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Jane Kenyon lived the unabashedly romantic life of a poet as imagined by a screenwriter: Graduate student marries middle-aged professor, renouncing academia for poetry, learning rural ways at her husband's ancestral farm, escaping occasionally to foreign parts to enjoy fine food and wine and art, becoming--as did her husband--poet laureate of New Hampshire. She falls victim to debilitating depression, he to cancer. They struggle, they write, they love, they rise above their afflictions-until she, only 46 years old, is diagnosed with leukemia and dies 15 months later.
It is not surprising, then, that Otherwise, Kenyon's posthumous collection, has been widely and favorably reviewed; or that on the anniversary of Kenyon's death, tributes to her were held in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts, while a 1993 televised interview of Kenyon and her husband, Donald Hall, was rebroadcast on pbs stations in Connecticut.1
Hall, in fact, spent a busy spring reminiscing about his late wife at various poetry festivals, at a luncheon at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association, and with NPR's Terry Gross on Fresh Air.2 His poem-memoir, The Old Life (Houghton Mifflin, 134 pp.; $19.95), is dedicated to Kenyon; its final poem, "Without," is a masterpiece of raw, unmediated grief.
An enormous spiritual hunger
Despite the flurry of interest in Jane Kenyon, both critical and affectionate, it is rarely mentioned that her poetry is suffused with Christian references. When Terry Gross asked Hall if his wife maintained her faith in God throughout her final illness, he showed Yankee reticence: "Yes," he said, and then again: "yes."
Faith did not keep her from suffering, he quickly noted: "Often there were long hours of night when there was no grace present, and there was suffering and despair. . . . I don't mean despair of survival, but despair simply of the immediate circumstances of suffering." The couple's shared faith went beyond words: "We both wanted paradise, and to meet again in paradise, so much that we couldn't speak of it."
Kenyon spoke freely of her faith, however, some three years earlier when Bill Moyers interviewed the two poets for the pbs special "A Life Together," which won an Emmy Award in 1994. When Kenyon and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm in the midseventies, they "got into the habit of going to church" because that's what the neighbors expected of them. Soon Kenyon discovered an "enormous spiritual hunger" fed but not satisfied by poetry. "Before I knew what had happened to me," she told Moyers, "I'd become a believer"-not in the frightening God of her childhood, but in "a God who, if you ask, forgives you no matter how far down in the well you are. If I didn't believe that I couldn't live."
For Kenyon, that statement was not hyperbole. Her poems reveal a woman dogged by depression:
It wakes when I wake, walks
when I walk, turns back when I
turn back, beating me to the door.
It spoils my food and steals
my sleep, and mocks me, saying,
"Where is your God now?"
Kenyon addresses depression directly in "Having It Out with Melancholy":
You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
"We're here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated."
And yet, unlike many depressed persons, "Jane wanted to live. She was astonished at how much she wanted to live," Hall said to Terry Gross.
"My belief in God, such as it is, especially the idea that a believer is part of the body of Christ, has kept me from harming myself," Kenyon had told Moyers. "When I really didn't want to be conscious, didn't want to be aware, was in so much pain that I didn't want to be awake or aware, I've thought to myself, 'If you injure yourself you're injuring the body of Christ, and Christ has been injured enough.' "
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