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“And death shall have no dominion” consists of three nine-line stanzas, each of which begins and ends with a refrain that’s identical to the poem’s title (lines 1, 9, 10, 18, 19, and 27). Featuring as much repetition as it does, this basic structure places more emphasis on driving home a single idea than on developing that idea through a sustained argument. That single idea is clearly announced in the poem’s refrain, which insists on death’s radically diminished power over the domain of life. In addition to the refrain, the speaker also makes repeated references to the sea. Oceanic imagery appears in all three of the poem’s stanzas. In the first stanza, they reference people “sing[ing] through the sea” (line 7). The second stanza features a longer passage that invokes the sea: “Under the windings of the sea / They lying long shall not die windily” (lines 11–12). The speaker references the sea yet again in the third stanza: “No more may gulls cry at their ears / Or waves break loud on the seashores” (lines 20–21). The speaker’s repeated use of sea imagery serves to evoke the constant dynamism of oceanic movement, which in turn reflects the dynamism of life.

That said, the structure of the poem isn’t simply based in repetition. In fact, upon close inspection, it becomes apparent that the poem as a whole exhibits a mirror-like structure in which the second half repeats imagery from the first half, but in reverse order. To make this clear, it’s helpful to start examine the way the poem opens and closes. The poem opens with several lines that conjure a cosmic image of dematerialized bodies in a void-like space, suspended among “the wind and the west moon” (line 3) and with “stars at elbow and foot” (line 5). This kind of cosmic imagery doesn’t appear again in the poem until the final lines, where the speaker invokes an apocalyptic vision of the sun breaking down at the end of time: “Break in the sun till the sun breaks down” (line 26). By beginning and ending with these vast cosmic visions, the speaker emphasizes that the domain of life—or, more broadly, of existence—stretches far beyond our ordinary imagining.

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