Hi, everybody--

I found myself flipping through some Robert Frost today--the semester is over and I can indulge myself-- and I re-read "Birches." It confirmed a suspicion I've harbored for a long time that I've never really articulated till now: I hate that last line. It's a very fine poem, of course-- but I honestly think that as a way to end it, one could do a whole lot better than be a swinger of birches. Way too cute for me. Strange verb usage, too.

This made me think of how effectively or ineffectively other well-known poems end. Some, I think, do so magnificently (e.g. "The Second Coming") while others tend to flop (maybe Sharon Olds's "Topography." I have never found it funny, which I think was her intention.)

Does anyone have any their own personal candidates for winners and losers in the "endings" department? Naturally this will depend heavily upon the sensitibilties of the individual reader, but I think it might be interesting to talk about them.

Marilyn

PS-- Many of you probably know that here's a wonderful book on this subject by Barbara Herrnstein Smith called POETIC CLOSURE: A STUDY OF HOW POEMS END (U of Chicago P, 1968-- unfortunately out of print, but libraries should have it.)

Marilyn,

Whatever about the ending, I always thought “Birches” one of Frost’s less satisfactory poems

Strong endings are not always appropriate, of course, but “Dulce et Decorum Est” was one of the poems that turned me on to poetry many years ago, and I still love the ending, the way the Latin slots neatly into the meter.


My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Philip Larkin has some great endings, such as this, from “The Whitsun Weddings”:

……………………..We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Or the beautifully fudged ending to “An Arundel Tomb”

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

And Frost? The wonderful ending to “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

As for dull or so-so endings - a rather large proportion of villanelles and sestinas. But nothing else much springs to mind, as you would expect with dull endings.

Apologies, Marilyn, I got your name wrong. I shall change it as soon as my posting appear on my browser, as I have problems
with delayed appearances of postings on Eratosphere.

Well, most of Dorothy Parker's poems rely on the stinging last line. "Resume" and "Unfortunate Coincidence" come to mind. Her last lines reward the reader, which makes a successful end.

The book, Poetic Closure, was apparently reissued in 1971 under the name Barbara H. Smith. A few copies are available at Amazon Marketplace for about $27 and up.

I found an excerpt here: http://home.comcast.net/~barbarajdaniels/Closure.htm

Toni

oops -- I guess that's not really an excerpt!

[This message has been edited by Toni Clark (edited May 17, 2006).]

Last lines are certainly an interesting subject.

The last line of many light-hearted poems is what makes the whole poem work. For example:

Rainbow

When you see
de rainbow
you know
God know
wha he doing -
one big smile
across the sky -
I tell you
God got style
the man got style

When you see
raincloud pass
and de rainbow
make a show
I tell you
is God doing
limbo
the man doing
limbo

But sometimes
you know
when I see
de rainbow
so full of glow
and curving
like she bearing child
I does want know
if God
ain’t a woman

If that is so
the woman got style
man she got style

John Agard, 1989

On the other end of the spectrum, elegiac poetry also often has a last line that comes as a shock. In A. E. Stallings' recent collection, Hapax, there's a lovely poem called "Visiting the Grave of Rupert Brooke" in which she retells the story of how Odysseus snared Achilles, who was dressed up as a girl, by putting a sword among gifts he'd laid out for the girls. She ends with: "But only old men made it home from Troy."

I think the last line often needs to be dramatic when a poem is especially light-hearted or especially elegiac. Otherwise, an overly dramatic last line is often too out of place. But it always has to give closure and/or take you back to the start of the poem again.

This is probably all very banal, but I wanted to chime in: last lines are what it's all about.

Duncan

Duncan, that Agard poem is wonderful. Took the top of my head off, and I don't know a single thing about the poet, John Agar. Thank you for that post.

And Larkin-- yes! Parker, yes! And I look forward to reading Alicia's poem about Troy.

