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.
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