All Is Well

Who This Poem Suits

All Is Well — widely known by its opening line "Death is nothing at all" — is one of the most requested readings at Christian and Anglican funeral services in Australia. Its origins in a sermon by an Oxford theologian give it a spiritual authority that many families find deeply comforting, while its language is warm and personal enough to feel intimate rather than formal.

It suits families where faith is present but where the tone of the service is gentle rather than doctrinal. The poem doesn't argue a theological position — it simply speaks from a place of certainty that love continues and that the person who has died has not truly gone. For families who believe this, hearing it expressed so directly and so warmly can be profoundly consoling.

It also works well for families who are not strongly religious but who want a reading that carries a sense of continuity and presence rather than absence. The poem's language is relational rather than religious — it speaks of familiar names, household words, old jokes, easy ways of speaking. These are universal human experiences, and the comfort they offer doesn't require a particular faith to receive.

Where Funeral Blues sits entirely in grief, and Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep finds comfort in the natural world, All Is Well finds it in the continuation of relationship itself. The person has not gone — they have simply moved to another room. That image, for many families, is exactly the right one.

Delivering the Poem at a Service

The poem is written in the first person — the voice of the person who has died, speaking directly to those they have left behind. This is unusual among funeral readings and gives it a particular intimacy. A reader who understands this delivers it not as an observer describing death, but as a loved one speaking across the threshold. That shift in perspective changes everything about how it lands.

The tone should be warm and conversational — the poem itself instructs this, asking that no forced solemnity enter the voice. A reader who delivers it in a measured, ecclesiastical tone works against the poem's own instruction. Read naturally, as though speaking to someone sitting nearby, it has an immediacy that more formally delivered readings rarely achieve.

It is one of the few funeral readings that explicitly mentions laughter. That line — about laughing at the little jokes shared together — often catches mourners off guard in the best way. A reader who allows a genuine warmth into their voice at that moment gives those gathered permission to feel the lightness alongside the grief, which is often a genuine relief.

The Story Behind All Is Well

Henry Scott Holland was an Oxford theologian and Canon of Christ Church who delivered the words that became this poem as part of a sermon in 1910. The occasion was the lying-in-state of King Edward VII, whose body was resting in Westminster at the time. Holland was preaching about the paradox of death — the way a body lying still in a room can seem simultaneously utterly absent and strangely present.

The sermon explored two contradictory responses to death: the sense that death is catastrophic and final, and the sense that the person has simply stepped away for a moment. Holland presented both as authentic human responses rather than resolving the tension between them. The passage that became "All Is Well" was his expression of the second response — the feeling that the connection between people is not severed by death but simply changed in its form.

Holland did not write the passage as a poem. It was prose from a sermon, and the poetic arrangement most families recognise today was created later by editors who extracted the most resonant passages and arranged them into the form now used at funerals. The title "All Is Well" and the subtitle "Death Is Nothing At All" were both added after Holland's death in 1918.

The passage entered funeral culture gradually through the twentieth century and became widely used in Australia through the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in Anglican and Catholic services. Because it is drawn from a public sermon delivered over a century ago, it is entirely in the public domain — there are no copyright restrictions on its use in any context, including printing in orders of service.

Note on the Full Text

The version displayed on this page is the shorter, most commonly used arrangement of Holland's words. A longer version exists which continues beyond the final line shown here, including additional passages about calling by familiar names, and the assurance that "all is well." Both versions are used at Australian funerals — the shorter version is more common because it fits more comfortably within a service, but the longer version has a particular completeness that some families prefer.

If you would like the full extended text, speak with your Greenfields funeral director — we can provide both versions and help you decide which suits the length and tone of your service.

Related Readings and Poems

If All Is Well resonates with your family, these readings share a similar sense of continuing presence and the comfort of unbroken connection:

• Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep — Mary Elizabeth Frye's poem of continuing presence in the natural world. Shares All Is Well's central reassurance that the person has not truly gone, expressed through the imagery of wind, light, and rain rather than relationship.
• She Is Gone (He Is Gone) — Remember Me by David Harkins — a more secular poem with a similar forward-looking message, inviting those gathered to carry love forward rather than dwell in loss.
• The Irish Blessing — a traditional Celtic prayer offering warmth, protection, and the hope of reunion. Well suited alongside All Is Well for services that want to close on a note of peace and spiritual comfort.
• Crossing the Bar by Alfred Lord Tennyson — a classical poem about death as a passage into something beyond, sharing All Is Well's sense that death is transition rather than ending. Particularly well suited to Anglican and Christian services.

Browse our full Funeral Readings and Poems collection for more options across religious, secular, and contemporary styles.

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