Old and New Poems

By Donald Hall

This collection drawn from more than forty years of the poet’s work is “a superb introduction to newcomers and a sumptuous offering to familiars” (Publishers Weekly).

Former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall has been celebrated with numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Medal of the Arts.

This volume collects some of Hall’s finest short poetry written between 1947 and 1990. Here are poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy.

“Our delight is in following an exceptional poet's growth and depth as he emerges with a richly playful but consummately serious voice.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 23, 1990
• ISBN: 9780547630441

Donald Hall

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

1947–1953

Old Home Week

Wedding Party

Love is Like Sounds

A Child’s Garden

Some Oddities

September Ode

Passage To Worship

Exile

At Delphi

The Columns of The Parthenon

The Lone Ranger

A Friend Revisited

Elegy for Wesley Wells

1954–1958

My Son My Executioner

Conduct And Work

The Red Branch

Christmas Eve In Whitneyville

The Hole

Cops and Robbers

The Sleeping Giant

Dancers

No Deposit

The Body Politic

A Second Stanza

To the Loud Wind

Abroad Thoughts From Home

Fathers and Sons

A Small Fig Tree

Je Suis Une Table

Shudder

By the Exeter River

The Umbrella

The Hut of the Man Alone

Oysters and Hermits

1934

Waiting on the Corners

The Three Movements

Sestina

A Set Of Seasons

The Scream

Marat’s Death

The Kiss

Between the Clock and The Bed

Christ Church Meadows

The Clown

President and Poet

Religious Articles

The Foundations of American Industry

The Widows

Mr. and Mrs. Billings

The Family

The Grown-ups

1959–1963

The Long River

The Snow

The Farm

The Poem

The Tree and The Cloud

The Idea of Flying

The Moon

The Sun

The Child

The Kill

The Sea

Wells

The Wreckage

An Airstrip in Essex 1960

New Hampshire

Southwest of Buffalo

Self-Portrait as a Bear

Mycenae

On a Horse Carved in Wood

Jealous Lovers

Sleeping

Internal and External Forms

King And Queen

Reclining Figure

Digging

O Flodden Field

Cold Water

The Old Pilot

Beau of The Dead

A Village in East Anglia

Letter to an English Poet

Stump

In the Kitchen of the Old House

The Days

1966–1969

The Man in the Dead Machine

The Corner

Swan

The Alligator Bride

The Grave The Well

Sew

Old Houses

Pictures of Philippa

The Coal Fire

The Blue Wing

The Repeated Shapes

Woolworth’s

Apples

The Table

Mount Kearsarge

1970–1974

Gold

Waters

The Young Watch Us

The Dump

Nose

No Color Man

Stones

The High Pasture

Stories

To A Waterfowl

Poem with One Fact

The Green Shelf

FÊte

The Presidentiad

Eleanor’s Letters

The Raisin

Transcontinent

White Apples

The Town Of Hill

1975–1978

Maple Syrup

The Toy Bone

Illustration

Adultery at Forty

O Cheese

Kicking The Leaves

Eating the Pig

Wolf Knife

Photographs of China

On Reaching the Age of Two Hundred

Flies

Ox Cart Man

Stone Walls

Old Roses

Traffic

The Black-faced Sheep

Names of Horses

1979–1986

Great Day in the Cows’ House

The Henyard Round

Whip-poor-will

New Animals

The Rocker

Twelve Seasons

Scenic View

Sums

The Revolution

Old Timers’ Day

The Baseball Players

Granite And Grass

A Sister on the Tracks

A Sister by the Pond

The Day I Was Older

Acorns

For an Exchange of Rings

The Impossible Marriage

Mr. Wakeville on Interstate 90

My Friend Felix

Merle Bascom’s .22

1987–1990

Cider 5¢ a Glass

Edward’s Anecdote

Carlotta’s Confession

Brief Lives

Our Walk in Yorkshire

A Carol

A Grace

Maundy Thursday’s Candles

Material

Moon Clock

Match

Persistence of 1937

Milkers Broken Up

Notes For Nobody

Six Naps in One Day

Tomorrow

Tubes

Valley of Morning

The Coffee Cup

Speeches

This Poem

Praise For Death

Notes on Old and New Poems

Index of Titles and First Lines

Read More from Donald Hall

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hall, Donald, date.

