These Hallowed Days: May Sarton's "All Souls" poems

[zirconium]

May 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?" ( Read more... )

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). ( Read more... )

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.