Catalog structure
The poem is one long sentence listing different kinds of endings, each introduced with 'Or.' Dickinson builds from trivial to cosmic—watch the scale shift.
Garret games
Garrets are attic rooms where children play. She's starting with childhood endings—when playtime stops, when holidays end.
Death euphemism
'Parting with a world / We have understood' is Dickinson's code for dying. The next world will be 'unfurled'—revealed like a flag or scroll we can't read yet.
Reading Notes
The Solemn Grammar of Endings
The opening word 'THAT' points backward to something unspoken—an ending we're meant to supply ourselves. Dickinson doesn't tell us what ended; instead, she insists 'That is solemn we have ended'—the solemnity comes from the fact of ending itself, not from what ended.
The poem's structure mirrors its theme. It's a single eight-line sentence that keeps postponing its conclusion with 'Or... Or... Or.' Each 'or' adds another type of ending: a play, a children's game, a holiday, leaving home, and finally death. The catalog moves from trivial to terminal—from a play ending to life ending—but Dickinson treats them with equal grammatical weight. The syntax suggests all endings share the same essential quality: they're solemn because they're over.
The phrase 'for better / Still it be unfurled' is deliberately ambiguous. 'Still' can mean 'nevertheless' (despite our understanding, the next world will be revealed) or 'motionless' (it remains furled, rolled up, unreadable). Dickinson leaves both meanings active. The world to come is either a promise or a mystery—possibly both.
Dickinson's Ending Obsession
CONTEXT Dickinson wrote obsessively about thresholds and transitions. She rarely left her house after age 30, but her poems catalog every kind of departure: guests leaving, seasons changing, consciousness fading, death arriving. This poem, likely written in the early 1860s during her most productive period, treats ending as a category of experience.
Notice what she doesn't do: she doesn't comfort, doesn't promise reunion, doesn't soften death with religious certainty. The final lines acknowledge we've 'understood' this world—past tense, finished—but the next remains 'unfurled,' a word that suggests both revelation (a flag unfurling) and continued concealment (still rolled up). For a poet often labeled as Christian, Dickinson offers remarkably little assurance about what comes after.
The poem's power comes from its emotional flatness. There's no grief here, no fear, just the simple observation that endings are solemn. Whether it's a child's game or a human life, the structure is the same: something was, now it isn't. Dickinson states this as fact, not tragedy.