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The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon
“Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry.” ―Wendell Berry
Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets―celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”
Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets―celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 2020
34 people are currently reading
324 people want to read
About the author
Jane Kenyon
21 books104 followersJane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned both her BA and MA from the University of Michigan. While a student at the University of Michigan Kenyon met her future husband, the poet Donald Hall, who taught there. After her marriage, Kenyon moved with Hall to Eagle Pond Farm, a New Hampshire farm that had been in Hall’s family for generations.
Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”
The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come, her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”
Constance began Kenyon’s study of depression, and her work in this regard has been compared with that of the late poet Sylvia Plath. Comparing the two, Breslin wrote that “Kenyon’s language is much quieter, less self-dramatizing” than that of Plath, and where the earlier poet “would give herself up, writing her lyrical surrender to oblivion,… Kenyon fought to the end.” Breslin noted the absence of self-pity in Kenyon’s work, and the poet’s ability to separate from self and acknowledge the grief and emotional pain of others, as in her poems “Coats,” “Sleepers in Jaipur,” and “Gettysburg: July 1, 1863,” which imagines a mortally wounded soldier lying in wait for death on the historic battlefield.
New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Kenyon’s verse probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as Gary Roberts noted, her poetry was “acutely faithful to the familiarities and mysteries of home life, and it is distinguished by intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies.”
In Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), a posthumous collection containing twenty poems written just prior to her death as well as several taken from her earlier books, Kenyon “chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures,” according to Nation contributor Emily Gordon. As Muske added in the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon avoids sentimentality throughout Otherwise. “The poet here sears a housewife’
Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”
The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come, her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”
Constance began Kenyon’s study of depression, and her work in this regard has been compared with that of the late poet Sylvia Plath. Comparing the two, Breslin wrote that “Kenyon’s language is much quieter, less self-dramatizing” than that of Plath, and where the earlier poet “would give herself up, writing her lyrical surrender to oblivion,… Kenyon fought to the end.” Breslin noted the absence of self-pity in Kenyon’s work, and the poet’s ability to separate from self and acknowledge the grief and emotional pain of others, as in her poems “Coats,” “Sleepers in Jaipur,” and “Gettysburg: July 1, 1863,” which imagines a mortally wounded soldier lying in wait for death on the historic battlefield.
New Hampshire’s poet laureate at the time of her untimely death at age forty-seven, Kenyon’s verse probed the inner psyche, particularly with regard to her own battle against depression. Writing for the last two decades of her life at her farm in northern New England, Kenyon is also remembered for her stoic portraits of domestic and rural life; as Gary Roberts noted, her poetry was “acutely faithful to the familiarities and mysteries of home life, and it is distinguished by intense calmness in the face of routine disappointments and tragedies.”
In Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), a posthumous collection containing twenty poems written just prior to her death as well as several taken from her earlier books, Kenyon “chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures,” according to Nation contributor Emily Gordon. As Muske added in the New York Times Book Review, Kenyon avoids sentimentality throughout Otherwise. “The poet here sears a housewife’
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
January 18, 2021
Otherwise
I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise.
I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach.
It might have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.
All morning I did the work I love.
At noon I lay down with my mate.
It might have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks.
It might have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls,
and planned another day just like this day.
But one day, I know, it will be other wise.
I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise.
I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach.
It might have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.
All morning I did the work I love.
At noon I lay down with my mate.
It might have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks.
It might have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls,
and planned another day just like this day.
But one day, I know, it will be other wise.
July 23, 2023
🕊️🦋 On her way to another world
Jane Kenyon was a nature poet in the same way Frost was a nature poet - they both found the most important truths in trees, birds, dogs, cats, and weather.
In addition, she found infinity in the simple habits of human life.
And death. Many of these poems were written as she battled leukemia. I had not read any of those before. I came away feeling I’d both lived the fight and, thanks to her, looked beyond it.
An essential, but too often overlooked, American poet.
She writes with enormous grace and beauty.
🕊️🦋I love her poems. She’s amazing.
