Donald Hall's Elegy

Many of Hall's earlier works focused on nature, culture, and national history. One of his more popular works, "An Elegy for Wesley Wells," in Exiles and Marriages (1955) displays just this in dynamic balance. Poems such as this also have a side of death and the realistic view on this event in life. By looking at several of Donald Hall's pieces we notice how his life impacts what he writes about. For example, in "In an Elegy for Wesley Wells," this famous author was undergoing a death of his grandfather while he was at Oxford. Because of this the attributes listed above prevail in the poem. In his earlier works, Donald Hall focused on a classical form of structure and technique. With regular meters and a sense of rhyme, stanzas tend to be structured