The end of The House at Pooh Corner is deeply sad. Milne’s vision is humane and generous to both the stuffed animal and the young man, but it is also unflinching. Innocence is always innocence and growth is anything but. Pooh is a childish thing and must be put away, but Milne makes it clear that this is not a weakness or indictment of Pooh. Milne manages to have Christopher Robin prepare to leave Pooh without devaluing their relationship. The House at Pooh Corner ends with a sly meditation on growing up that is both structurally surprising and so deftly handled that it never takes away from the other adventures contained in the novel. The fact that this recognition of time comes suddenly at the end of a book that is, in many ways, about timelessness, is what makes the ending so smart and so devastating. The fact that Christopher Robin has no choice but to change is the subtext to the chapter and the tragedy at the core of the book. The boy is leaving the bear, despite assurances that they’ll still be together when they are 99 and 100 respectively. When Christopher Robin insists nothing will change between he and Pooh, readers know this is not the case. This is it! Christopher Robin is saying goodbye to childhood, while Pooh, his imaginary childhood friend, faces mortality in the form of indifference. It’s called “Chapter Ten, In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place and We Leave Them There.” Already, if you have any soul at all, that last part is a gut-punch.

The Pooh books consist of comically long chapter titles and the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner is no exception. And the end of House at Pooh Corner, one of the most devastatingly perfect endings ever put to paper, is all the more striking for that fact. Pooh was not intended to be intellectual property, a protagonist on an endless series of profitable “expositions.” The House at Pooh Corner was supposed to be the end of it.

Though Pooh makes cameos in Milne’s books When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, the twin volumes Winnie-the-Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner comprise basically the entirety of the Pooh canon.

Winnie-the-Pooh is so ubiquitous and beloved it’s easy to forget that there are only two canonical Pooh novels by A.A.

Book the house at pooh corner