All Souls

 Today is All Souls, when Christians are enjoined to remember 'the faithful dead'. For most of us, I suspect, the ever growing family of our dead contains only a minority of the Christian faithful, but today, well placed in the elegiac season of autumn, is a good day to remember them all. Loss and remembrance are great themes in English poetry – Lycidas, Gray's Elegy, In Memoriam, to name only the more imposing monuments. On a far smaller scale, and much more recent, I always find this poem by Kay Ryan – short, subtle and oblique – especially poignant...

Things shouldn't be so hard

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

As for music, Schubert marked All Souls Day with one of his most beautiful songs, the Litanei. This morning Radio 3's Song of the Day was the Litanei, sung to an orchestral accompaniment by Benjamin Appl (a new release, not yet available online). For me, this version, sung by Bryn Terfel (using, like Hans Hotter, only a fraction of his vocal power), is my favourite...