Poems about Death

The Versery gathers 3 poems that take up the theme of death by 3 different poets, spanning more than 200 years of writing, from 1650 to 1947. Each entry below links to the full text (or, for in-copyright work, a fair-use excerpt with a link to an authoritative source), along with a short curator's note placing the poem in context.

Theme pages are one of several ways to move through the collection. Poets rarely write to a single subject — most of the work below sits at the intersection of death and several related ideas at once. The list of related themes further down on this page is built from co-occurrence: if a poem about death also takes up another theme, that theme rises in the ranking. Following those links is a good way to discover poems you might otherwise not have found.