Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.

Aging, everybody knows it.

Even when we are young,

we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads

when a grandfather dies.

Then we row for years on the midsummer

pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,

that began without harm, scatters

into debris on the shore,

and a friend from school drops

cold on a rocky strand.

If a new love carries us

past middle age, our wife will die

at her strongest and most beautiful.

New women come and go. All go.

The pretty lover who announces

that she is temporary

is temporary. The bold woman,

middle-aged against our old age,

sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Another friend of decades estranges himself

in words that pollute thirty years.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge

and affirm that it is fitting

and delicious to lose everything.

MARGINALIA

Here is a poem about mortality—Donald Hall often expressed that dying gets in the way of living. When his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, passed away, the devastation was palpable in his poems. But over time his work became a reckoning with death, and how it is an important part of life.

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This poem appeared in    The Painted Bed  by Donald Hall  , published by Ecco, 2003. (Available on:  Amazon  •  Bookshop )

DESCRIPTION

“Donald Hall’s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else – life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall’s new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, “Daylilies on the Hill 1975 – 1989,” moves back to the happy repossession of the poet’s old family house and its history – a structure that “persisted against assaults” as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing – “mania is melancholy reversed,” as Hall writes in another long poem, “Kill the Day.” In this book’s fourth and final section, “Ardor,” the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.” ( Source )

ABOUT DONALD HALL

Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. Hall earned a BA from Harvard University and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford. In 1955, Hall published his first poetry collection,   Exiles and Marriages   (Viking Press), which was the Academy of American Poet’s Lamont Poetry Selection 1956. His other books are   The Selected Poems of Donald Hall   (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015);   The Painted Bed   (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); …  (more)

Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. Hall earned a BA from Harvard University and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford. In 1955, Hall published his first poetry collection,   Exiles and Marriages   (Viking Press), which was the Academy of American Poet’s Lamont Poetry Selection 1956. His other books are   The Selected Poems of Donald Hall   (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015);   The Painted Bed   (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002); and   Without: Poems   (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998). He died on June 23, 2018, New Hampshire. ( Source )

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ENDNOTES

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