by Donald Hall
Poetry begins with elegy, in extremity, as Gilgamesh laments the death of his companion Enkidu, watching worms crawl out of Enkidu’s neck. What horror we embody in reciting death’s progress. Homer sings of heroes as they die in battle, and Priam weeps to see his son Hector’s body dragged around the walls of Troy. Virgil follows Aeneas from the graveyard of Troy to the founding of Rome, Dido’s pyre flaming on the way. In the fifteenth century, poetry departed England after Chaucer and emigrated north to the Scots, where William Dunbar wrote his elegy for the makers—in Greek, a poet is a “maker”—and grieved over twenty-five dead and dying Scots poets. Not a line from these poets remains. In “Lament for the Makaris” Dunbar writes:
I that in heill wes and gladnes,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infermitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
He hes done petuously devour
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
He hes Blind Hary and Sandy Traill
Slaine with his schour of mortall haill,
Quhilk Patrik Johnestoun might nocht fle;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The refrain translates as “The fear of death confounds me,” but “conturbat” is more violent than “confounds.” When I learn that Blind Harry and Sandy Traill are dead, the fear of death shakes me as a dog shakes a rat. A few years later, in Shakespeare’s English, not in Scots, Hamlet dies, Lear dies, Macbeth dies. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” the vowels of lament are golden, as erotic in sound as Paradise Lost, but the grief is formal not intimate, literary not literal. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. embodies grief before resolving it by theology. The profoundest or most mournful American lament is Whitman’s for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” A great elegy from the seventeenth century, rooted among the best poems of the English language, is Henry King’s “The Exequy”:
Accept thou Shrine of my dead Saint,
Insteed of Dirges this complaint;
And for sweet flowres to crown thy hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse . . .
His bride has died in her twenties: “Thou scarce had’st seen so many years / As Day tells houres . . .” In almost a hundred lines, tetrameter couplets hurtling with a passion of grief, King looks ahead to his own death and inevitable reunion with his bride. It is not compensatory.
Sleep on my Love in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted!
My last good night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake:
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves; and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy Tomb.
When Jane and I lived here together, we suffered the deaths of dear friends and cousins. Edna Powers, granddaughter of my grandfather’s brother, was a parishioner of the South Danbury Christian Church. Large, affectionate, warm, outspoken, Edna died in her fifties on the operating table at the Franklin Hospital when the surgeon opened her body to find a universe of cancer. We wept, we wept, we wept. To Jane I read Henry King’s “Exequy” aloud.
When death, as public as a president or as private as a lover, overwhelms us, it speaks itself in elegy’s necropoetics, be the subject a twenty-five-year-old bride or Enkidu or Edna Powers or Blind Harry or Abraham Lincoln or Jane Kenyon. When Jane died, “The Exequy” kept me company again.
When I was nine or ten, generations of uncles and cousins went into the ground. At Great-Aunt Jenny’s funeral, Great-Uncle George felt a pain in his back. We buried him two months later. I woke in the night hearing myself declare, “Now death has become a reality.” At twelve my first poem was “The End of All.” As late as 1975, ecstatic as I returned to boyhood’s New Hampshire farm, I remembered its horses and finished a poem by burying them. At one point I decided that if we flattered death it might spare us, so I wrote “Praise for Death.” Of course death didn’t belong only to horses. Between my two years at Oxford, I returned to the United States to marry my first wife. My New Hampshire grandparents couldn’t attend the wedding—the year before, my grandfather suffered malfunction in a heart valve—and after the wedding, before sailing to England, we had only a day to drive to the farm. I had spent my childhood summers there, listening to my grandfather Wesley Wells’s stories, haying with him every afternoon, at dinner eating my grandmother’s chicken fricassee or red flannel hash. My grandfather was my life’s center, the measure of everything. My bride and I arrived the day after our wedding, she met Kate and Wesley, we ate a hen fresh from the henyard, we chatted, and when Kirby and I started upstairs for sleep, Wesley could not help but tell a funny story. The night he and Kate married, Kate’s cousin Freeman had wired a cowbell to their bedsprings.
Three days later we boarded the Queen Elizabeth for England and Oxford. In March came the airmail letter from my mother—transatlantic telephone calls had to be scheduled—which told me that my family was burying my grandfather. In our Banbury Road flat there was a room where I worked on poems. For a week, for a month, for a season, I sat at my desk writing “Elegy for Wesley Wells,” fiercely iambic, making him the high point of the dying world. “Soon I will leave, to cross the hilly sea / And walk again among the familiar hills / In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.”
Two and a half years after our wedding, our first child was born. When the baby turned out to be a boy, we named him after my father and me, Donald Andrew Hall. We would call him Andrew. When mother and son came home from the hospital, my wife’s breastfeeding was insufficient. Every night with pleasure I gave him his 2 a.m. bottle. Every day I worked on a poem called “My Son My Executioner.” The New Yorker published it, an anthologist put it in a college textbook, teachers assigned it, and for decades textbook anthologies reprinted it. I was the fellow whose son walked him to the gallows.