[Poems. Selections]

Old and new poems / Donald Hall,

p. cm.

ISBN 0-89919-926-7 ISBN 0-89919-954-2 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3515.A315204 1990 90-31087

811'.54—dc20 CIP

Author photograph © Linda Kunhardt

eISBN 9780547630441

v2.1118

The following poems previously appeared in The Happy Man, copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986 by Donald Hall, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.: Great Day by the Cows’ House, Whip-poor-will, Scenic View, New Animals, The Rocker, The Henyard Round, Twelve Seasons, Mr. Wakeville on Interstate 90, Sums, The Revolution, Old Timers’ Day (Couplet), The Baseball Players, My Friend Felix, Merle Bascom’s .22, A Sister on the Tracks, For an Exchange of Rings, The Impossible Marriage, Acorns, Granite and Grass, A Sister by the Pond, The Day I Was Older.

A number of poems previously appeared in the following publications: American Poetry Review: Notes for Nobody, This Poem. Arete: Speeches. The Atlantic Monthly: Material. The Boston Review: Persistence of 1937. Boulevard: Tubes. Brief Lives (W. Ewert). The Gettysburg Review: Praise for Death. The Hudson Review: Carlotta’s Confession. The Iowa Review: The Coffee Cup, Valley of Morning. The New Criterion: Cider 5¢ A Glass, Tomorrow. The New Yorker: The Sleeping Giant (1955), Christ Church Meadows (1957). Shudder (1958), The Farm (originally appeared in The New Yorker as Merrimack County, August 22, 1959), The Clown (1960), Jealous Lovers (1963), The Man in the Dead Machine (1966), The Dump (1969), The Raisin (1971), Ox Cart Man (1977). Names of Horses (1977), Scenic View (1983), A Sister on the Tracks (1984), Moon Clock (1989), Six Naps in One Day (1989). Ploughshares: Match. The Reaper: Edward’s Anecdote. The Sewanee Review: A Grace, Maundy Thursday’s Candles. Times Literary Supplement: Our Walk in Yorkshire. The Virginia Quarterly Review: Milkers Broken Up.

for Emily

for Allison

1947–1953

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Old Home Week

Old man remembers to old man

How bat struck ball upon this plain,

Seventy years ago, before

The batter’s box washed out in rain.

Wedding Party

The pock-marked player of the accordion

Empties and fills his squeeze box in the corner,

Kin to the tiny man who pours champagne,

Kin to the caterer. These solemn men,

Amid the sounds of silk and popping corks,

Stand like pillars. And the white bride

Moves through the crowd as a chaired relic moves.

We are the guest invited yesterday,

Friend to the bride’s rejected suitor, come

On sudden visit unexpectedly.

And so we chat, on best behavior, with

The Uncle, Aunt, and unattractive girl;

And watch the summer twilight slide away

As thunder gathers head to end the day.

Now all at once the pock-marked player grows

Immense and terrible beside the bride

Whose marriage withers to a rind of years

And curling photographs in a dry box;

And in the storm that hurls upon the room

Above the crowd he holds his breathing box

That only empties, fills, empties, fills.

Love is Like Sounds

Late snow fell this early morning of spring.

At dawn I rose from bed, restless, and looked

Out of my window, to wonder if there the snow

Fell outside your bedroom, and you watching.

I played my game of solitaire. The cards

Came out the same the third time through the deck.

The game was stuck. I threw the cards together,

And watched the snow that could not do but fall.

Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations

Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains

As distant as the curving of the earth,

Where the snow hangs still in the middle of the air.

A Child’s Garden

I’m sure I can’t remember where, but some

Where in this jungle I have lost the key

That locks the door of Grandfather’s walled garden

Where he and I, before he died, would play,

And he would sing about the funny sun

That circled over the garden every day.

