[Tim Blighton]

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

Originally posted by Janet Kenny:


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

[B.J. Preston]

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).]

[Chris Childers]

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

[Gregory Dowling]

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

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Gregory Dowling]

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).

[Marilyn Taylor]

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

[Gregory Dowling]

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

[Rose Kelleher]

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.

[RCL]

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