Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse

Sarah Williams

Jan 1868 · Strahan

Ratings and reviews

“I have loved the stars to truly to be fearful of the night.” - The Old Astronomer. This poetry was written by a young woman in the mid 1800s and published after her death. Her life isn’t well documented, even the book’s introduction described her from a slightly removed perspective. Regardless, if you read her poetry you can see that she loved, lost, and adventured: at least through literature. There is a bittersweet aspect to reading the poetry of someone who died young. In a letters she wrote, “Somebody asked me once what I should do if I found myself at the head of a household? I said, "Abdicate."” While she never did acquire a household to abdicate from, she left this accidental inheritance of poetry. As the introduction states, Sadie wrote the way birds sing, spontaneously and naturally. Sometimes she drifts into cliche (as when raindrops are compared to teardrops or her sometimes rote religious poems), but her utter lack of pretension is genuinely charming. The collection features love poems full of ghosts and funny poems about children. The poems rhyme, simply but still occasionally beautifully. God, death, love, and children are the subjects most often mentioned, and at some length. Sadie was intensely spiritual, though she writes about falling asleep consistently in church. Her devotion was more to the ideas of heaven, love, and personal devotion. What is it about youth that makes dying so romantic? I don’t know. I admit, the poems’ quality is inconsistent. It varies from trite to sublime. Sarah Williams was not Emily Dickinson, but she does not deserve to be forgotten.