But then he died. I didn’t know a thing

Of what a grown-up would have done, and so

I ran away when April ate him up,

Our dog. And now the door is shut, and just

The walls are all I see, and sometimes I

Don’t know if there’s a garden there at all.

The animals just look at me. I bit

A rat to death three days ago and ate him.

A tiger has been padding all today

Behind me, and I cannot sleep at all.

I cannot sleep at all, and what is worse

Yesterday I tried to talk again

Just like I did with Grampa, but my voice

Was only grunts. I made no words at all.

Some Oddities

The hugy spider stooping through the door

Rushes to kiss me, but I am not there;

I have retreated through the floor

And hear him flounder at the empty air;

I sit in my concealment, smiling

To hear him weep and swear;

And now the keepers come with candy,

He

Will need no more beguiling.

These sentimental beasts are all the same,

Stupid and loving, quick to kiss or cry;

That dragon last week, with his game

Of burning love-words on the midnight sky;

Or any unicornish creature:

Two heads or just one eye.

I wish they wouldn’t come and slobber,

For

I’m through with oddities of nature.

September Ode

And now September burns the careful tree

That builds each year the leaf and bark again

With solemn care and rounded certainty

That nothing lives which seasons do not mend.

But we were strangers in that formal wood

Those years ago, and we have grown to change,

Ignorant of the fury of the blood,

And we have tasted what is new and strange.

This new September’s pilgrimage is made,

Remembering that season of the mind

When we were Tamburlaines of leaf and shade

And Alexanders of the lusty wind.

But only seasons spin around the tree

In winter thick and summer narrow bark;

The person learns a changing cruelty;

Possessions cumber us from going back.

Only the young are really pitiable

Who walk from high school past my cluttered room,

Who live in last night’s party, and who tell

What happened in the darkened living room.

That innocence is only negative

And innocence is only not to know

That all intensity is curative

In the disease of love we undergo.

This room is cluttered with the truth of years,

Possessions of the unreturning blood.

And innocence possesses only fears

Of parting from the comfort of the wood.

Wealthy with love and fruitful memory,

I pity only those who have no guilt.

It is the structure of complicity,

The monument experience has built.

The tree is burning on the autumn noon

That builds each year the leaf and bark again.

Though frost will strip it raw and barren soon,

The rounding season will restore and mend.

Yet people are not mended, but go on,

Accumulating memory and love.

And so the wood we used to know is gone,

Because the years have taught us that we move.

We have moved on, the Tamburlaines of then,

To different Asias of our plundering.

And though we sorrow not to know again

A land or face we loved, yet we are king.

The young are never robbed of innocence

But given gold of love and memory.

We live in wealth whose bounds exceed our sense,

And when we die are full of memory.

Passage To Worship

Those several times she cleaved my dark,

Silver and homeless, I from sleep

Rose up, and tried to touch or mark

That storied personage with deep

Unmotivated love. My days were full,

My halting days were full of rage,

Resisting in my heart the pull

Toward reverence or pilgrimage.

But now this blinding sheeted bird

Or goddess stood at my bed’s head,

Demanding worship, and no word

But honoring the steadfast dead.

Exile

Each of us waking to the window’s light

Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone;

Our furniture has vanished in the night

And left us to an unfamiliar dawn;

Even the contours of the room are strange

And everything is change.

Waking, our minds construct of memory

What figure stretched beside us, or what voice

Shouted to pull us from our luxury—

And all the mornings leaning to our choice.

To put away—both child and murderer—

The toys we played with just a month ago,

That wisdom come, and make our progress sure,

Began our exile with our lust to grow.

(Remembering a train I tore apart

Because it knew my heart.)

We move to move, and this perversity

Betrays us into loving only loss.

We seek betrayal. When we cross the sea,

It is the distance from our past we cross.

Not only from the intellectual child

Time has removed us, but unyieldingly

Cuts down the groves in which our Indians filed

And where