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Craft essay · Endings
An editorial reading of endings — the difference between a poem that concludes and a poem that stops, and what makes the last line worth waiting for.
By Poets of The Household4 min read
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (University of Chicago Press, 1968 — the foundational study in English on the question), draws a distinction that has organised the conversation since: there is a difference between concluding and stopping. The ringing of a telephone, the blowing of the wind, the babbling of an infant in its crib, she writes, all stop. A poem or a piece of music concludes. The distinction sounds slight on the page; it is not. Most of the editorial work the last few lines of a poem do is the work of being a conclusion rather than a stop.
The editor's bias here is toward this distinction as the most useful single handle for thinking about endings. A poem that has only stopped tends to leave the reader wondering whether more was supposed to come. A poem that has concluded tends to leave the reader with a sense — sometimes uneasy, sometimes resolved — that the poem has reached the place it was going.
Smith identified a number of techniques poems use to achieve closure. Her categories are technical and worth reading in full, but a few that recur:
Few endings use only one of these. Many of the most-anthologised endings in English use three or four at once.
Philip Larkin's An Arundel Tomb (1956, in The Whitsun Weddings) is one of the most discussed endings in twentieth-century English poetry. The poem describes a medieval stone tomb of an earl and a countess whose hands are joined; it works through the centuries-long erosion of the image, the irrelevance of the dead couple's actual lives, the historical accident of the joined hands, and concludes:
Take a finished poem. Delete the last line and read it aloud. If the new last line stops rather than concludes, write three candidates: one that returns to an earlier element, one that breaks a pattern, one that shifts grammatical register.
The foundational English-language study of poetic closure. The technical categories of closural devices the essay borrows are from Smith's first three chapters.
Full text of Larkin's poem and editorial notes; the source for the worked closural example the essay reads in detail.
Working essay-length reading of the poem and its famous closure; useful evidence for the ambiguity-as-craft argument the essay develops.
Standard reference; the 'Closure', 'Cadence', and 'Maqta' entries are the technical baseline for the kinds of ending the essay discusses across English, Persian, and Urdu traditions.
> Our almost-instinct almost true: > What will survive of us is love.
The final line is famous on its own and is sometimes quoted without the line before it. The line before it is doing most of the work. Almost-instinct, almost true qualifies everything the famous line claims; the poem ends on a sentiment whose own poem has been undermining it for thirty lines. Larkin scribbled at the bottom of one draft, Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years. The closure is fundamentally ambiguous — what the poem says and what the poem allows itself to say sit in tension — and the tension is what makes the ending land.
Many of the endings that age well do this kind of work. The last line is not a single statement; it is a statement complicated by what comes before it. A reader who lifts the last line out of its setting frequently loses what made the last line earn its place.
A non-exhaustive list, named as observations:
The essay is not arguing that every poem needs a strong ending. Some poems are deliberately open-ended; some lyric forms (the haiku, the ghazal couplet, certain kinds of fragment) work precisely by refusing closure. The point is not that poems should close; the point is that most poems close in some way, deliberately or accidentally, and the deliberate closures tend to age better than the accidental ones.
The editor's bias here is, finally, toward endings that the reader will want to return to. Many of the lines most often quoted from English-language poetry are last lines; many of the lines most often quoted from the Persian and Urdu ghazal traditions are the closing couplets (the maqta); many of the lines most often recited from marsiyas are the final musaddas before the salām. The ending is the line the reader takes away. That is a small craft observation, not a rule. But it has been true for as long as poems have been written down.