O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?


Marilyn, I'm pretty sure we've done this topic before as well, but the only thing I remember is Clive quoting section ends from The Auroras of Autumn, and I can't find the thread. Anyway, I'm sure it was instructive the first time and it will be again. So many topics are inexhaustible.

Chris

[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited May 18, 2006).]

Tim,
This is the poem which turned me onto poetry.
The Hollow Men, by T. S. Eliot
Janet

My all time favorite ending is from Larkin's "Aubade" And, as others have mentioned, a Larkin ending rarely disappoints.

"Postmen go like doctors from house to house."

But I think you need the rest of the poem to really feel it.

As far as disappointing endings, Tintern Abbey always ends flat for me:

"Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!"

Actually, all the stuff to his sister is kind of blah after the fireworks of the middle of the poem.

End with a good image, and it's a good ending. End with a prescription, and you're in trouble.

Speaking of which, as far as good, there's always Wordsworth's worthy friend:

Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

-Dan

-Dan

Some terrific examples of closure, so far! Somehow it doesn't surprise me, Chris, that this topic has surfaced before; even so, I think you're right, the subject does seem inexhaustible.

It might be interesting to include in this thread some irresistible OPENING lines, as well, i.e. lines that I've heard referred to as "grabbers." A few of my favorites:

"Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All". . . (Jarrell)
Also: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes". . . (Dickinson, as if you didn't know)
Also: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones". . .(Roethke)

But there are so many! Probably too many for a coherent discussion, really-- but what the heck.

Marilyn

del.

[This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited May 28, 2006).]

Glad you liked the Agard poem, Marilyn. Actually, this isn't simply a humorous poem and a humorous ending, and it makes me think that good endings often have an ambivalence about them which gives the effect of an open ending.

In Douglas Dunn's poem "A Removal from Terry Street" (from Terry Street, 1969) a man moving house takes a lawnmower away with him, and the narrator ponders over the fact that there are no lawns on Terry Street. The poem ends:

"That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass."

The critic, Ian Gregson writes: "the longing for grass in 'A Removal from Terry Street' is understood and endorsed".

- "'There are many worlds': The 'Dialogic' in Terry Street and After", in Crawford, Robert & Kinloch, David (Eds.), Reading Douglas Dunn (Edinburgh 1992), p.29

But this isn't the whole story. The longing is certainly EXPRESSED, but not necessarily "understood and endorsed".

Dunn himself writes:

"The last line of the poem is intended as ironic. That man, and his lawnmower, setting off for a new place, perhaps a better place, and perhaps some grass for him to look after, moved me; and yet I also saw this vignette as an image of vanity, of that man's touching faith in progress, and of my own unjustifiable cynicism in an environment which perfectly embodied the shame and wormwood of British society."

- King, P.R., "Three New Poets: Douglas Dunn, Tom Paulin, Paul Miles", Nine Contem¬porary Poets, (London 1979), p. 224

Thus we can see that "I wish him grass" is a subjective jump from the material presence of the lawnmower, a conceit. And Dunn is LAUGHING at the item's incongruity. A trace of the reduced laughter can be seen in the double "h" of "wish him", i.e. "hee, hee".

Duncan

[This message has been edited by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin (edited May 18, 2006).]

Here's another one I love from Yeats, the poem is "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz."

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The ignorant and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch,
And should the conflagration climb
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built;
They convicted us of guilt.
Bid me strike a match and blow.

The early rhyme of "match / catch" and the double repetition of "strike" sound like abortive scratches on the lighter-pad-thing (whatever it's called), but then when they come back at the end you feel the spark has been struck; finally, though, as it ends in the wide open sound of "blow," we wonder: do we see a fireball jumping off the tip of the match-stick and consuming the fabric of time, or is the light merely extinguished? This seems like such a good ending to me I actually find it difficult to say to my satisfaction.

How about this one, from early Wilbur. "For the New Railway Station in Rome":

What is our praise or pride,
But to imagine excellence and try to make it?
What does it say over the door of heaven
But homo fecit?

