Raleigh answers his own opening question in ten lines, and the answer is a theatre. "What is our life? A play of passion." Everything after that is stagecraft: dressing rooms, an audience, curtains, a final exit. The poem works because it keeps the metaphor going without a slip, and because its last line turns on it.
The theatrical details are precise. A "tiring-house" was the actors' dressing room, its name a shortened form of "attire-house," and Raleigh puts it in an unexpected place: "Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be, / Where we are dressed for this short comedy." Birth becomes a costume fitting. The body is something we are dressed in for a role we did not choose, and the word "short" tells us the performance will not run long. Heaven, meanwhile, sits in the audience as a "judicious sharp spectator," a critic who "marks still who doth act amiss." "Still" here means "always," so the review never stops. "Amiss" suits the metaphor well, since it can mean both a moral failing and a bad performance, and the poem lets the two overlap. Behaving badly and acting badly become the same offence.
The second line is the most layered. "Our mirth the music of division" plays on a word with several meanings. "Division" was a musical term for a run of quick, broken-up notes, and it also means separation and discord. Even our happiness, Raleigh suggests, is fragmentary, a flurry of notes that does not add up to harmony. This is a quiet note of unease in a poem that otherwise sounds light.
The sound of the poem helps with that lightness. It is written in rhyming couplets (*be/comedy*, *is/amiss*, *sun/done*, *rest/jest*), and each pair closes with a small click, like a stage direction. The opening couplet is a little shorter and ends on soft, feminine rhymes, *passion* and *division*. After that the lines settle into a steady ten-syllable pace, easy to read aloud and a little sing-song, as if the poem were performing the casual tone it describes. The tidiness is a deliberate setup.
The imagery of endings sharpens as the poem closes. Graves "hide us from the setting sun / Are like drawn curtains when the play is done." Two images are folded together here. The sun going down is the end of a day, and the curtain closing is the end of a show. Both are ordinary, repeating events, and for a moment death seems just as ordinary and almost gentle. The next line adds to that feeling: "Thus we march, playing, to our latest rest" would be the poem's most peaceful moment, with death as a "rest" and the whole of life a procession of players walking off together.
Then comes the last line, which breaks the pattern: "Only we die in earnest, that's no jest." The word "only" acts as the hinge. Everything before it was play, and now one thing is not. The rhyme of *rest* with *jest* shows the collision, because the peaceful word and the joking word are tied together just as the poem refuses the joke. "Earnest" and "jest" are opposites, and the blunt, nearly all-monosyllabic ending leaves no room for decoration. An actor can leave the stage and return, but we cannot. The "comedy" of the earlier line, which first sounds like a mild word, becomes bitterly ironic, since this is a comedy with a death in it that no one is acting.
The poem belongs to a very old habit of imagining the world as a stage, a comparison that was common in Raleigh's English-speaking world, and Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" is its best-known version. What makes Raleigh's treatment worth reading is its compression and its reversal. In ten lines he builds the comparison out thoroughly, with dressing room, critic, and curtain, and then uses the last line to say where it fails. Metaphor can make life seem like a performance, but it cannot make death one. The reader leaves with an uncomfortable idea: we can treat everything as a game except the one thing we cannot rehearse or repeat.