The Afterlife
Rivers, ferrymen and unfinished conversations: write what happens after the last line.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about the afterlife: underworld imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
The afterlife is poetry's oldest thought experiment: if the dead go somewhere, what is it like, and what do they still want from us? Unlike heaven, which leans toward reward and rest, the afterlife as a theme includes the whole geography, underworlds and waiting rooms, rivers of forgetting, ancestors who watch, ghosts with errands left undone. It is less a doctrine than a set of questions wearing landscapes, and each tradition's answer tells you what that culture feared and honoured most.
For the working poet, the afterlife is above all a device for continuing conversations that death interrupted. The dead in poems rarely rest; they advise, accuse, forgive, ask for water, ask to be remembered. Writing the afterlife means deciding what your particular dead still need, and what the living speaker still owes. That unfinished business, not the scenery, is the poem.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose this theme because grief demands a forwarding address. Whether or not the poet believes in one, the act of imagining where the dead have gone gives loss a shape the mind can work with, and readers borrow these imagined geographies for their own mourning. The theme also licenses poetry's boldest move: giving the dead a voice, which no other art manages with such intimacy.
It is also a theme where imagination is tested directly against feeling. Contest judges reading afterlife poems, on Writory's five criteria or anywhere else, can tell at once whether an underworld was built from genuine grief or assembled from mythology kits; the difference is always in the small, personal details the dead are given to carry.
Where it comes from
Homer sent Odysseus to the underworld to interview the dead, and the shade of Achilles told him he would rather be a poor man's servant among the living than king of all the perished: the theme's honesty begins there. Virgil guided Aeneas below, then Dante recruited Virgil himself and mapped the entire territory in terza rima. The Egyptian Book of the Dead versified the soul's journey and judgement millennia earlier, heart weighed against a feather.
The myth of Orpheus, who nearly sang his wife out of death and lost her by looking back, has become the afterlife poem's great template, reworked by Rilke and by countless modern elegists. Emily Dickinson, meanwhile, domesticated the whole subject: her carriage ride with Death, made of a cornice, a cooling gown, and centuries that feel shorter than a day, proved the afterlife could be written at the scale of a single polite journey.
The elements that carry it
- Rivers and crossings: Styx, Lethe, Jordan, the ferryman and his coin, water as the border between states of being.
- Thresholds and gates, and their keepers: what must be given up, answered or paid to pass.
- The backward glance, Orpheus's error, and every image of looking where looking is forbidden.
- Objects buried with or belonging to the dead: coins, letters, shoes, the possessions that travel or fail to.
- Voices of the dead: their requests, complaints and blessings, always more specific than the living expect.
Techniques that work
- Give your dead an errand: something they still want done in the world of the living, and let the poem be the negotiation.
- Domesticate the geography: an underworld with bus stops, waiting rooms or hospital corridors will unsettle readers more than one with flames.
- Use the Orpheus structure, descent, bargain, backward glance, but change one term of the bargain so the myth becomes yours.
- Write the crossing through sensory subtraction: colours fading, names slipping, sounds thinning; loss of detail is the journey.
- Let the dead speak in a voice truer than mourning expects, funny, petty, practical; the surprise makes them alive on the page.
Mistakes to avoid
- Assembling a mythology-kit underworld with no personal stake. Fix: put your own dead in it, with their real habits and unfinished arguments.
- Solemnity from first line to last. Fix: the dead in great poems are often blunt or wry; give grief its gallows humour.
- Explaining the belief system instead of walking through it. Fix: trust images, the river, the coin, the gate, to carry the cosmology.
- Ending on 'they are at peace now'. Fix: earn any peace through a concrete final image, or admit the peace is the speaker's wish.
An exercise
Write a poem in which someone you have lost is met at a border crossing of your invention, a toll bridge, an airport desk, a riverbank, and must surrender one possession to pass. Choose the possession from their real life, and let the surrendering be the poem's turn.
A challenge
Retell the Orpheus story in a modern setting without using the names Orpheus or Eurydice, and change the reason for the backward glance so it reveals something true about a relationship you know.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in the voice of one of your dead, describing their afterlife as if in a letter home, with one complaint, one comfort and one request.
Before you submit
- The poem contains at least one detail belonging to a real, particular dead person.
- The geography is felt through image and sensation, not explained as doctrine.
- The dead have agency: a voice, an errand or a refusal.
- Any borrowed myth has been altered enough to become personal.
- The final line resists unearned peace and lands on something concrete.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.