Toni-- just want to quickly point out what you probably already know: the excerpt you provide a link to is not actually from Barbara H Smith, it's from a Barbara J Daniels-- who took most of Smith's categories and distilled them a bit. She acknowledges Smith, of course. But I do think Smith's approach to these "ways of closure", which involves backing up each one with examples and all kinds of interesting historical and linguistic reasons why-- are worth spending time with.

More soon; miles to go, etc.--

Marilyn

PS-- Oliver, I think you got my name right, didn't you? I don't see any error at all.

Just personally, I often write the last line of a poem first and build the rest around it. I hope this is not too obvious in the finished product!

No great endings come to mind at the moment, but one of my favorite OPENINGS is by Housman:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

...I am not always sure that the "land of lost content" lives up to that beginning, but what would, after that initial chill?

<u>Strong Endings</u>

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


<u>Dull Endings</u>

433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.

Michael,

i like this strong ending example. What poem is it from?
~tim

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

Janet,

i apologize for the delay in response. Thank you very much for the information. i will have to take my next 'nook break' with Mr. Eliot.
~tim

Thanks for this topic, Marilyn – a good one to visit (and re-visit), and some very good examples have been posted already in the thread. A number of old ‘Musing’ threads do come back from a search for ‘poem endings’, btw, though only a couple seemed to address the issue in detail. This thread , started by Fred Longworth in 3/04, mentions the Smith book and contains a link to a similar discussion thread at sonnet central.

And in this thread , from the Blurbs of Wisdom section of PFFA, comment #18 provides a list of “endgame strategies” such as substitution, similarity, contrast, recommencement, involvement, departure, disinterest, and denial. (I’m not sure if these were gleaned by the poster or are taken from some other source.)

I had written up some thoughts after reading a couple of John Burnside’s books last summer that I ultimately never posted, including several examples of beginnings and endings I felt were particularly good. Some openings that made me want to read more (all Burnside , just to add another contemporary writer to the mix):

We measure things for years: our schoolroom walls,
the growth of plants, lost energy, shed skins.

* * * * *
This is the myth we choose to do without;

* * * * *
Each day the evening was smaller;

* * * * *
It takes us years to understand
the colours of perpetual return:

* * * * *
From a distance
………they only missed
what they never saw:

* * * * *
There was something I wanted to find,
coming home late in the dark, my fingers
studded with clay,
oak flowers caught in my hair, the folds of my jacket
busy with aphids.

* * * * *
Because what we think of as home
is a hazard to others


And closings (harder to find economical examples here, as he’s not a poet inclined to ‘punch-lines’):

* * * * *
and somewhere behind it all
………the children they were
sailing through the dark
………on winter nights
to needle-falls and cream
………and the blood-fruit they prized
above all others:
………crimson
mythical.

* * * * *

those promised letters, cleaner and more precise
than any we ever received, in days gone by,

still in the hold, like birds, or the quiet folds
of bridal dresses, sail cloth, reams of salt.

* * * * *
the pull of the withheld
………………………….. the foreign joy
I tasted that one afternoon
………………………….. and left behind
when I made my way back down the hill
with the known world about me.

* * * * *
For the sign I have waited to see
is happening now
and always, in the white continuum
of frost and spawn:
the blood in a tangle of thorns
where it stiffens and pales,
the hard bud splitting through the ice
and the nailed palm healing.


All very visual endings, save one. Sometimes in bookstores I will read the first few/last few lines of several poems by a poet I’m unfamiliar with to get a sense of whether or not I might like to read more. This strategy is undoubtedly unfair to some writers, but it does give a sense of how someone works (sometimes better than simply reading a few poems in their entirety, though I do that as well).

One method that seems in vogue recently (though it’s certainly not new), particularly in prose poems, is the ‘close-before-the-close’: the last lines functioning almost as a cinematic fade-out/denouement following an earlier, embedded, revelatory ‘ending’. I vacillate on Auden’s Funeral Blues , at times feeling its true ending is line 12, at others feeling the summing up in S4 properly nails it down.




[This message has been edited by B.J. Preston (edited May 27, 2006).]

