Donald Hall, Foremost God in the Harvard College Pantheon

Donald Hall in Scytheville, New Hampshire. Photo: Henri Cole.

Don Hall is dead after a brief struggle with a horrid and untreatable cancer. It was impossible not to wish for his prompt release from this misery. All the same, I can’t really believe that he is gone, that the letters we exchanged once, sometimes twice a week will never again be written, that he ate at the Lipp, in Paris, about twenty years ago, with my wife and Linda and I, was present in his memory and in his letters. All of this is gone. But Gus (his dog), the blue chair, the Glenwood stove, the changing moods of Eagle Pond and Mount Kearsarge, and the rest of the Donald Hall iconography live on, in memory and in his verse.