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Poets/Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon

1947–1995

Poems
14
Reader comments
13
Portrait of Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon 1947–1995
1947Born

Biography

Jane Kenyon (1947 - 1995) was an American poet and translator. Her work is often characterized as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant.

Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. While a student at the University of Michigan, Kenyon met the poet Donald Hall; though he was some twenty years her senior, she married him in 1972, and they moved to Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire.

Four collections of Kenyon's poems were published during her lifetime: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978). She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English (published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985), and she championed translation as an important art at which every poet should try her hand.

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Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when she died in April of 1995 from leukemia. When she died, she was working on editing Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, which was released posthumously in 1996. In 1999, Graywolf Press published A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem, which most reviewers regarded as less stellar than her previous work but worthwhile nonetheless. In 2004, Ausable Press published Letters to Jane, a compilation of letters written by the poet Hayden Carruth to Kenyon in the year between her diagnosis and her death.

Kenyon's poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields. She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. Though a subtle faith permeates her poems, they are not overtly Christian, though her essays reveal the important role church came to play in her life once she and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm.

Reading closely

Analyses

A full analysis sits under one of these poems: what the poem says, how it is built and how readers here have read it. About the analyses

Let Evening Come

This is a quiet poem of six three-line stanzas set on a farm as day ends. Almost every sentence begins with "Let". The speaker gives permission, one by one, to the things of dusk. The light moves up the hay bales, crickets start, dew settles, the fox goes home and the shed goes dark.

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From readers

What readers say about Jane Kenyon

  1. On Let Evening Come

    “This poem has a subtle cadence,with insightful verse. I especially like the last lines "God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come." I think everyone has felt some trepidation at one time or another as night fall approached.”

  2. On Finding A Long Gray Hair

    “I like this poem because it is kind of short, and it has a meaning to it. She has lived in that house since forever, and when she finds a grey hair she knows that once before that 3 other woman have lived in that house. She is picturing herself becoming old, and one day she wont be there anymore…”

  3. On Having it Out with Melancholy

    “This is the most sublime depiction of depression I have ever come across. I think it takes a personal and intimate understanding of depression (to have suffered it such as myself) to know and feel what this author is speaking of. It rings so true, especially the first few lines--and such an…”

  4. On Otherwise

    “This poem make me feel so happy, it was like it had been written just for me. It really made me think that perhaps I shouldn’t just give up on my life like I was going to, that happiness might really be out there for me. The poem talked about how she cherished her cereal and actually enjoyed her…”

  5. On Notes from the Other Side

    “I think this was a great poem, it was very easy for me to understand what she was talking about. The only problem I have right now is analysing it. Poetry is not something I read often, so analysing is hard. Other than that the poem was great.”

  6. On Twilight: After Haying

    “I tried to capture the scene of this poetry one early evening in Alberta Canada. I will place this piece with a photo I took of the rolled bales. I really like this piece. Nicely done.”

Where readers gather

Most discussed

  1. Let Evening Come5 comments
  2. Finding A Long Gray Hair2 comments
  3. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks1 comment
  4. Having it Out with Melancholy1 comment
  5. Notes from the Other Side1 comment
  6. Otherwise1 comment
  7. Twilight: After Haying1 comment
  8. Wash1 comment

All 14 poems

Otherwise · 1996 · 1 poem
  1. Otherwise1
Other poems · 13
  1. Biscuit1996
  2. The Blue Bowl1996
  3. Finding A Long Gray Hair19972
  4. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks1
  5. Dutch Interiors
  6. February: Thinking of Flowers
  7. Happiness
  8. Having it Out with Melancholy1
  9. Let Evening Come5
  10. Notes from the Other Side1
  11. The Suitor
  12. Twilight: After Haying1
  13. Wash1