The thread of Fred Longworth's B.J. links to I think took its impetus from the one I was remembering, in which Clive was quoting from "The Auroras of Autumn." In any event, looking back through it I noticed I posted the end of "Little Gidding," which forgetfully I was about to do again. This time I will only quote the last line, which goes:

"And the fire and the rose are one."

This line, it has been pointed out to me, has 26 letters, obviously the number of the alphabet. It is sustained by the mystical 4/3 structure, ("and the and the" / "fire - rose - one"), the elements and the trinity (It will be recognized that each Quartet represents one element, Air, Earth, Water & Fire). The other word is "are," the "copula of being," as somebody (Coleridge?) called it, which in the scheme of Eliot's poem is like the fifth part which binds together each quartet, or the Empedoclean quintessence, the love/hate duality, which drives the combining and disjoining of the standard four elements. All of these features I consider to be miraculous. Do I have to say I think this is a great ending? I do.

The unity of the fire and the rose represents the mystical fusion of the two most important symbols throughout the poem, from the rose garden at the beginning of Burnt Norton to Little Gidding's "refining fire / where you must move in measure, like a dancer." Throughout we are to understand the influence of Heraclitus, who said, among other things, "The universe is an ever-living flame being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures." But one could talk forever. I'll stop now.

Chris

Thanks, Chris, for a fascinating reading of that last line of Eliot's.

I've been thinking over that much-criticised last line of Frost's - "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches" - and I'd like to see if I can now attempt some kind of defence of it.

There's a great essay by Wilbur, "Poetry and Happiness", which ends with a discussion of this poem. In it he shows how Frost deliberately alludes to two famous lines from Shelley's "Adonais":

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity.

Frost, says Wilbur, is writing an answer to Shelley's poem, which is fired by a "kind of boundless neo-Platonic aspiration". Frost's answer is that "Earth's the right place for love". Wilbur says that "Birches" is a "recommendation of limited aspiration, or high-minded earthliness". You climb toward heaven, but then come back to earth. For this reason the final tone of the poem has to be downbeat, it has to have a tone of New England colloquialism and dry humour. It has to be totally different from Shelley's closure ("The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."). It's as if the poet at the very end, after indulging himself in some very fine lyrical descriptive passages, deliberately puts his hands in his pockets and assumes the role of the homely New-England farmer, parsimonious with words and refusing to promise too much. In the context I would say it works.

Gregory

If that's limited aspiration, I think it's the one that I prefer. The Romantics' aspiration was for death, in effect, which is eternal and unchanging, etc., with or without white radiance. But the Romantics would often then come to their senses and realize that death isn't really the answer they were seeking after all, since it's hard to enjoy eternity and white radiance when the self is gone. Think of Keats' nightingale fancy. The nightingale, like the birches, eventually delivered him back in the human world after giving him a taste of eternity, though Keats, unlike Frost, didn't get all sappy his return to earth -- earth might be the best place for love, but it's also where we find the weariness, the fever and the fret, so Keats wasn't quite satisfied with either his own world or the nightingale's.

But speaking of Keats, what do we think of the way he ends the nightingale or urn odes? I'm used to these endings enough to be satisfied, on the whole, but prefer the non-tendentious way he ends the autumn ode, which is more like the way he ended the grasshopper sonnet, letting the images simply speak for themselves.

Yes, I totally agree. The superb dying fall of "Autumn" is what makes it his most perfect poem - perhaps the most beautiful poem in the language (if I can be allowed a sweeping claim).

Gregory--
I agree with you completely about Keats's "Autumn"-- it's certainly among the most beautiful poems in the language, and I practically swoon whenever I read it. But I still differ with you about "Birches", and what I would call its-- forgive me-- flat-footed ending. Maybe this has to do with my knee-jerk tendency to concern myself with stylistic elements over substantive ones, but I find it jarringly colloquial, a sudden intrusion upon the articulate and somewhat elevated register that has characterized the whole tone of the poem.

