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poetreeMay Sarton (1912-1995) wrote two poems titled "All Souls." The first one was published in Harper's in 1957 and reprinted in the collections In Time Like Air (1958) and Collected Poems, 1930-1993. (Sarton was prolific enough for a Collected Poems to appear in 1973; as an aside, my library owns that version but not the more recent compilation.)
An abridged version of the first "All Souls" poem appears in Singing the Living Tradition (1993), the primary hymnal for most Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is printed in the "Funerals and Memorials" section as a responsive reading, which means the minister (or other worship leader) and the congregation alternate speaking the lines to each other.
It begins, "Did someone say that there would be an end, / An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?" Online, you can find the UU version quoted in full within several archived sermons, including the following All Souls observances:
Good Grief! The Right to Grieve (Rochester, NY, 2001)
Dia de los Muertos: No Ordinary Time (Phoenix, AZ, 2009)
The second All Souls poem was published as "All Souls 1991" in the collection Coming into Eighty (1994; no online copy available, as far as I can tell). There appears to be a typed copy archived at Harvard as well, in the papers of Janice Oberacker. In her preface to Coming into Eighty, Sarton writes about being "a foreigner in the land of old age" and trying to come to terms with it; there are elegies for a friend killed by AIDS, a recollection of an old crush after reading his obit, references to her muses being absent/dead, and poems addressed to her mother and to Jean Dominique, a glamorous old lady who died when Sarton was 25.
"All Souls 1991" is about the dead children of Iraq. In the first stanza, Sarton writes that on the day itself, she is thinking not of her parents or other loved ones, but about the children, whose 55,000 souls "cloud the dirty sky, / will not go away." The second stanza itemizes some of the ways the children have been traumatized. The third stanza states that 500 more children will die that day. The fourth stanza emphasizes that the day is All Souls. The fifth and final stanza in entirety reads, "We have won the war. / Who could ask for more?"
The structure of the poem is one of diminishment: the first stanza is twelve lines, the second eleven, the third just four lines, the fourth four lines, and the fifth two lines. It could be regarded as a visual parallel to a soul fading into the sky, like smoke.
In her 1991-1992 journal (published as Encore), Sarton criticizes the U.S. war on Iraq at least twice (and probably more often; I don't have a copy at hand). Mark K. Fulk (in Understanding May Sarton) writes about the August 9, 1991, entry, in which Sarton reacts to a New Statesman article projecting that 170,000 Iraqi children would die in 1992; she condemns the Bush administration as "a huge festering cancer of irresponsibility and stark sadism."
On October 30, 1992, Sarton wrote:
An abridged version of the first "All Souls" poem appears in Singing the Living Tradition (1993), the primary hymnal for most Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is printed in the "Funerals and Memorials" section as a responsive reading, which means the minister (or other worship leader) and the congregation alternate speaking the lines to each other.
It begins, "Did someone say that there would be an end, / An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?" Online, you can find the UU version quoted in full within several archived sermons, including the following All Souls observances:
Good Grief! The Right to Grieve (Rochester, NY, 2001)
Dia de los Muertos: No Ordinary Time (Phoenix, AZ, 2009)
The second All Souls poem was published as "All Souls 1991" in the collection Coming into Eighty (1994; no online copy available, as far as I can tell). There appears to be a typed copy archived at Harvard as well, in the papers of Janice Oberacker. In her preface to Coming into Eighty, Sarton writes about being "a foreigner in the land of old age" and trying to come to terms with it; there are elegies for a friend killed by AIDS, a recollection of an old crush after reading his obit, references to her muses being absent/dead, and poems addressed to her mother and to Jean Dominique, a glamorous old lady who died when Sarton was 25.
"All Souls 1991" is about the dead children of Iraq. In the first stanza, Sarton writes that on the day itself, she is thinking not of her parents or other loved ones, but about the children, whose 55,000 souls "cloud the dirty sky, / will not go away." The second stanza itemizes some of the ways the children have been traumatized. The third stanza states that 500 more children will die that day. The fourth stanza emphasizes that the day is All Souls. The fifth and final stanza in entirety reads, "We have won the war. / Who could ask for more?"
The structure of the poem is one of diminishment: the first stanza is twelve lines, the second eleven, the third just four lines, the fourth four lines, and the fifth two lines. It could be regarded as a visual parallel to a soul fading into the sky, like smoke.
In her 1991-1992 journal (published as Encore), Sarton criticizes the U.S. war on Iraq at least twice (and probably more often; I don't have a copy at hand). Mark K. Fulk (in Understanding May Sarton) writes about the August 9, 1991, entry, in which Sarton reacts to a New Statesman article projecting that 170,000 Iraqi children would die in 1992; she condemns the Bush administration as "a huge festering cancer of irresponsibility and stark sadism."
On October 30, 1992, Sarton wrote:
Yesterday was special because I was able to finish the poem "All Souls" which I had to write because of four articles in the Manchester Guardian Weekly about the children of Iraq and the numbers of them who are dying....And that, of course, is what we did and what President Bush said he had no responsibility for. So he kept the sanctions on, and the food is not getting there. I was in a rage after I read that, and thank God I am a poet because I was able to use it and write a poem that may be of use.
