Darkness and light: Jane Kenyon's spiritual struggle

The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. By Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, 272 pp., $23.00.

A Hundred White Daffodils. By Jane Kenyon. Graywolf, 226 pp., $16.00 paperback.

Collected Poems. By Jane Kenyon. Graywolf, 320 pp., $26.00.

EDGAR ALLAN POE once famously opined that the death of a beautiful woman is "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." What if the woman is also a poet, death comes early, and her husband is a famous poet as well? This convergence surely played some part in the renown that has gathered around Jane Kenyon. Yet even before her untimely death in 1995 fame had begun to find her. An award-winning Bill Moyers documentary about Kenyon, her husband, Donald Hall, and their life together surely helped. And just as surely, none of it would have happened if not for her brilliant books of poems--The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), Constance (1993) and the posthumous Otherwise (1996). A clutch of recent books, including a generous collection of poems from Graywolf, her longtime publisher, seem sure to keep both her work and her life in the public eye.

Kenyon's life story is fascinating and wrenching, the stuff of both highbrow and middlebrow drama. She was a college student who married her much older professor, retreated with him from university life to a family farmhouse in New Hampshire, rediscovered her faith (without turning into a wild-eyed zealot), bravely battled depression, came into her own as a poet and loyally nursed her husband through two difficult bouts with cancer. Just when all seemed to be looking up, she was herself struck down by leukemia, leaving behind a legacy of unsparing, brave and beautiful poems.

Squinted at in another way, Kenyon's life follows the arc of the classic conversion narrative: early churchgoing, adolescent rebellion, and return to the church as an adult. As she tells it, it was her grandmother's "spiritual obsession" and frightening talk of hell that drove her away from the church as a girl: "By the time I was in high school I grew contemptuous of religion and the people I knew who practiced it, although I took great pains to hide this development from Grandmother.... I announced to my parents that one could not be a Christian and an intellectual, and that I would no longer attend church."

Kenyon went to the University of Michigan, where she first encountered Hall in 1969 when she took his large, lecture-style poetry class. As Hall tells the story in The Best Day the Worst Day, they did not really meet until the next year, when she enrolled in his writing workshop. When they married in 1972, she was 24 and he 43.

Three years later she and Hall moved to his grandmother's house in New Hampshire for what they thought would be only a sabbatical year. Their first weekend Hall mentioned that they would probably be expected to show up at the local church. An oft-repeated anecdote concerns the sermon they heard that first Sunday, and minister Jack Jensen's mention of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

"And how I did perk up then," Kenyon remarks in an unfinished essay reprinted in A Hundred White Daffodils, which also includes interviews, columns written for a local newspaper and Kenyon's translations of others' works. "Even in the years of my apostasy I never doubted that God exists, and that I exist in relation to God." At first their churchgoing was more social than spiritual, but before long they were regulars--Kenyon was church treasurer for more than a decade. "Within a short time," she notes in an interview with Moyers, "I discovered that I had an enormous spiritual hunger that I knew nothing about."

Before that first year was up, both were ready to remain in New England. The beauty of the area around Mt. Kearsarge and Eagle Pond, for which their house is named, was one factor. In an interview with Mike Pride, Kenyon explains deeper reasons: "I never felt a sense of community in Ann Arbor. Here I felt it immediately .... It makes one less self-obsessed and more concerned about the needs of others. It gives you a feeling that you are part of the great stream."

Kenyon and Hall thrived in the unstructured days at Eagle Pond, and Kenyon in particular began to write more seriously and steadily than ever before. Solitude and "a lot of hours to fill" were crucial: "For me, poetry comes out of silence, and I can have silence here."

Community and solitude, then, were two sides of the coin for Kenyon and Hall as they established their life together. Hall's earlier books and other literary sources of income enabled them to avoid steady outside work and to devise a daily pattern that included large chunks of writing time. Hall describes their habits in The Best Day the Worst Day: "We got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems and on [poet] Akhmatova. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again.... If we were lucky the phone didn't ring all day."