Hazel Hall compares a single day to a garment being sewn, with each hour adding one more stitch. By evening the day is complete and put away, just like finished clothing. Then she widens the image: days themselves pass one by one, the sun rises and sets, and each day’s seam is stitched into a whole life. There is no struggle or protest here. The tone is quiet, patient, a little melancholy. The speaker seems to accept that time works steadily and impersonally, the way fingers move through fabric. The sewing metaphor makes the passage of time feel intimate and ordinary, but also unstoppable. By the final line, “And life is done,” the poem suggests that a lifespan is made of the same small, repeated motions as a day — and ends just as gently, with the garment finished and laid away.
Three Songs for Sewing 3 — Summary
One by one, one by one, Stitches of the hours run Through the fine seams of the day, Till like a garment it is done And laid away.
One by one the days go by, And suns climb up and down the sky; One by one their seams are run — As Time's untiring fingers ply And life is done.