Dana Gioia's collection of poetry Interrogations at Noon (2001), which includes his poem “The Litany,” has been praised for its lyricism as well as its classic sense of subject and theme. One of the strongest poems in the collection, “The Litany” makes a powerful statement of love and loss and of the search for a way to comprehend the nature of suffering. These became common themes in Gioia's poetry after the tragic death of his son at four months of age. Gioia's verse collection The Gods of Winter (1991) expresses his pain over his son's death; his later work is less personal but still focuses on the subject of loss.

In “The Litany,” Gioia makes a confessional investigation of the nature of life and death and the universal design of that nature. Each stanza lists things the speaker has lost. These losses include someone he has loved as well as his faith in his religion, which had taught him to believe in the rightness of the cycle of life and death. His questioning of this cycle becomes an expression of grief.