Most poems about dying end at the light. Hartley's "After Life" walks its speaker toward the light and then drops them. That reversal makes the sonnet worth a second look. The path is familiar: a person slips out of the world, loses hold of who they were, hears a voice, sees a brightness, and then opens their eyes on "the life I forgot, and left behind." The central idea is that the space between living and dying is mostly a place of forgetting, and that coming back may feel less like a rescue than a fall.
The title does quiet work too. Written as two words, "After Life" can mean the afterlife, what follows life, or what follows the afterlife. The ending leaves all three possible.
The opening image is deliberately unsteady. "The colors come together as dismal rays" suggests hues merging into grey, and "dismal" makes even light gloomy. The speaker then defines themself with a list: "the forgotten, the in-between, and the dead." The list builds toward "dead," yet the middle term matters most. A truly dead speaker could not go on hearing and seeing, and this one does for the whole poem. "In-between" is where the poem actually lives.
What follows is erosion. In five lines "once" appears four times: the life "I once knew," the things "I once said," the people "I once knew," the place "I once lived." Each repetition shuts another door, and the losses shrink as they go, from a whole life to a sentence, to people, to one unnamed love ("That one love"), to a single address. Twice the speaker says "I can't seem to," and that small word "seem" is telling. They are not even certain of their own failure.
Then the senses wake. "I hear the others; their fear and their cries" shows a crowd still afraid while the speaker is oddly calm. A voice calling their name is the one thing that still belongs to them. The light waits "at the end of a hall," not in a tunnel; judging by the imagery, a hall is a built, ordinary space, which keeps the scene strangely domestic. "Somehow I just don't feel the same" is flat to the point of a shrug, which is how numbness might sound. Then the line that turns everything: "As I get closer, I begin to fall." Approach and descent share a single breath.
The form supports this. The rhyme runs ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, the Shakespearean pattern, with full rhymes such as rays/haze and name/same. The rhythm is looser than strict ten-syllable verse. Line 2 is long and crowded, as though the speaker carries all three labels at once, while other lines run lighter, so the poem sounds more like speech than ceremony. There is no full stop anywhere, not even a question mark after "what do I find," so the sentences drift into each other like the "dreamy haze" of line 3. The couplet borrows its rhyme words, "find" and "behind," from lines 5 and 7, and "left behind" nearly repeats line 5's phrase. The poem ends by circling back into its own earlier sound, fitting a speaker looped back into the life they thought they had left.
This is a modest poem, and some phrases, "dismal rays" and "dreamy haze," are stock. But it earns attention by taking the usual furniture of near-death stories, the light, the calling voice, the corridor, and putting the surprise after them. The last line is a fragment with no verb, and it never says whether the speaker has been revived, reborn, or only woken from a dream. That leaves the reader in-between, where the speaker began, with a question to argue over: is the life they find a gift, or something they were better off forgetting?