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
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