END OF G POEM

Aims and Objectives

Introducfion
Lyrical poetry : form related to length
Rounded ending
Open ending
Ending : the role of 'torie'
Ending : its importance and its effect
Summing up
Activities : aids to answers
'Additionai Readings for Block 4
1
I

4.C AIMS AND OBJECTI-S

unit discusses the question of where and how to end a poem. You will learn that
t t ( ending should spell a 'natural' culmination, unless otherwise intended;
a1poetry, form is related to length thereby suggesting where to end the poem;
m can have a rounded ending through the repetition of the opening line (or
through the summing up of the theme, attitude or experience projected on

em can have an open ending; i.e., the poem, wfiile about to wind up, opens a
indow or a fresh vista;
lays an important role in the ending of a poem;
is itnportant to the realisation of its effect by the pcprn,
this Unit, the last in the Block on 'Structure', you should be able to
poem in such a way that it has an appropriate &ginning, the theme
the poem proceeds, there is a moment when t6e central issue is recognised
ional response is greatest, and finally, the poem ends fulfilling the promise

4.1 INTRODUCTION
-
nee', (see Unit 1'Where to begin') in a brewing poem happens to be
ity of the final line (i.e., seems the natural culmination of
utlined in your mind), then the problem of how t o end is
lved. Your problem then would be the rest of the body of the poem,
end. Such a line appears to be the one, 'A terrible beauty is born', in Yeats's
r 1916'. Reading it, o$e cab see that this line occurred to Yeats before the rest of
is is further proved by Yeats's letter to Lady Gregorv, written earlier
'I am trying to write a pmm on the man executed -a terrible beauty
gain'. Of the four sections of the poem, Yeats ends three, including the
uoted. The movement in each section converges on the same point,
which ordinary men and women resign their part 'in casual comedy'

It to say how often it happens that a poet gets the ending first into his head.
,it is not always as easy to locate it as in this poem by Yeats. In most cases,
ell ojl its way before the question of how to end occurs. The painters -Van
icasso, for example -have spoken of how the whole picture had been in
efore they started painting, by which they meant the primary vision, not the
finally appeared on the canvas. This applies to poetry too. A poem is not
phrodite in the clatsical myth, full-grown. It grows, and, as it does so, the
the question of where to end and how. Partly, it is a question of form. The
he point at which you end a poem determines its form. Of course a poet
g in a given genre, ode or sonnet, for example. In such a case he would be
 working within well-defined limits. The sonnet form would settle the question of where
to end, but how to end would still remain an open question.
Traditional forms, however, are rarely used today, but the question of form still remains
alive and is relevant even when you are writing free verse. No poem can be amorphous.
However bizarre its theme, it cannot be bizarre in form. The old Aristotelian concept
of structure -a beginning, a middle and end -is still not, obsolete. Of course, each
poem can be said to have a form which is in a sense dictated by the requirements of the
poem itself. This would mean that you as a poet sense the direction a poem is taking and
guide it to a natural culmination. The 'natural culmination', as I would try to show later,
admits of considerable variation.

4.2 LYRICAL POETRY :FORM RELATED TO LENGTH

In lyrical poetry, ihich is what most contemporary poetry is, form is related to length,
that is to say, the final form of a poem partly depends on how long or how short the
poem is. When you consider where to end, you will have to think of what length you
want your poem to carry. The length would, of course, depend on a number of factors,
the intensity of the inspiration behind the poem, the number of associated images that
may c cur to the mind, the tone and the theme, the flexibility of the line adopted and
so on. In any case, length would count and, to an extend decide, the question of where
to end. Take, for example, the poem by Emily Dickinson quoted in the Unit on 'Where
to begin'. It proceeds through tense phrases that are statements of a frame of mind,
each enforced by a relevant image. Do you think a poem with this technique could be
made much lengthier? Perhaps not.
Theme, technique, the total vision, the responses one is able to evoke from language,
all determine at what point a poem should terminate. All these can be subsumed under
what may be called poetic discretion and this throws you back on your own judgement.
You have to ask of yourself the question whether or not a poem is sufficiently advanced
to embody whatever you have wished to embody -an experience, a mood, a feeling,
an observation, a truth -and whether taking it further would help or hinder its effect.

4.3 ROUNDED ENDING

Turning to particulars, one way of ending a poem is to repeat the opening line or lines.
This makes the poem contained and gives the reader a feeling of having arrived. Often
the repeated linenines acquire a new dimension, the result of the reader havingpassed
through the middle of the poem. Wilfred Gibson's poem quoted in the earlier lesson
('Where to begin, and how',) is an example. 'Blake in 'The Tiger' repeats the opening
stanza at the end with onlybne word altered. The stanza, you will see, emerges into new
light. Let us look at a brief poem by William Carlos Williams called 'The Dance' which
uses a similar technique. The poem depicts in words a painting by a Flemish artist,
Pieter Breughel, representing a local Dutch dance at a church fair, called the Kermess:

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, ... swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

The same line at the beginning and at the end hasthe effect of having the picture
framed.
All these are rounded endings and the poems, in their formal aspect, can be called
34 closed poems. Another such ending is the one that sums up the theme, or attitude, or
experience of the poem. Sharat Chandra in his poem 'A Hindu Returns.' (Two Decades
of Indian Poetry, ed. Keki N. Daruwalla) speaks of how the returning Hindu is put
through rites of purification, and ends the poem with a summing up in the last two lines,

You're back in the caste game \

son of India.
See also the'concl~din~
last lines of Dilip Chitre's 'Poem in Self-Exile'. You will
remember that Keats sums up his well known 'Grecian Urn' ode in the last lines,

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

It's all ye know on and all ye need to know.
In this case, however, as has been noted, the summing a p borders on a cliche but adds
t o the reader's experience of the poem. Emily Dickinson's ending in the poem already
mentioned, 'After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling comes.. .... is in the same category, and
the last line is so vivid that it illumines the whole poem in retrospect.