My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
And whom my body warms.
Sweet death, small son, our instrument
Of immortality,
Your cries and hungers document
Our bodily decay.
We twenty-five and twenty-two,
Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
And start to die together.
In Andrew’s first autumn, Kirby enrolled for her senior year of college. We had married after her junior year. For a year I fed Andrew breakfast in our flat while his mother took classes and studied or wrote papers at the library. I gave him his bath, played with him, changed his diaper, put him down for his morning nap, changed his diaper again, walked around with the baby on my shoulder, and gave him another bottle. At noon Kirby relieved me.
My father turned fifty-two on December 6, 1955. He died of lung cancer two weeks later, and we buried him on Christmas Eve in the Whitneyville Cemetery in Hamden, Connecticut, a block from the house he grew up in. During his seven months of dying, I lived two hours away and drove to see him once a week. He could not speak outright of his approaching death. In a low voice that cracked and shuddered, he murmured, “If anything . . . should happen . . . to me . . .” I turned twenty-seven as he was dying. Week after week I watched as his skin paled, he grew frail, he grew frailer, he sank silently down and down. My mother Lucy rubbed his head, rubbed his head, rubbed his balding head. He died a few hours before my weekly visit. The last time I sat with him alive, I thought that every breath might be his last. Not yet had I observed brain-stem breathing—three quick breaths, a pause, and a last long breath—which I would watch as my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother died, and twenty years later my wife.
Everyone was there for my father’s funeral. My grandmother took the train from New Hampshire, from the tiny depot of Gale, three-quarters of a mile south of the farm. She w
ore her Sunday black dress. Kirby brought Andrew, and I remember him playing with a plastic toy telephone. My mother Lucy, a widow at fifty-two, hadn’t had a night’s sleep for many months. She would live until almost ninety-one without dating another man. It was cold, Christmas Eve, as we buried him in early darkness on almost the shortest day of the year.
For many months afterward I worked on “Christmas Eve in Whitneyville.” I used Thomas Gray’s stanza if not the characteristic rhythms of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” It was the best poem I had written, and it lamented that my father never did what he wanted to do. “ ‘The things I had to miss,’ you said last week, / ‘Or thought I had to, take my breath away.’ ” I decided that for the rest of my life I would do what I wanted to do. I sent the poem to the Kenyon Review, the prestigious literary magazine of its day, and John Crowe Ransom accepted it, calling it “pious.”
Forty years later, my poems in Without resonated with Jane’s pain of dying and with my pain of witness. Jane’s own necropoems began earlier, when her father died. During his cancer she and I flew from New Hampshire to Michigan and with her mother took turns staying up all night beside him. Three years after her father died, Jane’s poems encountered my almost-death. I lost half of my liver to cancer. My surgeon said that after such an operation a man of my age had a thirty percent chance of living five years. We wept driving home from the hospital. Soon she showed me her poem “Pharaoh” as I lay in bed recovering from the surgery.
I woke in the night to see your
diminished bulk lying beside me—
you on your back, like a sarcophagus
as your feet held up the covers. . . .
The things you might need in the next
life surrounded you—your comb and glasses,
water, a book and a pen.
“Is it all right?” said Jane, bending anxiously over me in the bedroom’s half-light. Jane had the habit of repeating a difficult sentence with a heavier emphasis. She said again, “Is it all right?” “It’s a wonderful poem,” I said as I finished it. I paused and added that yes, it was remarkable to read of my own death; I was so used to writing about other people’s. Jane bought a portable massage table and set it up in the bedroom. Every day for a year she massaged the cancer out. When I was still skinny with chemotherapy, she showed me a draft of “Otherwise,” beginning:
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
As she showed me the poem, it ended two stanzas later: “But one day, I know, / it may be otherwise.” I wonder if Jane suspected that I would change a word; frequently we revised each other. I crossed out “may” and wrote “will.”
And so it was, but not as we assumed.
When a New York composer twenty years later set several of my poems to music for tenor and piano, he mentioned my name as he visited the medical school at Columbia. “Oh, yes,” a doctor-teacher told Herschel Garfein, “we use him.” After I published my book of poems out of Jane’s death, many medical schools used me. Sometimes they invited me to read to their students and answer questions. Twice the University of Utah flew me from New Hampshire to Salt Lake City to read from Without at its school of medicine. I told student doctors about our oncologist Kris Doney in Seattle, where Jane had her bone marrow transplant. Dr. Doney adhered to Jane’s suffering and to my own as husband and lover. After the successful transplant and our return to New Hampshire, when Jane’s leukemia outwitted her new marrow, Dr. Doney flew cross-country for Jane’s funeral. She did it for us who had become one person in the disease.
