Before Hazel Hall put words to loneliness, she lived it. After a childhood bout with scarlet fever left her with a lifelong physical disability, Hall spent much of her adult life in an upstairs Portland room, writing poems on a lap board and watching the city through lace curtains. Her first collection, *Curtains* (1921), is shaped by that unusual vantage point. “Loneliness” reads less like a complaint than like an intimate definition, worked out through sound, stillness, and one central tree image.
From the first line, Hall asks what loneliness actually is rather than reaching for an easy emotional label. The opening definitions are themselves questions: “This silence like a deep bell's tone, / These moments, motionless?” A bell tone is not empty—it is resonant, lingering in the air long after it is struck. Comparing silence to that deep tone suggests loneliness is a kind of charged quiet, not absence. The dash after “loneliness” opens a pause, as if the mind needs room to consider its own question. The word “motionless” freezes time, but the question mark keeps the meaning open.
The second stanza moves from inner stillness to a view of the world. There is “this hush above the nervous street,” where the street below hums with anxious motion while the speaker sits apart from it. The simile that follows is the heart of the poem: loneliness is “Removed as is the tree that stands, / Hill-high, with burrowing root-feet / And boughs like reaching hands.” The word “Removed” sits at the line’s start, suggesting both physical distance and a deliberate stepping back. The tree is solitary, but it is not weak. Its roots burrow, its boughs reach; it is anchored and aspiring at once. Hall gives the tree a body—root-feet, hands—so the landscape itself begins to express what isolation can feel like: separate, but intensely alive.
That aliveness surfaces explicitly in the third stanza. “As in my blood I feel life press, / Like sap into the frailest bough.” Here the speaker turns inward, and the tree metaphor follows. The word “press” conveys urgency, not the sluggishness one might associate with solitude. Even the “frailest bough” is filled with rising sap. This is a crucial reversal: loneliness is not defined as the absence of life, but as the almost painful awareness of life moving through a solitary frame. The poem closes with conditional recognition—“I think if such is loneliness / Then I am lonely now.” The conditional “I think” is humble, as if the speaker has not fully answered loneliness but has recognized it in herself. There is no despair in that final line; it is more like naming a place she has known all along.
Hall builds that quiet shift through a steady, hymn-like rhythm. Each stanza is four lines, rhymed ABAB, with pairs such as “alone” and “tone,” “street” and “root-feet,” “bough” and “now.” The first three lines of each stanza carry four iambic beats, but the final line shortens to three, as in “These moments, motionless?” and “Then I am lonely now.” The result is a drop into silence at the end of every stanza, a formal echo of the hush the poem describes. Questions and dashes create pauses, so the poem seems to think aloud rather than argue.
“Loneliness” matters because Hall, writing from a life of intense physical constraint, refuses to treat that condition as mere deprivation. Instead she offers a definition of loneliness as a kind of fertile solitude—resonant as a bell, rooted as a tree, charged as rising sap. It is a short poem, but its quiet music and careful imagery make solitude feel less like a sentence than like a space for attention.