August 29th Poem- 1943

The first thing that stood out to me with Donald Hall's Poem "1943" was the structure. He keeps all the lines within the same length and has them spaced with two lines in each stanza. The structure gives me a matter of fact felling about his poem; like there is no distraction with how it is all set up. On the website poets.org-a site that gives backgrounds and bios on numerous poets- said that, "Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines." The fact that Hall gives such "simplicity" makes his poems stand out all the more.

This poem is also a kind of tribute to Hall's life. Hall was born in 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut. This means that Hall was already 15 at the time of America entering World War II-prime age for a prospective solider. Hall had to experience the pressures of being a teenage boy at the time of war. As Hall said himself,
"They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals..."