Henry Scott Holland

Henry Scott Holland was not a poet at all: he was Canon of St Paul's Cathedral and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. In May 1910, while King Edward VII lay in state, he preached a sermon called "Death the King of Terrors" — and one passage from it, imagining a beloved voice saying that death "is nothing at all... I have only slipped away into the next room," escaped into the world on its own.

Arranged as verse, "Death Is Nothing at All" became one of the most-read funeral texts in English. The irony is that Holland's sermon presents that serene voice as only one mood of grief — the other being raw, inconsolable loss — and argues that faith must hold both. The excerpt comforts millions anyway.