'Quiet Footfalls' at Eagle Pond Farm
Remembering Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall
Introduction: I had a very tangential relationship with poet Donald Hall, who for years turned away my requests to interview him. When he finally agreed to meet with me, he made it clear that it would not be an interview, just a visit. And so it was. He preferred talking about Eagle Pond Farm and his recollections of visits there as a child before he and Jane Kenyon came to Wilmot and made it their home.
I have written about him before and can share links to those stories:
I finally got to meet Donald Hall on July 1 of last year. He was waiting for my arrival at his Wilmot farmhouse, and I saw him in the window, waving me inside. He was sitting in his favorite blue chair, his Rollator in front of him, his long hair in disarray and his beard just as wild.
Learning of the estate sale planned for Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot took me back to my correspondence with Donald Hall leading up to my only face-to-face meeting with the former U.S. Poet Laureate.
September 20 would have been Donald Hall’s 90th birthday, but he died three months earlier, on June 23, just weeks before the publication of his final book, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.
Wayne King recently posted his own account of meeting Donald and Jane on his Anamaki Chronicles Substack, and I share it here:
"Quiet Footfalls" at Eagle Pond Farm
Remembering Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall
By WAYNE KING
It was one of the great honors of my life to meet and work with poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. We met in 1992, introduced by my friends Kennison Smith and Mary Lyn Ray, to collaborate on an effort to protect land around Mount Kearsarge.
Jane had not yet been diagnosed with Leukemia. Donald himself had been through his own battle with colon cancer, emerging in remission. Their generosity of spirit was overwhelming to me.
I fell in love with them both that day: The irascible old man, whose love of baseball and fondness for silly old keepsakes — the value of which could only be measured by the ways in which they swelled his own heart — and his beautiful, brilliant and tragic soulmate whose love of the place they had chosen to make their life together took her almost daily deep into the contemplative woods of Mt Kearsarge with her beloved dog Gus.
Jane died in 1995, at 47, and Donald, who had already written much about his Jane, wrote some of his most beautiful, soulful and heartfelt work about the process of first struggling against Jane’s illness and then grieving and living alone following her death.
Donald died in 2018.
Following Donald’s passing an estate sale at their Eagle Pond Farm scattered many of their earthly possessions to the four corners of the world, in the loving hands of many admirers. But a small and dedicated group of friends and admirers of Donald and Jane independently purchased as many of the most precious mementos as they could afford and have formed a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation (At Eagle Pond, Inc.”) to continue the legacy of these two extraordinary people.
At Eagle Pond, Inc. was established to preserve the farm and what Don and Jane brought to it, as well as to open the house to visitors, offer public programs and events that honor and examine Don’s and Jane’s work, while inviting reflection, too, on place and poetry in all our lives, and providing residencies where writers can take up their own work at Eagle Pond Farm.