Lumpy pudding

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)

Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!

Sep 20, 2011 10:06pm
Donald Hall: Maple Syrup August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk among carved names that go with photographs on top of the piano at the farm: Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck. We pause at the new grave of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s sister. Last summer we called on her at the nursing home, eighty-seven, and nodding in a blue housedress. We cannot find my grandfather’s grave. Back at the house where no one lives, we potter and explore the back chamber where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels, pretty boxes, quilts, bottles, books, albums of postcards. Then with a flashlight we descend firm steps to the root cellar—black, cobwebby, huge, with dirt floors and fieldstone walls, and above the walls, holding the hewn sills of the house, enormous granite foundation stones. Past the empty bins for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes, we discover the shelves for canning, a few pale pints of tomato left, and—what is this?—syrup, maple syrup in a quart jar, syrup my grandfather made twenty-five years ago for the last time. I remember coming to the farm in March in sugaring time, as a small boy. He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart buckets, dangling from each end of a wooden yoke that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them into a vat in the saphouse where fire burned day and night for a week. Now the saphouse tilts, nearly to the ground, like someone exhausted to the point of death, and next winter when snow piles three feet thick on the roofs of the cold farm, the saphouse will shudder and slide with the snow to the ground. Today we take my grandfather’s last quart of syrup upstairs, holding it gingerly, and we wash off twenty-five years of dirt, and we pull and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff, dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers in, you and I both, and taste the sweetness, you for the first time, the sweetness preserved, of a dead man in the kitchen he left when his body slid like anyone’s into the ground. — from Old and New Poems. Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall Above: Donald Hall at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, when he was named the new poet laureate of the United States. Photo by Ken Williams/Concord Monitor.

Donald Hall: Maple Syrup

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden
outside the kitchen.
I didn’t know you then.
We walk
among carved names that go with photographs
on top of the piano at the farm:
Keneston, Wells, Fowler, Batchelder, Buck.
We pause at the new grave
of Grace Fenton, my grandfather’s
sister. Last summer
we called on her at the nursing home,
eighty-seven, and nodding
in a blue housedress. We cannot find
my grandfather’s grave.
Back at the house
where no one lives, we potter
and explore the back chamber
where everything comes to rest: spinning wheels,
pretty boxes, quilts,
bottles, books, albums of postcards.
Then with a flashlight we descend
firm steps to the root cellar—black,
cobwebby, huge,
with dirt floors and fieldstone walls,
and above the walls, holding the hewn
sills of the house, enormous
granite foundation stones.
Past the empty bins
for squash, apples, carrots, and potatoes,
we discover the shelves for canning, a few
pale pints
of tomato left, and—what
is this?—syrup, maple syrup
in a quart jar, syrup
my grandfather made twenty-five
years ago
for the last time.
I remember
coming to the farm in March
in sugaring time, as a small boy.
He carried the pails of sap, sixteen-quart
buckets, dangling from each end
of a wooden yoke
that lay across his shoulders, and emptied them
into a vat in the saphouse
where fire burned day and night
for a week.
Now the saphouse
tilts, nearly to the ground,
like someone exhausted
to the point of death, and next winter
when snow piles three feet thick
on the roofs of the cold farm,
the saphouse will shudder and slide
with the snow to the ground.
Today
we take my grandfather’s last
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone’s into the ground.

— from Old and New Poems. Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall

Above: Donald Hall at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, when he was named the new poet laureate of the United States. Photo by Ken Williams/Concord Monitor.
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