“Life,” available in Alexander Witherspoon and Frank Warnke's Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (1963), is another poem of Herbert's from The Temple. Like “Virtue,” it focuses on how nature's products die off and thereby reveal the fate of humankind.

In “On My First Son,” a lyric written in 1603, also available in Witherspoon and Warnke's Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (1963), Ben Jonson laments the death of his son at the age of seven years. Jonson tries to balance his profound grief with the consolation that death has put his beloved child in a state he ought to envy rather than regret, in removing him from earthly care.

In act 4, scene 2, of his play Cymbeline (c. 1612), William Shakespeare introduces a funereal lament, “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun,” in which the singers console themselves over the fact of death by accepting its inevitability...