A few years ago, my father emailed me the obituary of Donald Hall. He asked if I knew him, and wrote, “He is new to me but I like him.” After my dad died, I bought a copy of The One Day which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry when it was published. It contained a snippet my dad quoted: “Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house.” I thought I should get to know this man’s poetry a little better.
I’ve now read only the first section of the book, “Shrubs Burnt Away”, but I don’t want to rush through it, and I’m also finding lots of things to think about with it, so I’m going to approach the book section by section.
“Shrubs Burnt Away” has two epigraphs: the first is from Matthew Arnold, the British poet perhap most famous for his poem about Dover Beach. Hall uses this snippet:
What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.
The second epigraph is from a Chinese poet, Hsu Hsia-k’o. He writes, “Mi-t’o Temple after thirty li. A most desolate spot…For fear of them hiding tigers, all trees and shrubs have been burnt.”
And there is where Hall gets his title. Reflecting on these two quotations, I think there is an idea of relief from suffering and the necessity of suffering in creating beauty. Creating mitigates suffering. Arnold seems to tell us that poetry is what relieves us of pain; it functions to end distress through expression. “Poetical enjoyment” is achieved through venting, through relief, through hope, through doing. But the anecdote about the temple instructs us that destroying the bushes and trees to protect from tigers has reduced a beautiful spot to a desolate one. Removing the tigers through destroying the natural beauty of the place was a mistake, says Hsu and Hall. So, as I go into this section of the poem, I have those two precepts in mind.
The poem seems rather autobiographical; this inference could be the trick of having a first person narrator, but some of the details throughout the poem are from Hall’s life. On page 4, the narrator’s father, weeping and impotent, cries that his son will “do what he wants to do”, a direct legend from Hall’s own life. However, Halls’ father worked at a dairy, and the narrator’s works at a lumberyard. Small differences, but it means we can’t say the narrator is Hall.
The poem focusses on the narrator, a man, reflecting on his life–he reminisces about moments from his childhood, adulthood, and the present as he ages into n middle aged man. There is also the voice of the narrator’s mother (her stanzas are written in italics and from her point of view), and thus we learn the stories of the narrator’s father and of the various grandparents. The structure of the poem is rather consistent. Each stanza has 10 lines of free verse, and they often shift from the narrator at different points in his life to the narrator’s mother at different points in her life. Both characters are artists: the mother is a painter, an alcoholic who suffers from breakdowns and divorces (also unlike Hall’s mother, disrupting the autobiographical aspects of the poem). The narrator is a poet who leaves his pastoral childhood at some point to wander the gritty Los Angeles of the 60s or 70s, suffering from drink and malaise before, as Hall did, returning to a rural farmhouse to live. He wanders while “(i)t rains on Sunset Boulevard. I walk with the collar/of my jacket turned up. Topless go-go dancers twist/at the back of the bar.” It’s a shock from the early scenes of domesticity of the young boy calling for his mother from his bed. And then there’s a subsequent shock as the narrator is an older man in a farm house (Here, too, there are autobiographical notes as Hall retired from teaching to his familial farmhouse in New Hampshire where the poet Jane Kenyon lived with him until she died.) casting about for meaning and life in the empty rooms of the building.
As I sit by myself, middle-aged in my yellow chair,
Staring at the vacant book of the ceiling, unfit
To work or love, aureoled with cigarette smoke
In the unstoried room, I daydream to build
The house of dying. (3)
So, the section explores these two people, three really with the father not exactly having his own say, as they try to find their ways through their lives. Hall uses several motifs to help express his overarching idea that without risk and suffering, life isn’t beautiful. The first is images of a house. We see it in the above quotation (which perhaps also carries an allusion to another of his works “The Painted Bed” as his chair is painted yellow). “A house of dying” is a coffin, but in this old farmhouse that many of his family members presumably have died in, he literally sits in a coffin of a sort. We know from Hamlet that “a grave-maker” makes “the houses that… last till doomsday” (V. i. 60-61). Later in the poem, Hall reverses the image and compares a house to a life: “At the exact millisecond when the two cells fused/and multiplied, I started this house.” He continues this idea through various descriptions of rooms and furniture, repeating the metaphor that “the world is a bed”, that he “built this house” and that he will “build it over again” while sitting in his chair (12). This idea that in living we build a house brings me back to the statement from Arnold that poetry is action against suffering, and essentially building a house, a shelter, is to take action against suffering–against cold, against rain, against darkness. So, I like it; I find it an apt metaphor and one that gives me some confidence and some purpose. My father built a literal house in Mississippi nearly singlehandedly when I was a toddler, and I am certain that he very much agreed with Hall in this symbolism of houses as larger metaphysical beings.
But there’s another metaphor Hall repeats in this section–doomed airplanes–and their destruction seems to parallel artists and their families. Hall references Lindbergh, Earhart, Corrigan, Will Rogers, and even a man who built a plane in his garage using lawnmower engines, took off on it, and only some of his remains were found. To me, Hall is extolling the pursuit of something despite the risks; the beauty of taking risks, making something, and doing what one wants, echoing back to his father’s dictum of “He’ll do what he wants to do!” Perhaps that is what Hall illustrates with the character of the mother who had abandoned painting for a life as a mother and wife; the choice destroys her and destroys the beauty in her life.
“Shrubs Burnt Away” ends with several more stanzas from the mother’s point of view than the son’s. The mother describes how, in her thirties, she was in love with fires that burned down white houses, and her life devolved into numbness. She divorced, ennui set in, and she slept a “drugged sleep.” She dreams of stumbling through a field of corpses–babies, old men, young women–dead bodies everywhere. And the poem ends with her voice recounting in the last two stanzas another dream of domesticity falling into surreal decay and violence. She feeds her weeping children prescription drugs and then an anonymous visitor enters the kitchen and proceeds to dismember a rag doll as a model of instruction for the mother.
The poem ends with this metaphor of a family destroyed, perhaps. It ends with the mother’s domestic life in shards and pieces, maybe because she was not able to be the painter she wanted to be. Earlier in the poem, as a teen, she prepares a meal for her mother and is praised as a good future wife. Hall writes that she never painted again. It’s as if the domestic future she sees overwhelms the possibility of being an artist, of doing what she wants to do, and that destroys her. Meanwhile, the male narrator is happy in his terrible Bukowskian world of drugs and drink and women, feeding his body’s needs and desires. His last words are instructive: “Never do anything except what you want to do.”
(Discharge in 1983 at the old 9:30 Club. Photo by Jim Saah.)
(Photo of Bad Brains at the old 9:30 Club from 
The Transom 