Jane Kenyon was a nature poet in the same way Frost was a nature poet - they both found the most important truths in trees, birds, dogs, cats, and weather.
In addition, she found infinity in the simple habits of human life.
And death. Many of these poems were written as she battled leukemia. I had not read any of those before. I came away feeling I’d both lived the fight and, thanks to her, looked beyond it.
An essential, but too often overlooked, American poet.
She writes with enormous grace and beauty.
🕊️🦋I love her poems. She’s amazing.
May 30, 2020
I read this on a day of personal mourning. Jane was a comfort, as always.
"Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come."
-- "Let Evening Come"
"Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come."
-- "Let Evening Come"
December 3, 2021
i am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name...
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name...
April 30, 2020
I enjoyed this collection of poetry, but I warn you, a lot of them deal with the author's grief. I had to walk away from the book a couple of times, but this did not detract from my enjoyment.
June 11, 2025
I find it difficult to rate and review poetry. On the one hand, I don’t feel educated enough on the nuances of poetry to say whether it is good or bad (if such a description is even possible with an art form such as this). And on the other hand, poetry is very personal both to the author and to the reader so rating it is incredibly subjective.
This volume by Jane Kenyon is one where I can appreciate what she is doing while at the same time not particularly enjoying the darkness she dwells on in her poetry. My two favorite poems in this collection are probably two of the lightest in tone - “Afternoon in the House” and “Let Evening Come”. And while I can’t say every poem in this volume was enjoyable to read or even that I understood what she was doing in each poem, I can say that I am glad I read this if only to further elucidate for myself what I do and do not enjoy when reading poetry.
This volume by Jane Kenyon is one where I can appreciate what she is doing while at the same time not particularly enjoying the darkness she dwells on in her poetry. My two favorite poems in this collection are probably two of the lightest in tone - “Afternoon in the House” and “Let Evening Come”. And while I can’t say every poem in this volume was enjoyable to read or even that I understood what she was doing in each poem, I can say that I am glad I read this if only to further elucidate for myself what I do and do not enjoy when reading poetry.
June 17, 2024
I can’t quite explain the depth of connection I feel to Jane Kenyon. Ever since I first encountered her work in my early 20s interning at Graywolf Press, I have felt this strong affinity and sense of familiarity with Jane, almost as if she were an aunt or older sister to me.
While the poetry of Mary Oliver orients me to a way of seeing the world that feels aspirational, when I read Jane Kenyon, I feel that she IS me. Her writing about depression, domesticity and nature, the seasons of New England, the ballast of a loving and committed partnership, all feel like a mirror held up to my own soul.
While the poetry of Mary Oliver orients me to a way of seeing the world that feels aspirational, when I read Jane Kenyon, I feel that she IS me. Her writing about depression, domesticity and nature, the seasons of New England, the ballast of a loving and committed partnership, all feel like a mirror held up to my own soul.
May 1, 2020
I love Jane Kenyon, and waited breathlessly for this collection, though it's missing some of my favorites. However, I guess any "Best Of" collection will, and I'm glad this one had poems selected by Donald Hall. Some poems I would have liked to see in here: "What It's Like"; "Evening Sun"; "Sun and Moon."
Read
December 27, 2022This was gifted to me by a dear friend last year for Christmas — and I've read and revisited it all year. It's been an immense comfort to me. Jane reminds me a little of Mary Oliver, and yet she stands completely on her own. It's funny. I'll find myself in the middle of a poem, totally stopped in my tracks by a certain like or turn of phrase. I have many favorite lines, but one that haunts me and has haunted me all year is: "My own violence falls away / like paint peeling from a wall / I am choosing a new color / to paint my house, though I'm still / not sure what the color will be."
Read
August 24, 2025“A fly wound the water, but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor‘s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.”
- The Pond at Dusk
(***see more on this one further below)
“A bird begins to sing,
hesitates, like a carpenter
pausing to straighten a nail, then
begins again…”
- From the Back Steps
“And the monkeys: one of them
reaches through the cage
and grabs for my pen, as if
he had finally decided to write a letter
long overdue….”
