Hazel Hall sat in her house looking outside to observe and study the world on the other side of the glass each day.  Her observations, recorded in her poetry, made her one of the nation’s most powerful poets from 1916 until after her death in 1924.  Hall was born on February 7, 1886 in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

 

Hall moved to Portland as a young girl with her parents and two sisters.  An attack of scarlet fever or a fall, at the age of twelve, left her wheelchair-bound.  To help support her sister and her widowed mother, Hall worked as a seamstress.  She was very skilled in her craft, but when her eyesight began to fail in her twenties Hall began writing poetry.  Her first poem to be published was “To an English Sparrow,” which appeared in the Boston Transcript in 1916.  Hazel Hall was thirty years old.  After this, her poems appeared in many other publications including Century, Harpers, New Republic, Yale Review, and Literary Review.

 

In 1920, Hall’s poem “Three Girls” was selected as one of the five best poems of the year by eminent critic William Stanley Braithwaite.  In that same year, she also won first prize for poems published by Contemporary Verse.  Hall’s first book of collected poetry Curtains was published in 1921.  This was followed by Walkers, in 1923.  A third book of poems was published posthumously in 1928 by her sister Ruth, titled Cry of Time.  She was highly regarded during her own time as a great poet and even likened to poets such as Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.  After her death, however, her popularity dwindled.  In the 1990s, her work once again began to be recognized as great poetry.  In 2000, Oregon State University Press published The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall which contains all three of her collected volumes. 

 

If it were not for the many letters that Hazel Hall’s sister Ruth wrote to editors and critics, much less would be known about Hazel Hall.  Ruth Hall emphasized that invalidism was not what her sister would have wanted stressed about her life: “When anyone speaks of my sister as crippled, I always feel rebellious, because she gave the impression of such abundant health.  She enjoyed living immensely her days were never long enough for all the activities she wished to press into them.  Except that she did not walk, she was in good health until about six weeks before her death”

 

Hall’s poetry has been described as “compassionate, personal, and yet coolly objective.”  The solitude and sadness of her life are expressed through her poetry.  Curtains describes the life that Hall observed outside her bedroom window and her frustration at not being able to join it.   To be able to observe the world outside her bedroom better, Hall placed a small mirror on her window-sill.  Hall writes poems to the door, window, floor, and stairway.  She refers to her room as a prison.  She laments that of all the things in her room, the floor is not hers.  The first poem in the volume “Frames,” gives the sense of Hall’s frustration at being restricted in her movements.  She writes: “Brown window-sill, you hold my all of skies/…Brown window-sill, how can you hold it all?”  Curtains also contains Hall’s many poems on needlework. 

 

Although Hazel Hall spent twenty-six years in a wheelchair, she once confided to a friend, “I am not unmindful of my advantage.”  Hall’s instinctive wisdom, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility enabled her not only to cope with her handicap, but to transform the mundane and communicate symbolically through her art what she found within the silence of her solitude.  Hall’s poetry was her means of coping, of self-empowerment, and the legacy she left behind at the end of her brief life.  She died in Portland on May 11, 1924 after a sudden illness. 

 

The home where Hazel Hall lived is located at 106 NW 22^nd Place.  It was in this house that she observed the world around her and wrote poetry.  In 1995, the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission erected a small park in honor of Hazel Hall, next to the house.  In the park, granite slabs display three of her poems.  The park is located on NW 22^nd Place off of NW Everett St. between NW 22^nd and NW 23^rd avenues. 

 

One of Hall’s poems from her volume, Curtains, 1921:

 

                    INSTRUCTION

          My hands that guide a needle

          In their turn are led

          Relentlessly and deftly

          As a needle leads a thread.

 

          Other hands are teaching

          My needle; when I sew

          I feel the cool, thin fingers

          Of hands I do not know.

 

          They urge my needle onward,

          They smooth my seams, until

          The worry of my stitches

          Smothers in their skill.

 

          All the tired women,

          Who sewed their lives away,

          Speak in my deft fingers

          As I sew today.

 

 

 

Sources:

24 April 1921, “Wheel Chair Does Not Keep Girl from Achieving Fame,” Oregonian, section 2, p.24.

19 February 1922, “Portland Girl Wins,” Oregonian, section 3, p.9.

22 April 1923, “Portland Poet is Ranked High by American Critics”, Oregonian, section 3, p.12.

12 May 1924, “Hazel Hall Dies at Family Home,” Oregonian, section 1, p.1 continued on p.3.

13 May 1924, “Hazel Hall,” Oregonian, p. 10.

John Witte, ed.  The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000. 

Viola Price Franklin, A Tribute to Hazel Hall, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1939.