Fitting and Delicious

I heard Donald Hall read this on a podcast tonight, and I love the way he speaks his verse. I get so tired of poets who run their sentences on and on with an up-and-down lilt like they're sibyls intoning meth-head nonsense. It literally sounds like Dylan Thomas with vocal coaching by the Monks of Santo Domingo. Hall reads like he actually knows what the sentences mean, assigning necessary weight and depth to each line and each word. 


This is perhaps his most well-known poem, and rightfully so. Compare this with goth/emo "Death is in love with us" poetry and tell me which you find more convincing. (For further reading, check out "Christmas Eve in Whitneyville.")


Here's audio of his reading the poem, together with a brief, somewhat disingenuously self-effacing introduction.

Affirmation

Donald Hall

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.