- Cages
“Beside the porch step
the crocus prepares an exaltation
of purple, but for the moment
holds its tongue…”
- Mud Season
“There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind, afraid
That day, the sun
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.
It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.”
- The Pear
Having read a fair amount of Akhmatova’s poetry not too long ago, I appreciated Kenyon’s “Lines for Akhmatova” and, in particular, that she directly quotes lines from Akhmatova in her poem:
”I can’t tell if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.”
“‘The future ain’t what it used to be,’…
I woke in the night to see your
diminished bulk lying beside me—
you on your back, like a sarcophagus
as your feet held up the covers. . . .
The things you might need in the next
life surrounded you—your comb and glasses,
water, a book and a pen.”
- Pharaoh
“I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov’s first
sentence I knew it wasn’t the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.
…
But to return to the rocking cradle. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That’s why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.”
- Reading Aloud to My Father
***So… I’d never heard of Kenyon before, but an article titled “I Want This Poem Read at My Funeral” by A.O. Scott in the NYT grabbed my attention, so I got a volume of her poetry.
The poem was Kenton’s “The Pond at Dusk” (and really I liked that the NYT article came with a link to hear the poem read aloud - by Scott) and Scott’s thoughts on the poem (below)
The humor in the poem is not brash, but makes the point, to me at least, that we’re not infallible; that in the most somber moments, things can go awry. The poem also made a connection with me as I’d been reading Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness which opens with an epigram from Wallace’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and about the emperor worms from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” - which is, obviously, about death and where we all end up and who were food for, but Vuong’s book while clearly addressing elder care issues and dying is laced with a fair amount of humor. And I was also reading Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo which also deals with death, and grief, and the afterlife, but has humor woven throughout it.
I found Kenton’s poetry mostly ordinary; but ordinary in the sense that she was capturing the everyday events she observed happening around her, often focusing on nature; ordinary in the same sense that a photographer would look at light and shadow, or texture.
I think that in this volume, she was working the stages of grief, of having lost not just someone but that significant someone in her life. And not just looking after the fact, but she shares with us vignettes of the decline of that person. Catharsis aside, how painful that must have been.
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2... … sorry there’s a paywall)
Scott: “Its 12 lines reject false comfort and offer something more useful in its place: a measure of clarity about the human situation.
For two of its three stanzas, this reads like a nature poem. And like most nature poems, it understands the natural world both as a series of phenomena and as a storehouse of symbols.
Insects, birds and trees just are what they are. But people can’t seem to look at anything in nature without trying to read it. Which is, inevitably, to misread, to write our own thoughts onto the universe’s inscrutable page
Jane Kenyon, contemplating a pond in the gloaming, catches tremors of worry in what she sees
She turns errors of perception into a kind of conceptual mischief, a charming game in which unease plays tag with reassurance. You can call the ripple on the water a “wound,” which turns its disappearance into healing.
The fly that caused that brief disturbance buzzes off to become prey for the swallows, but any potential violence in that image is dissolved as the insect is reclassified as food. We arrange the world as we translate it into language.
Sometimes we realize our mistakes. Kenyon’s second stanza emphasizes the fallibility of human perspective, and makes gentle comedy of our habit of inventing causes for alarm.
Is that a cloud of poison gas hovering over the orchard? Exhaust from an alien spaceship?
Did the barn catch fire?
It’s only the trees. Everything is fine
And then it isn’t. As soon as we think the premonition of doom has been dispelled, the hammer drops. Sometimes — the worst times, as often as not — things are exactly as they seem to be. Lulled by the fading light over the water, we awaken to find ourselves at a funeral
What happened? Whose funeral? The final stanza is blunt — spelling matters out plainly rather than playing with ambiguous images — but also enigmatic.
And death, the conclusion to every story, isn’t without its comic aspect, the slapstick of the pallbearers grappling with their burden. The brusque last line might be taken as a punchline.
