“They Are All Gone into the World of Light” by Henry Vaughan (1655)

Henry Vaughan was a Welsh poet of the 1600s. Many of his poems feature spiritual themes and religious devotion, as well as explorations of the afterlife. In this poem, light and dark symbolize life and death as the speaker welcomes death as the truest freedom attainable by humans.

“A Clock Stopped” by Emily Dickinson

In this poem by 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, the image of a stopped clock enables the speaker to explore the meaning of life and death. The personification of the clock, whose mechanisms cannot be restored once they pause, reveals Dickinson’s questions about the afterlife.

“Guernica” by James Johnson Sweeney (1940)

American art curator and poet James Johnson Sweeney wrote this poem in 1940 about the destruction of the Spanish Basque town of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The violence of its vivid war imagery communicates the senselessness of death and the misery of battle—themes echoing throughout the genre of war poetry.