Wilbur honestly does not convince me that Frost's decision to have his speaker "deliberately put his hands in his pockets and assume the role of the homely New England farmer"-- was a good one. I find myself wishing he had left me with something a little more memorable, after all that. Nothing fancy or theatrical, but memorable in the way, say, that the close of "Fire and Ice" is memorable; just those three little words: ". . .and should suffice." Wow. Vastly preferable, in my opinion, to the aw-shucks homespun philosophy that ends "Birches." I keep expecting him to add, "by cracky!"

End of pontification--

Marilyn

Marilyn,
Well, I tried... Actually, the bit about Frost putting his hands in his pockets was me, rather than Wilbur. I was extending Wilbur's argument about Frost's conversing with Shelley's "Adonais" and applying it also to the very ending of the poem, which has to be in total contrast with Shelley's aspirational sublime.
"By cracky" is a new one on me. I may adopt it myself.
Gregory

Okay, I hate to cement my reputation as Eratosphere's most prurient member, but since that last line of Frost's has struck other readers as odd or off somehow, I'll say it: "birchings" were once a common form of corporal punishment, and were also (and still are) a turn-on for some people. I've sometimes wondered if Frost, who wrote "Now no joy but lacks salt / That is not dashed with pain," was making a private joke. In some people's eyes it may be unfair to suggest such a thing about someone who's dead and can't "defend" himself - but I don't think of unusual sexual preferences as crimes that need defending against, so the only qualm I feel about it is that it's such a terrible, terrible pun. But it's conceivable that someone who did in fact, er, swing that way, who lived in a time when such things were considered shocking and shameful, would enjoy flirting with danger by slyly not-quite-outing himself. Anyway, crazy or not, it's just a thought.

Well, Rose, your comment makes one wonder what Sidney Cox had in mind in his book, "A Swinger of Birches" (1957). An avant-garde swinger? A switch hitter?

------------------
Ralph

I don't know the book, but it appears to be about Frost, so, uh, I would guess he was quoting the famous Frost poem.

But I know, you're not really asking, you're making fun of my wild, crazy, wacky idea, ha ha. Robert Frost is a revered, canonized poet! He couldn't possibly have been kinky, or have indulged in a little playful innuendo. Heaven forfend.

I'm not saying he was, or that the whole poem is about that (that obviously doesn't work), but I don't see what's so inconceivable about it, either.

I'm afraid I haven't been able to read this whole thread although it interests me greatly. As one who feels close to the musical mind of Frost I'd like to add that I have never read any biograhical information about Frost that doesn't say he was a complex and sometimes unlikeable character. He was obviously a bit contorted psychologically and Rose's suggestion seems absolutely in keeping with the observations of those who knew him well. There is no reason why a great artist can't also be a bit screwed up. It's the unwinding into art that keeps "them" going ;)
Janet

PS: Here are some extracts from a biography on the net. No wonder he was sometimes misunderstood:

"When he sent his poems to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse."
.....
After returning to the US in 1915 with his family, Frost bought a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire. When the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asked for poems, he gave the very ones that had previously been rejected......."

"In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College where he cofounded the Bread Loaf School and Conference of English. His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide. Frost also suffered from depression and the continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature."
......

Although Frost's works were generally praised, the lack of seriousness concerning social and political problems of the 1930s annoyed some more socially orientated critics. Later biographers have created a complex and contradictory portrait of the poet. In Lawrance Thompson's humorless, three-volume official biography (1966-1976) Frost was presented as a misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end..."

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 25, 2006).]

Hi,

I'm suprised no one has mentioned Sylvia Plath, whatever you think of her poetry in general, she certainly came up with humdinger endings....

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises towards her like a terrible fish.

Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over like guests at a christening.

The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

Talking of the end - what about sonnets? My favourite couplet is from Shakespeare's xii -

Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the Winter's near.

What about your own writing - we must have some Spherean killer closes.

cheers

Alan

Marilyn,
I am a fine example of someone who talked without knowing what they were talking about. I had been overwhelmed by "real life" and if I had any sense that would have made me keep my half-baked opinion to myself.

I have just actually READ "Birches" and I think it's wonderful. When I was a child there was a giant macrocarpa tree in a paddock behind our house and the thing I loved most in the world was to swing up and down--as high as I dared, on its supple branches.