A few things to know about Jane Kenyon: She lived for much of her writing life on a farm in New Hampshire, the ancestral property of her husband, Donald Hall, who was also a poet. She suffered from depression, and wrote about it, and was just 47 when she died of leukemia, in 1995. She wrote about that illness too. Mortality is a presence in many of her poems, an emotional weight, an intellectual puzzle and a philosophical anchor
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
In “The Pond at Dusk” she sees a lot, and conveys it in very few words.
Just 73 of them, arranged into four sentences of increasing complexity.
This is free verse, which means that the music happens not through meter or rhyme but in the line breaks
Those breaks are also subtle cliff-hangers. The eye, looking for continuity, finds white space. The voice pauses, creating a breath’s worth of suspense. What are the swallows dropping toward?
What is it that looks like smoke? Like disaster?
There is nothing mysterious in this poem. A bug skims the water. A flock of swallows scatters. Trees are in leaf and in blossom. Someone has died. And yet the poem itself swells with mystery, an intimation of deep waters running under the placid surface.
We are in the presence of a strong voice — witty, unassuming, wise — but the speaker is nonetheless elusive. There is no “I” in evidence, though the disparate elements of the poem are brought together in one person’s mind. This isn’t a scene, but a sequence of thoughts.
And also feelings, even if the language of explicit emotion is absent. Pain, anxiety and grief are invoked in successive stanzas, but always in a sidelong manner, and never for very long.
The human world is distant, almost abstract. We don’t hear names or see faces.
We notice artifacts — the structures that people carpenter together to accommodate their needs. The sounds of mourning in the church have been muted.
But church, in this poem, is where we end up. Outside the coffin, at least for now.”
- A. O. Scott, NYT July 23, 2025.
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor‘s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.”
- The Pond at Dusk
(***see more on this one further below)
“A bird begins to sing,
hesitates, like a carpenter
pausing to straighten a nail, then
begins again…”
- From the Back Steps
“And the monkeys: one of them
reaches through the cage
and grabs for my pen, as if
he had finally decided to write a letter
long overdue….”
- Cages
“Beside the porch step
the crocus prepares an exaltation
of purple, but for the moment
holds its tongue…”
- Mud Season
“There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind, afraid
That day, the sun
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.
It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.”
- The Pear
Having read a fair amount of Akhmatova’s poetry not too long ago, I appreciated Kenyon’s “Lines for Akhmatova” and, in particular, that she directly quotes lines from Akhmatova in her poem:
”I can’t tell if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.”
“‘The future ain’t what it used to be,’…
I woke in the night to see your
diminished bulk lying beside me—
you on your back, like a sarcophagus
as your feet held up the covers. . . .
The things you might need in the next
life surrounded you—your comb and glasses,
water, a book and a pen.”
- Pharaoh
“I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov’s first
sentence I knew it wasn’t the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.
…
But to return to the rocking cradle. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That’s why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.”
- Reading Aloud to My Father
***So… I’d never heard of Kenyon before, but an article titled “I Want This Poem Read at My Funeral” by A.O. Scott in the NYT grabbed my attention, so I got a volume of her poetry.
The poem was Kenton’s “The Pond at Dusk” (and really I liked that the NYT article came with a link to hear the poem read aloud - by Scott) and Scott’s thoughts on the poem (below)
The humor in the poem is not brash, but makes the point, to me at least, that we’re not infallible; that in the most somber moments, things can go awry. The poem also made a connection with me as I’d been reading Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness which opens with an epigram from Wallace’s poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and about the emperor worms from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” - which is, obviously, about death and where we all end up and who were food for, but Vuong’s book while clearly addressing elder care issues and dying is laced with a fair amount of humor. And I was also reading Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo which also deals with death, and grief, and the afterlife, but has humor woven throughout it.
I found Kenton’s poetry mostly ordinary; but ordinary in the sense that she was capturing the everyday events she observed happening around her, often focusing on nature; ordinary in the same sense that a photographer would look at light and shadow, or texture.
