Editor's note: While Jane Kenyon was a student at the University of Michigan she met poet Donald Hall. The two married in 1972 and three years later moved to Eagle Pond Farm, Hall's ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. They lived and wrote there until Kenyon's life was cut short by leukemia in 1995 at the age of 47. While readers of Reckonings will be familiar with my admiration of Jane Kenyon and her poetry so steeped in place and depth of feeling, I've been less attentive in these pages to the impact of their marriage and her final illness and death on Donald Hall, which were profound. They were expressed shortly after she died in a volume of his poems he called simply Without; and then in a later, more reflective and wider ranging gathering of poems entitled The Painted Bed. The poem reprinted below, "Her Long Illness," is expressive of the personal effect of their love and suffering, and is drawn from Without.
Her Long Illness
by Donald Hall
Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced; he worked
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
at the darkness blurred
with flakes. They pushed the IV pump
which she called Igor
slowly past the nurses’ pods, as far
as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air.