The Blue Bowl

"Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon (1990)

The titular poem of her 1990 collection, Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come” makes use of anaphora, or the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of multiple poetic lines, to create a lush portrait of the rural landscape of her home. She infuses the poem with her signature undercurrent of mortality. “Let Evening Come” is one of Kenyon’s most anthologized poems, even making an appearance in the 2005 film In Her Shoes, in which the character Maggie reads the poem aloud.

"Having It out with Melancholy" by Jane Kenyon (1992)

Beginning with an epigraph from Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Kenyon’s “Having It out with Melancholy” examines her experience with depression and medication in nine parts. The poem begins with Kenyon’s childhood, describing depression’s presence in her life at an early stage, and moves through experiences of medication, treatment, the influence and opinions of family and friends.

"Otherwise" by Jane Kenyon (1996)

Kenyon’s poem of gratitude in the wake of impending mortality uses a repeating refrain, “It might have been otherwise,” to great rhetorical effect. In the months before her death, Kenyon wrote 20 new poems and selected others for her collection Otherwise, published posthumously in 1996. Listen to an audio version of the poem here.

"To Autumn" by John Keats (1820)

Written shortly before his death at the age of 25, this canonical Keats ode, often interpreted as a meditation on death or the artistic process, personifies the season of autumn, and is replete with rich imagery of ripening crops, the labor of harvest, and the changing of weather as the season shifts into winter. Across the centuries, critics praise Keats’s poem as an ideal example of poetry. Critics continue to examine its multifaceted thematic concerns and numerous interpretations. While different in tone and execution, Kenyon’s poetry often examines similar subjects and operates in what Keats called “Negative Capability,” or the willingness to sit with uncertainty and doubt. Keats’s attention to detail in his rendition of the natural world echoes through the decades in Kenyon’s work. Her biographer John Timmerman notes that she often repeated Ezra Pound’s dictum: “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” (Taylor, Keith. “The Presence of Jane Kenyon.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLV, Issue 4, Fall 2006. Accessed on 17 Sept 2021.)

"Without" by Donald Hall (1995)

Written in the wake of Kenyon’s death, “Without” is also a poem of deep grief, albeit told with a very different tone and style. Hall published the poem in the December 1995 issue of Poetry magazine. In 1999, he made it the title poem of his collection of poems ruminating on Kenyon’s life and death, for which he won the L.L. Winship/Pen New England Award. Hall continued to write about Kenyon for the remainder of his life, both in future poetry collections, memoirs, and essays.