I think that in this volume, she was working the stages of grief, of having lost not just someone but that significant someone in her life. And not just looking after the fact, but she shares with us vignettes of the decline of that person. Catharsis aside, how painful that must have been.
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2... … sorry there’s a paywall)
Scott: “Its 12 lines reject false comfort and offer something more useful in its place: a measure of clarity about the human situation.
For two of its three stanzas, this reads like a nature poem. And like most nature poems, it understands the natural world both as a series of phenomena and as a storehouse of symbols.
Insects, birds and trees just are what they are. But people can’t seem to look at anything in nature without trying to read it. Which is, inevitably, to misread, to write our own thoughts onto the universe’s inscrutable page
Jane Kenyon, contemplating a pond in the gloaming, catches tremors of worry in what she sees
She turns errors of perception into a kind of conceptual mischief, a charming game in which unease plays tag with reassurance. You can call the ripple on the water a “wound,” which turns its disappearance into healing.
The fly that caused that brief disturbance buzzes off to become prey for the swallows, but any potential violence in that image is dissolved as the insect is reclassified as food. We arrange the world as we translate it into language.
Sometimes we realize our mistakes. Kenyon’s second stanza emphasizes the fallibility of human perspective, and makes gentle comedy of our habit of inventing causes for alarm.
Is that a cloud of poison gas hovering over the orchard? Exhaust from an alien spaceship?
Did the barn catch fire?
It’s only the trees. Everything is fine
And then it isn’t. As soon as we think the premonition of doom has been dispelled, the hammer drops. Sometimes — the worst times, as often as not — things are exactly as they seem to be. Lulled by the fading light over the water, we awaken to find ourselves at a funeral
What happened? Whose funeral? The final stanza is blunt — spelling matters out plainly rather than playing with ambiguous images — but also enigmatic.
And death, the conclusion to every story, isn’t without its comic aspect, the slapstick of the pallbearers grappling with their burden. The brusque last line might be taken as a punchline.
A few things to know about Jane Kenyon: She lived for much of her writing life on a farm in New Hampshire, the ancestral property of her husband, Donald Hall, who was also a poet. She suffered from depression, and wrote about it, and was just 47 when she died of leukemia, in 1995. She wrote about that illness too. Mortality is a presence in many of her poems, an emotional weight, an intellectual puzzle and a philosophical anchor
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
In “The Pond at Dusk” she sees a lot, and conveys it in very few words.
Just 73 of them, arranged into four sentences of increasing complexity.
This is free verse, which means that the music happens not through meter or rhyme but in the line breaks
Those breaks are also subtle cliff-hangers. The eye, looking for continuity, finds white space. The voice pauses, creating a breath’s worth of suspense. What are the swallows dropping toward?
What is it that looks like smoke? Like disaster?
There is nothing mysterious in this poem. A bug skims the water. A flock of swallows scatters. Trees are in leaf and in blossom. Someone has died. And yet the poem itself swells with mystery, an intimation of deep waters running under the placid surface.
We are in the presence of a strong voice — witty, unassuming, wise — but the speaker is nonetheless elusive. There is no “I” in evidence, though the disparate elements of the poem are brought together in one person’s mind. This isn’t a scene, but a sequence of thoughts.
And also feelings, even if the language of explicit emotion is absent. Pain, anxiety and grief are invoked in successive stanzas, but always in a sidelong manner, and never for very long.
The human world is distant, almost abstract. We don’t hear names or see faces.
We notice artifacts — the structures that people carpenter together to accommodate their needs. The sounds of mourning in the church have been muted.
But church, in this poem, is where we end up. Outside the coffin, at least for now.”
- A. O. Scott, NYT July 23, 2025.
October 30, 2021
I found Jane Kenyon via Ted Kooser, and have savored this collection. I am rather new to contemporary poetry, but Jane has welcomed me in and has greatly expanded my boundaries. She writes of the rhythms of country life, imagines history, inserts Biblical imagery often and in unexpected ways. Because Jane suffered from severe depression, her poems about mental health, such as "Having it Out With Melancholy," are devastating.