In the past, stories of dying and death resided outside medical discourse. Death was medical failure, and doctors concentrated on the not yet dead. But in the second half of the twentieth century, human attention turned itself to the only event common to everyone. In 1967 in England, the physician and social worker Cicely Saunders founded the first true hospice, not to prolong life but to attempt to support and comfort the dying. Death and grief became subject to intimate analysis in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. Gradually we have equipped ourselves to think and talk about dread and terminal suffering. Palliative care has become a medical specialty, and death the subject of lyric as well as narrative attention, even painterly, as in Ferdinand Hodler’s images of his dying mistress. It wasn’t surprising that Columbia used me in its medical school, which offers a master’s degree in narrative medicine, appropriately directed by Dr. Rita Charon. A doctor at the Yale medical school, Anna Reisman, quoted on NPR the last poem Jane wrote, “The Sick Wife,” saying that doctors still “don’t really know what patients are going through.”
Necropoetics includes necromemoir. The young neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi wrote When Breath Becomes Air as he was dying of cancer at thirty-six. Smitten with multiple tumors, in his agony he continued to operate on patients with brain cancer. He and his wife conceived a baby despite his condition. While dying he made his suffering into a brilliant and devastating memoir.
Every season adds to the literature of dying. Ira Byock wrote Dying Well. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal was a bestseller for a year. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jed Myers, a psychiatrist who lives and works in Seattle, wrote “Poetry’s Company” after he watched his father die over six months of glioblastoma. He quotes from my poems about Jane’s death, then from my friend the poet Christian Wiman, afflicted for decades by his own multiple cancers. Myers ends by addressing the medical profession: “I commend to you, fellow physician, the pragmatically useless treatment called poetry, whereby we might leave our patients less alone when our medicine leaves us all alone.”
Jane’s early life had been rural and quiet, just outside the bustle of Ann Arbor. Her parents were freelancers as musicians, and she grew up surrounded by music in a house full of books. In junior high she started writing poems and keeping a journal. She enrolled in the University of Michigan, flunked biology, dropped out, took a job, returned to major in French, studied to be a teacher, switched to English and took my course in Yeats and Joyce. (It was a large lecture course, and I didn’t know her.) Next year she applied to take my poetry workshop, and most of the poems she submitted were slight and fantastic, a habit of the moment which Robert Bly called “light verse surrealism.” Yet one of her poems was darker and stronger, resembling her later work. She wrote of trying to capture the attention of her sick grandmother, approaching the hospital bed “like the young nurse with the needle” (see page 21 of her Collected Poems). Her embodied caregiving image brought her into my class and altered two lives forever.
In the first three years of our marriage, when we stayed in Ann Arbor, she worked on poems mostly when I flew out of town to do poetry readings. When I was at home my presence appeared to inhibit her. In New Hampshire for the first time she worked on poems every day. Here she had no job, no local past or friends. To confirm ourselves, we had each other, we had our house, we had our landscape, we had my cousins in the small white clapboard church—and we had the lyric labor and passion of our lives. We devoted every hour of every day to each other or to making poems. She wrote tentatively about inhabiting my place, my history. She saw, or imagined she saw, my ancestors haunting our kitchen, and her poems attended to possibilities of alienation. She floated in space like an astronaut detached from the mother ship—or was she attached? She found in the shed a woman’s long gray hair.
A close friend and poet from Ann Arbor had moved to Boston, a woman Jane’s age who belonged to the Alice James Poetry Cooperative. Joyce Peseroff recruited Jane, and the cooperative published Jane’s first book, From Room to Room, in 1978—the effective beginning of her life in poetry. Then Jane and Joyce started a poetry magazine, Green House, addressing their generation of young poets. It was eight years before Jane did another book, second of the fo
ur books in her lifetime, but as she published new poems in magazines, she came gradually to national attention. I remember when The New Yorker bought its first Jane poem, “Thinking of Madame Bovary.” Her second book, The Boat of Quiet Hours, was ready for publication years before it appeared, and its delay only made it a larger and richer book. Jane’s friend the poet Tess Gallagher worked to place it with Tess’s publisher, Graywolf Press. Graywolf was small and brilliant, edited by Scott Walker in Port Townsend, Washington, and brought out The Boat of Quiet Hours in 1986. Let Evening Come followed in 1990, Constance in 1993, the posthumous Otherwise in 1996.
Over these years Graywolf Press expanded into a major nonprofit literary publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota. Jane’s designer Tree Swenson stayed the same, to Jane’s benefit and joy. Tree beautifully executed covers for all of Jane’s books, including Otherwise. When she and her husband Liam Rector visited us in April 1995 to say goodbye to their dying friend, on the last day when Jane could leave her bed, Tree asked her if she had any notions about a cover. Almost speechless, Jane picked up a volume from the living room floor and awkwardly fingered through it. It was a collection of impressionist paintings of gardens, which a friend had mailed her at the Seattle hospital. In her frail dying voice Jane spoke of what she looked for, then found the page and the image. She pointed at the print of Gustave Caillebotte’s Le Jardin Potager, Yerres. Tree borrowed the book and used Caillebotte’s painting for Jane’s jacket. When she and Liam returned a week later for Jane’s funeral, Tree displayed a mock-up of Otherwise.