Poets must often write to cheer themselves up, and in so doing the good ones can cheer up their readers as well. Thomas Hardy's passionate love lyrics to his dead wife, the wife to whom when she was alive he had paid very little attention for thirty years and more, are also an acknowledgment of himself as he was, an acceptance of what he had done, or failed to do. So moving are these poems, and in a sense so self-delighting, that the reader too feels calmed and blessed at second-hand, endowed while he reads them with the same sort of self-acceptance.

This is the art that moves Donald Hall's poems to and for his dead wife, the poet Jane Kenyon [in Without]. These, too, are poems addressed to the dead which in reality can only have been written for the poet and for his reader. Unlike Hardy's they celebrate a marriage of deep intimacy and great happiness, but all things come to the same in the end. Hardy mourned that his wife had abruptly left him, just as she sometimes did when callers came to the house. She had departed finally “in the same swift style,” as if to say “Goodbye is not worthwhile.” Like all who have been bereaved, Hall in his poems lives among the same sort of memories.

I want to sleep like the birds,
then wake to write you again
without hope that you read me.
If a car pulls into the drive
I want to hide in our bedroom
the way you hid sometimes
when people came calling.

So many poets—Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Tennyson, the one following the other—have pointed out that nothing is worse in a bad time than the memory of good ones. Hall adds his own variant:

Remembered happiness is agony;
So is remembered agony.
I live in a present compelled
by anniversaries and objects.

But the paradox holds: the poets were incorrect, at least where their poetry is concerned. For the reader, and surely for the poet too, Hall's extraordinarily clear awareness of what is over and gone is more present and more appealing in words now than it could have found room to be in life. The house, the hospital, the course of his wife's leukemia, the dog Gus, the cemetery, the mountain and lake nearby, “Perkins,” Jane Kenyon's nickname for her husband, the gothic horror of her complex and meticulous treatments—all these, together with the sense of an unbroken human intimacy, make the poems almost mesmerically readable. It is as if they were not poems at all but experiences undergone with and by another human being. And yet art remains of course; for

Art was dependable, something
to live for.

And we can only be together in the saving dishonesty of art, the hypocrite lecteur and the poet who makes poetry out of what he has suffered, even out of the grotesque medical rituals which can be inflicted on us today to keep us going.

… blood-oxygen numbers
          dropped towards zero and her
          face went blue.
The young nurse slipped oxygen
          into Jane's nostrils and
          punched
a square button. Eight doctors
burst into the room, someone
pounded Jane's chest, Dr.
          McDonald gave orders like
a submarine captain among depth
          charges, the nurse fixed
a nebulizer over Jane's mouth
          and nose—and she breathed.

The symbolism of technology leaks into the verbal patterns of Hall's poetry like the chemicals from an intravenous drip, seeming native as well as natural to the mode, just as their own state-of-the-art life-handling technology did to Lowell's Life Studies and Berryman's Dream Songs. As in Hall's last collection, The Old Life, the mosaic of a whole period, with all its inner moods and its physical accessories, is masterfully accomplished: a time seen in the sad debris which seems to survive all the changes and chances, as the prayer book calls them (Hall and his wife were both believers), of our fleeting world.

          Yesterday
I cleaned out your Saab
to sell it. The dozen tapes
I mailed to Caroline.
I collected hairpins and hair ties.
In the Hill's Balsam tin
Where you kept silver for tolls
I found your collection
of clips from fortune cookies:
YOU ARE A FANTASTIC
          PERSON!
YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE
          PEOPLE
WHO GOES PLACES IN THEIR
          LIFE!

The clock given “our first Christmas together” keeps bad time.

… Now it speeds
sixty-five minutes to the hour, as if
it wants to be done with the day.

This poetry is too meticulously aware of itself not to know how much it must itself be comforted by the past and its losses, even luxuriate in them, as Hardy did in “After a Journey,” his magic poem for his dead wife, Emma. When Jane Kenyon is in remission and seems on the road to recovery

                    He felt shame
          to understand he would miss
the months of sickness and taking
          care.

In such crises it has to be one's own feelings that count. No poem here misses the irony of Jane's cry: “I wish you could feel what I feel.”

          It must have been unbearable
while she suffered her private
          hurts
          to see his worried face
looking above her, always
          anxious to do
          something when there was
exactly nothing to do.

The truest misery of terminal conditions—cancer, Alzheimer's—is the isolation they enforce on each once non-separate partner, and the concentration the still intact partner can only feel on his or her own feelings. Both in this case were poets, but one poet cannot console another with art, any more than believers can with belief. Both were practicing Christians, but in the poetry that fact emerges only in accounts of happenings, not in affirmations. …