
Globe. He paced. He worked
on
poems; he rubbed her back
and
read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they
wept and affirmed
their
love for each other, witlessly,
over
and over again.
When
it snowed one morning, Jane gazed
at
the darkness blurred
with
flakes. They pushed the IV pump
which
she called Igor
slowly
past the nurses’ pods, as far
as
the outside door
so
that she could smell the snowy air.
