Eagle Pond restored

 Still thinking this morning about Eagle Pond and the poetic life Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon made for themselves there (as once documented by Bill Moyers - * below), and about the transience of even the longest and most accomplished lives. All things must indeed pass (or fall), as Jane observed in her poem Things.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

"The traditional New Hampshire sidehill farm at Eagle Pond sits close to where townlines join Danbury, Wilmot, and Andover. [About 55 miles southwest of WJ's Chocorua, btw.] Thought to date from 1803, the farm was in Don’s family from 1865 until it was sold in 2019, following his death in 2018." 

Here are his great-grandparents there in 1890, and he and Jane recreating the scene in 1979:

                       

I was saddened that so much of Eagle Pond was auctioned off, including Hall's wonderful old Victorian roll-top (kin to mine I think).

But I'm pleased to learn that much of that stuff is being regathered and returned, as preservationists proceed with plans to turn the place into a literary retreat. That's a far more appropriate disposition for an abode that became such a monument to poetry and gentle living.

It might have been otherwise.

 

* (Poignant moment at about 41 and a half minutes of the Bill Moyers conversation below, when Don declares himself unlikely to live past 70. Little did he know that his much younger wife would be gone within two years, at just 47; and that he'd persist to 89. Little do we know.)