They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

These lines are from Henry Vaughan’s devotional lyric “They Are All Gone into the World of Light,” written in the mid-17th century and published in his collection *Silex Scintillans* (1650; expanded 1655). Vaughan (1621–1695), a Welsh poet often grouped with the “metaphysical” writers, composed many religious poems in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars and amid personal losses and spiritual introspection. The poem meditates on the death of loved ones and the Christian hope of their translation into heavenly “light,” while the speaker remains on earth, feeling left behind yet spiritually steadied by the purity of their memory.

The speaker contrasts the departed—now in a realm of “light,” suggesting heaven, clarity, and divine presence—with his own continued life in a dimmer, sorrowful world. Yet grief is not the poem’s final note: the dead are imagined as morally and spiritually luminous, and remembering them “clears” the speaker’s thoughts, functioning like a devotional discipline that purifies perception. Vaughan’s characteristic metaphysical movement turns bereavement into a theological meditation: loss becomes a prompt to reorient desire away from earthly attachment toward eternal realities, where the dead are not merely absent but transformed and, in a sense, more truly alive.