The poem reflects on life after the speaker’s hypothetical death. In doing so, the poem acknowledges what it perceives as a universal conceit: that many people think their death will be something like the apocalypse, that is, when they die, the world ends. Others must therefore be prepped on how to proceed without their presence. Though this is an everyday occurrence—someone dying and another surviving them—the speaker makes her potential death a grand agenda and therefore preps the “you” of the poem.

At its most personal level, the “you” referenced is most likely a lover, a close confidant, or even a family member. But there are other less immediately clear audiences that the poet may be addressing, an audience wide enough to include, more than a century and a half after its composition, the reader (despite Dickinson’s studied refusal to pursue publication of her poetry). The “you” might even be the speaker addressing her own essence, her very soul, which is a distinct possibility given the Christian doctrines that Dickinson studied so closely to survive the body’s spiral into mortality. In any event, the premise of the poem is how to handle the reality that individual death robs the world only of that individual life.