AN ESSAY
by Donald Hall
Donald Hall’s works include eighteen celebrated books of poetry, a Caldecott Medal–winning children’s book, and prose books about New Hampshire, his grand parents’ farm, baseball, and the sculptor Henry Moore. Hall was New Hampshire’s Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1989, and the fourteenth U.S. Poet Laureate, from 2006 to 2007. He has received a National Book Critics Circle Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. “Gaudeamus Igitur” is an excerpt from his memoir, Unpacking the Boxes (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). Hall lives and works at Eagle Pond Farm.
WHEN I WAS TWELVE, I was girl crazy and crazy for horror movies like Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. I doted on a kind, friendly girl in the seventh grade. I went to her house on a summer afternoon, and we played catch. Another girl lived a block away from me. We lay chastely on her bed—fully clothed, discreetly separated—when her mother peeked in, her face rank with anxiety. In eighth grade I went loony over a tall blonde from the slow track whom I had known all through Spring Glen Grammar School. She was beautiful, and I was lovesick. She would not let me kiss her. I took her to the high school prom when we were freshmen, and we had our picture taken. I remember the photograph, her flowered skirt and black velvet top against which she spread out her long yellow hair—Susan Frisbee. I remember all their names.
Lon Chaney Jr. played the title role in The Wolf Man and its sequels. There was always a moment when the mild-mannered citizen grew thick hair on his face while his eyeteeth elongated and he became the werewolf, scourge of Transylvania and doubtless of tall pretty girls with blond hair. Vampires and werewolves were ordinary folk who became alienated powerful outsiders, pure evil, therefore romantic, attractive, and dangerous. I told a neighbor boy, two years older, how I took the bus into New Haven alone on a Saturday afternoon to see horror films. He told me that if I liked that sort of thing, I ought to read Edgar Allan Poe. I didn’t know this author’s name, but in my parents’ bookshelves I found a boxed two-volume set of his work, one of those cheap fancy editions that the Book of the Month Club called Dividends. I was dumbstruck. It was the best stuff I had read in my entire life!
Elevated by terror and necrophilia, I read Poe’s tales and poems—all the dead young women, some of whom walked at night, albeit dead. I wanted to write stories like these stories, poems like these poems. I wanted to be Edgar Allan Poe, and I wrote my first poem, “The End of All,” which was morbid but with none of Poe’s sound. Every time I say it, or write it down, it’s a little different.
Have you ever thought
Of the nearness of death to you?
It follows you through the day,
It screams through the night
Until that moment when,
In monotones loud,
Death calls your name.
Then, then comes the end of all.
Friends tell me it’s the best thing I’ve done.
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