Hall, Hazel

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HALL, Hazel

Born 7 February 1886, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 11 May 1924, Portland, Oregon

Daughter of Montgomery G. and Mary Garland Hall

As a child, Hazel Hall was taken by her parents to Portland, Oregon, where she remained throughout her short life. At twelve, she became permanently confined to a wheelchair as a result of either a fall or an attack of scarlet fever; thus her formal public school education terminated with the fifth grade. She contributed to her own support by doing needlework; she also wrote poetry and prose under a pseudonym. By thirty, failing eyesight led her to devote herself more to writing, and her poetry began to appear under her own name. She continued pseudonymous publication, however, perhaps because she felt, as she wrote, that "my poetry should be given more attention than my life." Her pseudonym remains undisclosed.

Hall's contemporaries regarded her highly both as a person and as a poet. The individuality of her poetry was frequently noted. Her poems were sought after by the leading periodicals, and many of them were anthologized. She won several prizes including, in 1921, a first prize from Contemporary Verse and the Young Poet's Prize from Poetry magazine.

Hall never mentioned her affliction explicitly, but she used her confinement and the repetitive, monotonous domestic employment as subject and metaphor in many of her poems. In her first book, Curtains (1921), the poems from the title section use immediate objects—door, window frame, stairway—symbolically. The objects lead to the wider world, which is denied the speaker. The mood of these poems is a mixture of resignation and longing. Unsentimentally, the poems reveal flashes of Hall's struggle to accept confinement bravely and without resentment.

In the "needlework" section, Hall used her occupation in a variety of ways. In the poem "Monograms," she juxtaposes the details of a seamstress's work—the cold linen, the repetitive nature of the sewing and its long duration—with small, warm details of a bride's experience—"June, real flowers…like flesh"—to create a poignant sense of the barrenness of the speaker's life, a life that has been representative of many women's. In "Instruction," she makes a direct correlation between herself and "All the tired women, / Who sewed their lives away." Hall created fresh and original analogies between nature and the seamstress's world: "The wind is sewing with needles of rain" ("Two Sewing"); "the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon" ("Heavy Threads").

The subjects of Walkers (1923) are sometimes seen from a window, sometimes only heard. These passersby reveal themselves in the way they walk. They are perceived as being concerned with their individual, temporal matters and as being unaware of how they resemble each other, how ultimately each is moving toward the same destiny. While "they are always seeking a road," the one who observes them is always seeking a word; yet the goal for all is to "strive to give the understanding wings / And to make the brilliant flight of it enough" ("Summary").

Hall knew she was dying when she composed some of the poems found in Cry of Time (1928), published posthumously. There is a restlessness here, but there is awareness, too, that reflection and perception and song have been wrought from pain and silence. These poems are less personal and more varied. Hall more clearly portrayed herself as a representative of other women, sharing with them "hands never still" ("Woman Death"), sorrow, and a search for peace and repose. In "Tract on Living," Hall approached total reconciliation to life and death with her recognition that "the only answer is the call."

Hall's verse was usually traditional in form, but occasionally she experimented with newer techniques. She used a subtle juxtaposition of images to good effect, and she spoke to more modern sensibilities than do many of her contemporaries. Although her work is fairly limited in range, it is slight only in terms of quantity.