The Poetry of Hall by Donald Hall

First published:Exiles and Marriages, 1955; The Dark Houses, 1958; A Roff of Tiger Lilies, 1964

Critical Evaluation:

Donald Hall has edited a number of collections of contemporary poetry, has written a Recitatio on Robert Frost and, in 1961, an autobiographical reminiscence of his childhood in New England, STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED. It is as a poet, however, that he is best known. His first volume of poems, EXILES AND MARRIAGES, won the Lamont Poetry Prize for 1955. In 1958, THE DARK HOUSES was published; A ROOF OF TIGER LILIES appeared in 1964.

These volumes comprise, generally speaking, a single chronicle of a man’s increasing separation from persons and places, and a consequent search for personal identity. Increasingly cut off from the old New England that nurtured him, the poet struggles to live self-reliantly without, at the same time, isolating himself completely. Here the word poet means the speaker of most of the poems and not inevitably Mr. Hall personally. The main themes which run through the three volumes are nostalgia for the past, or a region, which the modern world has left in decay; some bitterness and scorn for the kind of life which has displaced rural New England; and, of most importance, the problem of individual freedom.

Technically, the volumes also show a progression. Beginning with a preponderance of closely rhymed, evenly metered stanzas, Hall’s later work moves toward greater freedom in style and structure. Less reliance on rhyme, more irregular lines which move less to a meter than to syntactic patterns, and a diction and syntax closer to spoken speech and prose come to characterize the later poems. Such a movement in style is not unusual in contemporary poetry. In “Apology,” from EXILES AND MARRIAGES, for example, he uses rhyme, alliteration, caesurae, and meter to create a formal effect to which the poet himself objects. In contrast, in some of the poems in THE DARK HOUSES, he allows the repetition of the syntactic unit to provide the prosodic form. The effect is at times deceptively prosaic.

In his later verse Hall made, along with a change from metrical to syntactic prosody, a movement toward a more direct utterance, with the poet speaking in a more nearly normal voice to the listener. From a quiet, conversational start in a poem, Hall will often attempt to build gradually toward emotional intensity and even shock. He is likely to move from whimsey or unadorned observation to fantasy or the surrealistic, and sometimes to violence. Perhaps the technique mirrors a theme: beneath the surface of the normal, even the humdrum, lurks the bizarre, the unsettling, even the terrifying. Poem after poem follows such a procedure, and treats such a theme. “A Child’s Garden,” from EXILES AND MARRIAGES, is an example. The poet relates the tale of a boy whose revered grandfather has died and who cannot return to the garden where they once were so close. That the grandfather is, in many other poems, characterized as representing the old New England serves to relate the poem to the theme of loss. The effect on the boy is at first whimiscal, then frightening. Childish innocence gives way to confusion, violence and fear. Hall is often about the task of resurrecting that lost innocence nostalgically, or exploring the psychological results of having lost it. Coloring everything is a sense of dying. For all its whimsy, its boyish fantasy, and its slightly academic wit, Hall’s verse is finally somber, sober, and perhaps a bit over-serious. The note of puritanism is strong: the love of a hard land; respect for those who work long for little; introspection and even moral righteousness. Such qualities are more evident when considering the whole bulk of the poetry than in any one poem, where they are likely to be rather concealed.

Often Hall appears to overwork the theme of a lost past. He is possibly most interesting when he explores the tensions of a man attempting to salvage and maintain a viable identity. The term perversity is important in a good many poems by Hall; and it will be examined further. The term leads to an understanding of the psychological conflicts underlying the verse.

Two poems especially in EXILES AND MARRIAGES, “Lycanthropy Revisited” and “Exile,” work out in some detail the theme which is Hall’s greatest concern: a love rooted in innocence must, by the nature of things, forsake the “woods” and become part of experience; its innocence is doomed, therefore, by exposure, sex, knowledge, and changing circumstance. “You always hurt the one you love,” as the song goes. There is guilt, as well as ego, and in “Lycanthropy Revisited” the poet humorously converts them both into a burlesque parody of Satan and the Wolf-man. Beneath the studied humor, however, there is an irony bitterly directed at the self. Even the guilt seems as silly as the attempt to match Satan in sin. The roles pile up until identity is lost and guilt is submerged in fantasy. In “Exile,” Hall begins to pull the strands together and perversity becomes more and more difficult to explain. It leads on to betray the present for a past which it had ruined to begin with. In “A Relic of the Sea,” the final poem in EXILES AND MARRIAGES, a young father climbs to the attic of his childhood home to visit the place where he was master. He climbs back down, vowing to say good-bye to his youth and the lie of being free and only to be concerned with Self. It becomes clear at last that perversity is finally to be equated with the falsehood of isolation—a false sense of the self and of freedom. The past is, really, peopleless; the state of innocence is really only one of self-escape through fantasy and self-gratification through cultivated loneliness. Love, then, must be murdered or come out of the attic; love must be to know your own self and her’s; love, therefore, is painful, the devil in the flesh, the thorn in the rose of the self. To be perverse, then, is to be unable to accept either oneself or another; it is, at last, to deny life by indulging in fantasies of the past, of altr egos, or by entombing oneself in the “jail” of a secure, middle-class, development—the “dark houses.”

Toward the end of EXILE AND MARRIAGES comes a short, and well-known, poem titled “Epigenethlion: First Child,” which momentarily submerges “perversity” beneath a fatalistic and austere vision of birth, death, and rebirth.

Since the beginning Hall has turned his attention more and more to overcoming perversity by attacking escapism and attempting to define a meaningful kind of relationship with others as in “Marriage: to K.” The knowledge he gains is, at least, the human need for a touching of hands, even though all men are separate and free. Yet, the scene and tone of this poem remains a bit furtive and fearful, and the reader senses that the conflicts are not wholly resolved.

THE DARK HOUSES takes up the theme of freedom: isolation is opposed to the possibilities of communion with others, a communion based on self-knowledge free from the curse of egoism. “Christmas Eve in Whitneyville” takes the poet back to his childhood home. But New England has changed completely, and the poet notes almost scornfully how the present inhabitants make prisons of their houses and refuse the risks that freedom entails. This volume shows the poet moving always in opposition to seclusion, isolation, as a protection against suffering and doubt. “The Clock-Keeper,” “The Foundations of American Industry,” “Residential Streets,” “The Adults,” “The Umbrella,” “Oysters and Hermits,” and “The Hut of the Man Alone” are all poems which, in one way or another, speak out against the modern willingness to hide in a crowd, or to be hide-bound, to escape or insulate oneself from the raw edge of experience. Yet, there are notes of uncertainty, as if the poet yet sympathizes with the impulse to hide. The nervous energy displayed is due to the poet’s being both objective in his depiction of neurotic escape and subjective in his expression of defiant independence.

Many poems in this volume explore these themes in abstract, intellectualized meditations. Then the abstract is given, suddenly, a palpable body or quality. “Coldness” becomes a key word, both a sensation and an idea. An elemental, detached, very objective viewpoint is taken toward human experience. Past, present, future; love, hate, guilt; the muck and mire of human life is viewed with aesthetic austerity. And the austerity seems to have a quality of cleanliness, a cold, purifying, bedrock reality which in turn suggests an idea or a conception of freedom and renewal. The conclusion to “Cold Water,” the final poem in A ROOF OF TIGER LILIES, shows an emphasis on pure sensation, coldness, ritual rebirth, contact with the primitive and elemental, suggesting that it is a beginning, a start to a new view of human relationships and self-awareness.