Loading essays…
Craft essay · Beginnings
An editorial look at how opening lines work — what they promise the reader, and what makes them earn the line that follows.
By Poets of The Household5 min read
Robert Penn Warren is often quoted as saying that the great battle of the poem is won or lost in the first line, or in the first five lines anyway. The phrasing is overstated — many strong poems have unremarkable openings and arrive — but the underlying observation is durable. The first line of a poem is the only line a reader has not yet decided to read. Everything after it is built on a decision the opening provoked.
The editor's bias here is toward openings that do two jobs at once: they set the poem's terms, and they create a small tension that the next line has to resolve or extend. A first line that only sets the terms can feel like throat-clearing; a first line that only creates tension can feel like a magician's reveal without the rest of the trick. The lines that earn the second are usually the ones doing both.
Ted Kooser, in The Poetry Home Repair Manual, writes that titles and first lines represent the hand a poet extends to a reader. The metaphor is exact: the reader takes the hand or does not. Once the hand is taken, the reader has agreed to a small set of conditions — a register, a pace, a kind of attention. The next line either honours those conditions or breaks them deliberately. Either move can succeed; what tends not to succeed is a second line that ignores the first.
Consider Seamus Heaney's "Digging," the opening poem of Death of a Naturalist (1966):
> Between my finger and my thumb > The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
The first line is almost flat: a body part, a body part, a position. The line is doing one thing — locating the speaker's hand on the page — and it does that thing well enough that the reader is willing to wait. The second line earns the first by completing what the first proposed: the pen, the simile that puts the whole poem's tension (writing vs. labour, peace vs. violence) on the table in five words. Snug as a gun is famous, but it would not work without the unhurried setup it follows.
Compare an opening like Emily Dickinson's "Hope" is the thing with feathers. The first line is a complete metaphorical claim. The work for the second line is different: not to complete a setup but to extend an image. That perches in the soul — and the bird, already named, finds a place. Each kind of opening creates a different obligation, and many poets find that knowing which obligation is in play is more useful than choosing one in advance.
The lines that work tend, in this editor's reading, to do one or more of the following. None is a rule.
Many of the openings most often anthologised do at least three of these at once, which is why they survive several decades of rereading.
A common trade-off in workshop drafts is between atmosphere and movement. An opening like "It was a grey morning in October" sets a tone (grey, slow) but does not locate the speaker, plant a question, or establish a music more specific than prose. The second line has nothing particular to honour. Many poets find that this is the most common edit a workshop will suggest: cut the first line, see whether the second line can stand on its own.
The opposite failure is the first line that tries to do everything. A first line that locates the speaker, sets the tone, asks a question, and establishes a meter is sometimes load-bearing in a way that crushes the lines that follow. The poem has nowhere to go. The editor's bias here is toward openings that leave the poem one or two moves to make, not all of them.
A subtler point: a strong first line is usually one that does not duplicate the title. If the title is "Snow" and the first line is "It is snowing", the title is doing nothing the line is not. If the title is "Snow" and the first line is "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests", the title is reframing the line — Snow is now a metaphor or a memory the speaker is approaching by the long way. Many editors read the title and the first line as a unit; a strong opening is often one where the unit does work the line alone could not.
This essay is not arguing that openings have to be striking. Some of the most-loved poems in English open quietly. "Whose woods these are I think I know" is one. "Let us go then, you and I" is another. The point is not loudness but earning: the first line creates an obligation the second line meets. Whether the obligation is dramatic or quiet is the poem's own business.
A final note. Many poets find that the first line is the line most likely to change in revision, sometimes several drafts in. Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" went through seventeen drafts at Vassar; the first line was the line that arrived first, and several others — including the famous parenthetical (Write it!) — arrived late. That ordering is more common than not. A working first line is often a discovery, not a decision.
Take a draft you have set aside. Write three new first lines for it — one that locates the speaker, one that plants a question, one that establishes a music the poem can keep or break. Read the second line aloud after each. Keep the one the second line earns.
A working essay on first-line strategies aimed at poets in revision; useful for the contract-and-tension reading the essay above develops.
The full text of Heaney's poem from Death of a Naturalist (Faber & Faber, 1966); the opening discussed above is on the page in context.
Kooser's chapter on titles and first lines is the source for the hand-extended-in-friendship reading the essay quotes.
Annotated facsimile drafts of Bishop's villanelle, drawn from the Vassar archive; useful evidence for the late-arriving-first-line pattern the essay names.