Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin is one of the most prominent Russian poets of the 20th century. Many various leitmotifs appeared in his poetry, and one of the most noteworthy ones is the leitmotif of death, as well as it appears to be in all other forms of art. Lexical items denoting the semantic field of death can be found in all of Yesenin's poetic phases. Hence, the primary goal of this paper is to determine the main features of each phase from linguistic and stylisticpoint of view, based on the lexical items Yesenin used to signify the semantic field of death. Some of the elements which are regarded as the main features of a phase are the most frequently used parts of speech, the context in which each word is used, how many times the same word is repeated, etc. When it comes to Yesenin's poetic phases, an overall conclusion for all the phases can be made on the basis of an individual phase research. The first phase is dominated by nouns (especially death and grave), but their frequency lowers as the years pass. At the time of the third and the fourth stage, Yesenin starts to increase the use of verbs (especially die). The last – fifth – phase is characterized by the highest use of verbs, without neglecting a frequentuse of nouns again. During the entire creation period, Yesenin used adjectives much less than nouns and verbs to denote death. The main and favourite topics of Yesenin's poetry were nature and the Russian countryside and it is where he found a way to use the motif of death and to express it by various lexical items. It can be concluded that those lexical items denoting deathwere used to a large degree in all the phases, but especially in the last years of Yesenin's work. In the end, it can be safely said that death played a great role in Yesenin's poetry and found a very special place among his verses.