My favorites include "Let Evening Come," "Otherwise," and the poignant "In the Nursing Home," which I offer as a sample of her work:
IN THE NURSING HOME
She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.
She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed’s dry.
Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.
My favorites include "Let Evening Come," "Otherwise," and the poignant "In the Nursing Home," which I offer as a sample of her work:
IN THE NURSING HOME
She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.
She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed’s dry.
Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.
August 6, 2020
Jane Kenyon is an absolute delight. This small collection chronicles Kenyon at her best and at her most fragile. The raw emotion captured within each poem, within each line is so undeniably real. She poured her sorrows, her joys, her doubts, and her loss throughout her work, and it feels almost scandalous to witness the life she lived behind the veil. I hope to visit with her again soon.
March 25, 2021
Jane Kenyon makes my heart sing. Each one of these poems is a wonder.
September 1, 2021
very sweet collection
January 24, 2023
Jane Kenyon's poems are incredibly readable and gorgeous in form and content. I marveled at how she says so much in so few words. On top of that, her humour is delightful. You’ll find littles lines thrown in here or there to make you chuckle or smirk. You'll also find: deep thoughts unpacked and explored in unique ways; new perspectives on everyday moments; fleeting moments in time captured so desciptively; touching endings that rip you back into reality.
I loved them all, but my favourites were The Thimble, The Shirt, At the Feeder, Afternoon in the House, Alone for a Week, The Blue Bowl, April Chores*, The Three Susans, The Stroller, Having It Out with Melancholy, Not Here, Gettysburg: July 1, 1863.
* "Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam”
I loved them all, but my favourites were The Thimble, The Shirt, At the Feeder, Afternoon in the House, Alone for a Week, The Blue Bowl, April Chores*, The Three Susans, The Stroller, Having It Out with Melancholy, Not Here, Gettysburg: July 1, 1863.
* "Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam”
October 21, 2024
If you love Mary Oliver or Donald Hall, you'll also enjoy Jane Kenyon. She constantly delighted me with her lines about happiness coming "to rain falling on the open sea, / to the wineglass, weary of holding wine" as well as melancholy: "You taught me to exist without gratitude / You ruined my manners toward God." I love poets who draw out beauty from everyday details. ("Now tell me that the Holy Ghost does not reside in / the play of light on cutlery!") Her poems carry an undercurrent of agnosticism due to sorrow, but they also acknowledge the goodness in the world. I'll be looking to add this volume to my collection.
Favorites Poems:
The Three Susans
Let Evening Come
Having it Out with Melancholy
Otherwise
Notes from the Other Side
Happiness
Favorites Poems:
The Three Susans
Let Evening Come
Having it Out with Melancholy
Otherwise
Notes from the Other Side
Happiness
Read
April 3, 2022from "walking alone in late winter":
from "camp evergreen":
"the three susans"
"having it out with melancholy"
"dutch interiors"
laughed/cried at the line about somebody's "huge, rusted Dodge/ that's burning oil" requiring an outlandish "twenty-five dollars to fill."
How long the winter has lasted—like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist's chair."
from "camp evergreen":
Now it is high summer: the solstice:
longed-for, possessed, luxurious, and sad."
"the three susans"
"having it out with melancholy"
"dutch interiors"
laughed/cried at the line about somebody's "huge, rusted Dodge/ that's burning oil" requiring an outlandish "twenty-five dollars to fill."
July 12, 2022
Really enjoyed this poem collection. I found her through Wendell Berry's Imagination in art and this collection felt like getting to know her. Her life-long battle with depression, her (sometimes very physical) love for her husband, finding her place in his old family home, even her slightly irrational guilt at composting a salvageable potato, and, sadly, her lost of faith after experiencing the depth of human suffering in India, as well as the decline of her health due to leukiemia.
Some favorites were: "Mud Season", "Having it out with Melancholy", "Briefly it enters and Briefly speaks", "Lines for Akhmatova", "Potato", "Let Evening Come".
Some favorites were: "Mud Season", "Having it out with Melancholy", "Briefly it enters and Briefly speaks", "Lines for Akhmatova", "Potato", "Let Evening Come".
