Biography
Donald Hall was born in Hamden, Connecticut, the only child of Donald Andrew Hall, a businessman, and Lucy Wells. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1951 and a B.Litt, from Oxford in 1953. Hall received a honorary PhD, Lit. from Bates College in 1991.
Hall began writin ...
every time I reread the name of horses I have tears in my eye. Why? I guess it is about the most honest and upright way to convey the meaning of love
I would like to see Donald Hall's long, incantatory poem 'Prophecy' included on Poem Hunter. I can't get enough of that poem, even though I do not understand all of it. It is magnetic.
His poems bring nature to be more Beautiful than the way people look at it.
A really fine poet. He has technical skill and emotional depth.
Such evocative images - the colors and feelings of life. Love An Old Life.
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.
I want to learn more about him