“When Death Comes” is a poem that deals with how one chooses to live once they realize they must die. There’s an almost fantastical quality to death in the opening stanzas. Death is not clinical or manmade, but natural, a next step in the journey of life.

The poem begins with the speaker being confronted by death, personified as a “hungry bear in autumn” (Line 2). This bear figuratively transports the main character to the Underworld, or the Land of the Dead, where the personified character of death collects “the bright coins from his purse / to buy me” (Lines 3-4). In mythological terms, coins were collected for the dead in order to pay Charon, the ferryman, to cross the Styx, the river that separated the lands of the living and the dead. Death is shown to be final as it “snaps the purse shut” (Line 4), which symbolizes keeping the “coins” (Line 3) and beginning the journey that awaits after life.

The speaker ponders their own cause of death, which is yet to be revealed. The speaker doesn’t know if their demise will be from illness like “measle-pox” (Line 6) or a natural disaster “like an iceberg” (Line 8). Despite the uncertainty of their future death, the speaker does not dread it.