I do agree with you that the last line is a sort of cop out. I don't see any connection (this time) to any strange practices. (Australians are used to the composer Percy Grainger and the idea of an artist flagellating himself is rather familiar.) But in this case I don't think any such meaning may be inferred. I think Frost just ran out of inspiration.
Janet
PS: Although, as Marilyn and Rose say, it is a very strange line. Perhaps the jury is still out?

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 27, 2006).]

Hello, I'm back-- after being in absentia for a few days tending to matters non-poetical. I want to quickly thank Janet, in particular, for providing those interesting and contradictory snippets about Frost as private person-- and also for backing me up on my potentially blasphemous disaproval of the ending of "Birches."

Alan, I think you're absolutely correct about Plath (who ate men like air)-- and her endings. Then there's Dorothy Parker-- "you might as well live"; and Wright's "Suddenly I realize / that if I stepped out of my body I woud break / into blossom."-- that's a brilliant break after "break", isn't it? And there are so many more! We could probably continue this thread forever, but perhaps it will behoove us to move on soon.

Marilyn

"We could probably continue this thread forever, but perhaps it will behoove us to move on soon."

Yes, Marilyn, but how do we achieve closure?

Hee hee! Good question, Roger. How about this:

You may think that this is the end--
Well, it is!

(Note: for those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with American pop-culture of the mid-20th century and who might be wondering what I could possibly mean by this-- I have just quoted the closing couplet from a bit of doggerel that some of us sang as kids, to the tune of John Phillip Sousa's rousing "Stars and Stripes Forever":

Be kind to your web-footed friends,
For a duck may be somebody's mother!
He sits all alone in the swamp
Where it's windy, cold and dawmp;
You may think that this is the end--
Well, it is!

Anyway, I think I'll run for closure while I'm ahead. Bye.

Marilyn

Marilyn, I know the thread is over - just wanted to let you know that I love the Swenson poem, Question - it's one of my all-time favorite poems. If you open a thread on Swenson, I'll be there.
Mary

Marilyn,

Am delighted to see that no-one has locked this thread - two pages seem short for this board - before I could put in a plea for Richard Wilbur. His endings are to my mind almost always satisfying and some are delightfully surprising. Think for instance of 'Merlin Enthralled' (won't quote to spoil the surprise for those unfamiliar with the poem) or the later and wonderfully original 'All that is', which in its closing lines returns from the seductively simple black-and-white world of crossword puzzles to the mysteries of real-life evening:

'It is a puzzle which, as puzzles do,
Dreams that there is no puzzle. It is a rite
Of finitude, a picture in whose frame
Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once
Into the ABCs of every day.
A door is rattled shut, a deadbolt thrown.
Under some clipped euonymous, a mushroom,
Bred of an old and deep mycelium
As hidden as the webwork of the world,
Strews on the shifty night-wind, rising now,
A cast of spores as many as the stars.'

Etc, etc, etc!

Margaret



[This message has been edited by Margaret Moore (edited June 22, 2006).]

Inspired by Sam Gwynn's cento, I decided to do one of my own, using only the last lines of famous, often-anthologized poems. I discoved that a high proportion of last lines are themselves about ending (usually death) and that they often have a "dying fall" or a grave, measured pace that gave them a kind of unity when I brought them together. (I, like Gail White, often write the last lines of a poem first, because I love that sense of completion of a line that carries a sense of having been meant to be). The lines in the cento below are not all my favorite last lines, but just lines that worked well together and were all in iambic pentameter.


Last Words: A Cento

For certain years, for certain months and days,
I measure time by how a body sways.
Everything we look upon is blest;
only we die in earnest--that's no jest.

When sleep comes down to seal the weary eyes
and gathering swallows twitter in the skies,
rage, rage against the dying of the light,
but keep that earlier, wilder image bright.

We shall go mad no doubt and die that way,
with the slow smokeless burning of decay,
the grass below--above the vaulted sky.
Last of all last words spoken is goodbye.