Hi David,
My good friend, excellent poet and writing tutor,
Alison Chisholm, gave me this great piece of advice at one of her workshops:
Never end a line with a "weak'' word... there are lots of them, but things like
it, and, the don't move the poem on, and as Ralph and Susan said, the end words of each line play a very important part; don't waste that with a nondescript word.
I don't write free verse ... often there's just one word on a line, which I find pretentious (and pointless), so the first thing I tend to do is skim down the last words on each line of a poem I'm about to read, to get the gist of it; Dick Davis's comment, that Susan quoted, sums it up well, that ''the words at the ends of the lines should encapsulate the poem''.
Jayne