The final rhyme is so brilliant, and the idea sends the poem exploding in your head, or at least it does mine. Among many other poems of Wilbur's, I love the conclusion to "Advice to a Prophet," how, after rising height of vatic utterance not unworthy of Horace it snaps shut as it were irrevocably with three voiced sibillants -- "When the bronze annals of the oak tree close." The rhythm, too, gives the sense of snapping shut, with the pyrrhic-spondee beginning and then the three strong monosyllables at the end.

Since I mentioned Horace, why not quote him too. The ending of Ode 3.5 is widely regarded as one of his best. The poem starts off lamenting that the Roman soldiers who were defeated under Crassus have settled down and intermarried with the Parthian victors; Horace says this wouldn't have happened in Regulus' day, during the first Punic war, when Regulus, under pain of death by horrible torture (his eyelids ripped off, buried up to the neck in sand, covered with honey and set upon by flies, if my memory serves, which it may not) nevertheless disobeyed his captors and counseled the Senate not to make a treaty, but to continue fighting. He stoically refuses the kisses of his wife and children, and, "an outstanding exile," hurries off to his death ("egregius properaret exsul"). The poem ends as follows (Apologies for my rough translation):

Atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus
tortor pararet; non aliter tamen
dimovit obstantis propinquos
et populum reditus morantem

quam si clientum longa negotia
diiudicata lite relinqueret,
tendens Venefranos in agros
aut Lacedaimonium Tarentum.

"Of course he knew what torture the barbarians
had ready for him; nevertheless,
he parted and passed through the relatives blocking his way
and the commonfolk trying to delay his return

just as if he were leaving behind
the long business of his clients, their disputes settled,
for a vacation in the fields of Venafrum
or Spartan-founded Tarentum."

As for great beginnings, the first thing that occurs to me is the first ode of the same book, 3.1. The voice has such a deep and powerful resonance it gives me goose-bumps every time, and the words are so inevitably put together it seems impossible the poem could have ever not existed. It has everything to do with the Aeolic stanza, which seems to me used here to nearly miraculous effect. I can say the Latin but can't describe it at all.

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo;
favete linguis. carmina non prius
audita Musarum sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto.

After consideration, I've decided to obey the poet and not attempt a translation. It would fall unbelievably flat and no one would be impressed. Every time I say it, though, I feel like High Priest of Awesomeness.

Chris

Marilyn,

I know what you mean about "Birches" but it seems a pity to talk about a subject like this and only quote that poem by Frost. Here are a few other endings from poems by him (and I see now that Oliver did mention "Stopping by Woods"):

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

With the slow smokeless burning of decay

I might have, but it doesn’t seem as if.

Nothing gold can stay.

The aim was song – the wind could see.

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

So love will take between the hands a face…

What but design of darkness to appall? –
If design govern in a thing so small.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

All revelation has been ours.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Just coming back to this thread - particularly to thank Chris for those great endings by Yeats and Wilbur. Wilbur is particularly rich in splendid finales; here's another one that uses a foreign language to brilliant effect ("Part of a letter"):

A girl had gold on her tongue, and gave this answer:
Ca, c'est l'acacia.

And this is "A Problem from Milton":

Envy the gorgeous gallops of the sea,
Whose horses never know their lunar reins.

And how about "All These Birds", where he uses the most hackneyed of all rhymes to wonderful effect?

Come, stranger, sister, dove:
Put on the reins of love.

But if I had to judge the most powerful and resonant endings in 20th-century poetry, it would be a toss-up between Bishop's "At the Fish-Houses" and Stevens' "Sunday Morning".

But to conclude, here's a killer-diller last line from the twenty-first century (by Joshua Mehigan):

Wish is the word that sounds like what wind means.

Greg, nice to hear your dulcet voice! And rest assured that I couldn't agree with you more about Frost's inordinate skill with closure. That's why the ending of "Birches" disappoints me even more than it otherwise would; it's-- what?-- beneath him, or something.

Wilbur, yes indeed. And May Swenson. The ending of her poem "Question" renders me speechless, and still more speechless (??) now that she has died (1989). I can't resist posting the whole thing, in case there is anyone out there who does not know this poem:

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?


Come to think of it, the opening and the middle seem just as strong to me as the close. Why, I wonder, don't people talk more about Swenson? Shall I open a new topic on her? I think I will, unless she has been discussed recently. Has she?

Marilyn