“Affirmation” by Donald Hall

When Donald Hall, the 14^th Poet Laureate of the United States, died this summer at age 89, he left behind a body of work preoccupied with death, loss and senescence — a beautiful word for the not-so-pretty process of deterioration with age.

The speaker in his poem “Affirmation” seems, like the cantankerous side of his creator, more annoyed with death than fearful of it. As the aging poet from the New Hampshire mountains often expressed, dying gets in the way of so much living. That was the case for Hall and the one great love of his life: the poet Jane Kenyon, his second wife, who passed away in 1995.

At the start of “Affirmation,” the speaker is oblivious to  the notion of  mortality when loss enters his life — as it does for all of us– unsuspected and uninvited.

Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.

Most of us, like the speaker of the poem, tend to drift away from the loss of our elders. We are sorry, yes, but eventually find ourselves chalking up their departures to the natural order of a cycle we try not to think about until other reminders of impermanence intrude.

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.

Loss even rears its nasty head in the manifestation of a failed marriage. It dares to dismiss a dear peer from our lives. Neither instance offers any regard for the personal feelings of those left behind. Yet still, we, like the speaker, persevere: two steps forward; one step back, tackling the rest of our lives, somewhat worn from the emotional wear and tear.

If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.

Donald Hall
Credit: Stephen Ratiner, Library of Congress

After suffering this cruel blow, the speaker becomes loss’ reluctant companion, one who stays the course, ever eroding like the legendary Old Man of the Mountain rock formation in Hall’s home state. From the freezing and thawing of water in cracks of the granite bedrock sometime after the retreat of glaciers 12,000 years ago, the rocky slope formed what appeared to be the jagged profile of a face when viewed from the north. The resemblance, first recorded at the start of the 19th Century, cracked over time and crumbled to the ground in May of 2003.

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.

Through these additional  bereavements, something remarkable happens in the closing lines of the speaker’s thoughts. His annoyance makes way for an aha moment:

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything. 

Timeworn, the indefatigable speaker discovers a well-worn truth: death is not an intrusion but an ingredient of life, at best a bittersweet concoction.