What we have

The house of the late poet and essayist Donald Hall (1928-2018) and his wife, poet Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), at Eagle Pond Farm, in Wilmot, N.H.

“New York has people, the Northwest rain, Iowa soybeans, and Texas money. New Hampshire has weather and seasons.’’

—Donald Hall in Here at Eagle Pond.

Circa 1910 postcard

‘Old toilers, soil makers’

“For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers….’’

— From “Names of Horses,’’ by Donald Hall (1928-2018), Wilmot, N.H.-based poet and essayist

To read the whole poem, please hit this link.

1910 image

Straining through the winter

“All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.’’

— From “Names of Horses,’’ by Donald Hall (1928-2018), a U.S. poet laureate who spent his last decades at Eagle Pond Farm, in Wilmot, N.H. This poem is a reference to the horses used by his maternal grandparents at the farm.

'Like a dream of beauty'

View of Mt. Kearsarge, in Wilmot and Warner, N.H.

“We must admit, spring is annoying, summer is not ours, autumn is best — and winter is New England’s truesy weather.’’

— Donald Hall (1928-2018), poet and essayist, in Here at Eagle Pond, inspired by his life on his ancestral farm in Wilmot, N.H.

“When summer gathers up her robes of glory, and like a dream of beauty glides away.’’

— Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878) from her Poems. She was an American poet, essayist, transcendentalist, and a romantic interest of Edgar Allan Poe. She was born and died in Providence.

'Lives because it dies'

Ragged Mountain as seen from Mount Kearsarge, in central New Hampshire, where Donald Hall lived in the tiny town of Wilmot.

“Ragged Mountain was granite before Adam divided. Grass
lives because it dies. If weary of discord
we gaze heavenward through the same eye that looks at us,
vision makes light of contradiction:
granite is grass in the holy meadow of the soul’s repose.’’

— From “Granite and Grass,’’ by Donald Hall (1928-2018)

The right day

Mt. Kearsage, in Wilmot, N.H.

"Now, when I hear she has died,

from the open door I look across at New Hampshire:

There, too, the sun is bright and clouds

make their shadowy ways along the horizon,

and it occurs to me? How could it not have been today?''

-- From "How Could She Not, for Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)'' by the late Galway Kinnell, a Vermont-based poet. He was writing about the poet Jane Kenyon, who lived with her husband,. Donald Hall, a former U.S. poet laureate and an  essayist, in Wilmot, N.H., near Mt. Kearsage. Hall died on June 23.

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