December 3, 2024
Jane Kenyon can make any ordinary object or moment sing, even in sadness! It’s pure magic. Some poems deliver a specific message and she really hits hard with those for me personally. The ones about death and melancholy are her strongest. Her poem “In the Nursing Home” is one I read years ago and have never stopped thinking about. However, she has a tendency to meander into moments she experienced for seemingly no reason other than to remember. I suppose there’s no greater reason to write, though, is there? Some poems feel diary-like in that way, and they’re not my favorite, but she can still describe anything with such specificity and beauty.
June 16, 2022
Beautiful.
Some favorite lines:
Lucky shirt.
At every turn it evaded us
like the identity of the third person
I’m the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.
I thought of a dozen things to do
but rejected them all
in favor of fretting about you.
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothes in light. (This is from Notes from the Other Side, a favorite in this collection.)
Some favorite lines:
Lucky shirt.
At every turn it evaded us
like the identity of the third person
I’m the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.
I thought of a dozen things to do
but rejected them all
in favor of fretting about you.
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothes in light. (This is from Notes from the Other Side, a favorite in this collection.)
November 13, 2023
Wow, she blew my mind. She writes about her pain so poignantly, so clearly and so honestly it hurts to read it. Her work is a treasure. I will read more of it. I now also plan to read the work of her husband, Donald Hall, who is also a highly acclaimed poet. How have I missed them thus far? She made me want to go where she was when she wrote these poems, and meet her dog. Beautiful, haunting and just wonderful poems, laced with literary allusions that delight.
August 27, 2023
When I first read this book I really glanced through it and didn't take the time to appreciate the words on the page. As I reread it now, in a vulnerable and sensitive state I am so thankful I happened upon this book in a random bookstore, and I am so happy I took the time to appreciate the words on the page.
June 23, 2025
I am new to Jane Kenyon's poetry. These poems were chosen after her death by her husband, Donald Hall, writer, professor, essayist, and author of the Caldecott winning children's classic, Ox-Cart Man.
I was enchanted from the very first poem in this slim volume. She writes of the ordinary, yet illuminates it with a grace and a light that shimmers through your being. I savored these poems, reading only 4 or 5 in a sitting and often rereading them. And next on my list is A Hundred White Daffodils...
I was enchanted from the very first poem in this slim volume. She writes of the ordinary, yet illuminates it with a grace and a light that shimmers through your being. I savored these poems, reading only 4 or 5 in a sitting and often rereading them. And next on my list is A Hundred White Daffodils...
October 24, 2025
“things simply lasting, then failing to last: a blue heron’s eye, and the light passing between them: into light all things must fall, glad to at last have fallen”
trying to tap into poetry but sometimes it’s too abstract for me… but my librarian recommended this to me so obviously i had to read it.
trying to tap into poetry but sometimes it’s too abstract for me… but my librarian recommended this to me so obviously i had to read it.
May 28, 2020
Such eloquence, such exquisite grace in every word. The beauty of the living world and the leaving...
And always comfort - in the endearing human emotion of hope that connects us all. Despite the pain - despite the despair -we have this life- this gift.
And always comfort - in the endearing human emotion of hope that connects us all. Despite the pain - despite the despair -we have this life- this gift.
July 27, 2021
I really liked the first half or third of these poems. Those were very much in celebration of life. Then they became darker and sadder, probably reflective of what was going on in her life, but it was not what I connected with at the time of reading.
December 6, 2025
I truly loved this collection! I don’t think I’d ever read Jane Kenyon before, and I kind of randomly picked this up at the library. She was a wonderful poet. I love her style and the stark emotion her writing evokes. Also, as a native of Michigan, I love stumbling upon Michigander writers.
May 12, 2020
Very beautiful collection, tinged with sadness.
Read
October 9, 2020These aren't her best poems in my opinion, but there are some might fine one's here.
November 24, 2020
“What shall we do about this?” I asked / my God, who even then was leaving me.
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