Reincarnation
One life ends, another queue begins: write the soul as a serial traveller.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about reincarnation: rebirth imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Reincarnation gives poetry a shape no other theme offers: the self as a series, not a single volume. Where an elegy ends at the grave, a reincarnation poem turns the page, and the questions it opens are irresistible to poets. What survives the crossing: a temperament, a fear of water, a talent, a debt? Who were you before, and what does that make of the person reading their own hands now? The theme treats identity as luggage, and asks what got lost in transit.
It is also a theme of recognition. The most haunting reincarnation poems turn on a moment when something is known that could not be known: a street corner remembered in a city never visited, an instant kinship with a stranger, a child's impossible sentence. Whether the poet believes the doctrine hardly matters; the shiver of almost-remembering is a universal human experience, and that shiver is what the poem must produce.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose reincarnation because it lets them write about death without writing an ending, and about identity without writing a mirror. It reframes grief, the lost one is not gone but travelling, and it reframes the self, this life is one costume in a long wardrobe. The theme also carries a moral engine: in the traditions that gave us the idea, how you live determines what you return as, which loads every ordinary choice with consequence.
There is a formal attraction too: cycles invite cyclical forms, refrains, repeated images, poems that end where they began but changed, and readers feel that architecture even when they cannot name it.
Where it comes from
The Bhagavad Gita gave the theme its most famous image: the soul discarding worn-out bodies as a person discards worn-out clothes and puts on new ones. Rumi traced an ascent through the kingdoms of existence, dying from mineral to plant, plant to animal, animal to human, and asked, in effect, when did dying ever make me less? Buddhist poetry across Asia treated rebirth as both fact and warning, the wheel that compassion alone could slow.
The idea travelled west and turned strange and lovely. Ancient Celtic verse attributed to Amergin has the speaker claim to have been a wave, a hawk, a salmon, a word. Walt Whitman closed Song of Myself by bequeathing himself to the dirt and telling the reader to look for him under their boot-soles: reincarnation as democracy, the self recycled into everything.
The elements that carry it
- Clothes, costumes and skins: garments changed, shed or outgrown, the Gita's own metaphor made personal.
- Creatures of metamorphosis: moths, cicadas, snakes, tadpoles, bodies that visibly become other bodies.
- Water cycles and seasons: rain to river to cloud, seed to stalk to seed, nature's rebirths standing in for the soul's.
- Deja vu and impossible memory: known staircases in unknown houses, faces recognised at first meeting.
- Doors, waiting rooms and queues: the between-lives space, which a poet may furnish as bureaucratically or tenderly as they dare.
Techniques that work
- Write a chain-of-lives poem in numbered sections, one per incarnation, and thread a single trait, a scar, a fear, a gift for whistling, through every life.
- Use anaphora, 'I have been', 'I was', in the manner of the Amergin song, to build incantatory momentum through past selves.
- Anchor the metaphysics in one present-tense scene, a market, a bath, a bus, where the almost-memory strikes; the ordinary setting makes the shiver real.
- Make the poem's form circular: end on a transformed version of the opening line, so the reader physically experiences return.
- Choose unglamorous incarnations, a carthorse, a kitchen table's oak, a midge, and let humility do what grandeur cannot.
Mistakes to avoid
- Claiming only flattering past lives: pharaohs, queens, temple dancers. Fix: let the speaker have been a flea or a turnip farmer; comedy and credibility arrive together.
- Vague mysticism, 'souls', 'energy', 'the universe', with no scene. Fix: stage one concrete moment of impossible recognition and build outward.
- Using rebirth to cancel grief entirely. Fix: even if the lost return, they return unrecognisable; keep the cost of the crossing.
- Explaining the doctrine like a textbook. Fix: dramatise one turn of the wheel; readers infer cosmology from story.
An exercise
Write your own version of the Amergin boast: twelve lines, each beginning 'I have been', naming twelve past forms from the mineral, plant, animal and human worlds. Then cut the four weakest lines and end on the form that surprises you most.
A challenge
Write a two-part poem: in part one, a speaker in a past life loses something specific; in part two, a stranger in the present finds it, or its echo, without understanding why it matters. Never state that the two speakers share a soul.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set in the waiting room between lives, where souls queue to choose their next body, and your speaker hesitates over the form they have been offered.
Before you submit
- A single thread, trait, object, fear, connects the poem's lives or stanzas.
- At least one incarnation is unglamorous or comic.
- The metaphysics is dramatised in scene, never lectured.
- The form enacts the cycle: refrain, circular ending or numbered rebirths.
- Grief or cost survives the consolation of return.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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