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The Painted Bed
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The Painted Bed Paperback - 2003

by Donald Hall

By turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing, Hall's masterly follow-up to "Without" reexamines his grief over the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and considers the life he has made since.


Summary

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

From the publisher

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

Details

  • Title The Painted Bed
  • Author Donald Hall
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition First Edition/Fi
  • Pages 112
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Wilmington, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
  • Date 2003-05-07
  • ISBN 9780618340750 / 0618340750
  • Weight 0.37 lbs (0.17 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.08 x 5.99 x 0.3 in (23.06 x 15.21 x 0.76 cm)
  • Themes
    • Cultural Region: Caribbean
    • Cultural Region: Latin America
    • Ethnic Orientation: Asian - General
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2003279106
  • Dewey Decimal Code 811.54
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The Painted Bed: Poems
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The Painted Bed : Poems

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The Painted Bed : Poems
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The Painted Bed: Poems
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