Selected Poems

Hazel Hall

Published by Ahsahta in 1980, The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall originally appeared in three published volumes: Curtains (1921), Walkers (1923), and City of Time (1928). Hall had an exceptionally short period of productivity. Born in 1886, she published her first poem at the age of thirty. Her poetry appeared in Poetry, Dial, Harper’s, Yale Review, The Nation, Literary Review, Lyric, Contemporary Verse, and Bookman before her work slipped into obscurity. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, awarded Hall the Young Poet’s Prize in 1921. Hall was confined to a wheelchair from the age of twelve after a bout of scarlet fever. Although her days were spent in an upstairs room of a large house in Portland, Oregon, her poetry has a vivid richness that extends outside her room and even her own time. Her sonnets are reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, although more gentle in their mental and emotional lacerations. Her world is absolutely feminine—achingly interior, forgotten, small and delicate—and absolutely razor sharp, clearly making her a modern poet.

A sample poem from the book

A Baby’s Dress

It is made of finest linen—

Sheer as wasp-wings;

It is made with a flowing panel

Down the front,

All overrun with fagot-stitched bow-knots

Holding hours and hours

Of fairy-white forget-me-nots.

And it is finished.

To-night, crisp with new pressing

It lies stiffly in its pasteboard box

Smothered in folds of tissue paper

Which envelope it like a shroud—

In its coffin-shaped pasteboard box.

To-morrow a baby will wear it at a christening;

To-morrow the dead-white of its linen

Will glow with the tint of baby skin;

And out of its filmy mystery

There will reach

Baby hands...

But to-night the lamplight plays over it and finds it cold.

Like the flower-husk of a little soul,

Which, new-lived, has fluttered to its destiny,

It lies in its coffin-shaped pasteboard box.

To-morrow will make it what hands cannot:

Limp and warm with babyness,

A hallowed thing,

A baby’s dress.