Pctivity 1
Read the following poem by Robert Herrick (1648)

I Upon Ben Jonson

Here lies Jonson with the rest

of the poets; but the best.
Reader, would'st thou more have known?
Ask his story, not this stone.
That will speak that this can't tell
of his glory. So farewell.

) Comment, in 50 words, upon the rounded ending.

) Attempt an open ending.
$ e c k your answers with the hints given.at the end of this Unit)

4$1C OPEN ENDING

t this contrasted is what might be called the open ending in which the poet,
bout to wind up, opens a new window, a fresh vista. A classic example is
ew Arnold's last lines in 'Sohrab and Rustom'. Such an ending is rich in
and takes the reader on a trip across the fields outside the poem itself -as
on's 'Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new' at the end of 'Lycidas'. In
mar's poem quoted in the earlier Unit, the last lines are suggestive of the
hge of time as against the fixity of the squatting women. Arnold, in the poem
tioned above, uses the river Oxus as a symbol.of continuity in life.
larly fine example of how a poem can be ended with an image that assumes
rces, powerfully in this case, the intention of the poem, is 'The Second
' by W.B. Yeats. The poem can be quoted here not only for its powerful
of the ending, but also for its perfectly balanced composition, its two
sin the first eight and the l a q t fourteen lines eatherine themselves in the slow.
 The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
a Are full of passionate intensity.

!
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 1
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 1
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethleham to be born?

This poem needs to be studied for its tense control, its economy of expression, its
linguistic choices, and the way it gathers energy and moves to a climax. Note how the
last two lines change from narration to a rhetorical question. I am not suggesting that
every poem should necessarily end with a climax. There are several other possibilities,
but this is one, and an effective one.
It would, perhaps, not be wrong to say that no poet, unless he starts at the end, has too
clear a notion of where and how his poem would end. He decides it, as the poem
proceeds, according to his intention and judgement and the compulsions, linguistic and
formal, of the poem as it develops.

Activity 2
a) Distinguish between a 'rounded ending' and an 'open ending' with illustrations other
than those cited in the Unit. (100 words)
b) What role, if at all, does 'tone' play ih the ending of a poem? (50 words)
(Check your answers with the hints given at the end of this Unit)
...........................................................................................................
 4.51 ENDING :THE ROLE OF 'TONE'
fer at this point to what has been said about the 'tone' of a poem in the Unit
o begin'. In the n . ;xity ji cases, it is liKely that when you begin to think
re and how to end your poem the tone has been already established. Now your
is: you can either cnd the poem in the same tone or switch it to shock, or
amuse the reader, or to raise the plane to a different level.
glish poets, by and large, seem to keep the tone to the end only occasionally
it slightly to make it a littlt more solemn, or ironical, or casual. There is rarely
tic change in their tone. A good example of such a change can beseen in the
eady mentioned, F r ~ s t ' s'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. From an
pnversational voice in the first three stanzas, Frost moves on to a deep, reflective

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

striking in this respect is Charles Causley's 'Ten Types of Hospital Visitor

d Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, chosen by D.J. Enright). After
n, highly amusing studies of eight different types of hospital visitors, the poet

The ninth visitor is life.

The tenth visitor

Is not usually named,

4
a dr matic, very unexpected shift of tone.
n now see that several options are open to you when you end your poem and the
will depend on your own poetic judgement. None of the several endings that
en discussed here is by itself better than any other, or inferior to another. The
nt thing is to bring a poem to its 'natural' culmination, whether you choose an
ding or a closed one, whether you opt for a dramatic climax or a quiet, lyrical

4.61 ENDING :ITS IMPORTANCE AND EFFECT

show how the point at which a poem is ended is important for its final effect,
like to draw your attention to an othenyise fine poem, which suffers somewhat
f
of a slight error of judgement in this respect -Saleem Peeradina's 'Poem to a
o Decades of Indian Poetry). Going down some stairs the woman
'with an exquisite sweep', gathers her hair in-a bunch above her shoulders,
ing a tilted glance at the poet asks, 'Does your hair ever feel hot?' It is aveiled
the poet feels, to touch or kiss the nape of her neck to which he should have

Instead, I sat as if abandoned

By my wish and your hair tumbled
down and clasping your knee you broke
, hastily into conversation.

these lines the poem seems to be complete. The situation has been brought home
y ,everything worth saying has been said. But the poet adds two more lines which
to unnecessarily stretch thc point that has already been made,

Did you ndver notice the way my gaze failed

to make yi$ur brief rite perpetual?
4.7 SUMMING UP
The question of where and how to end is as important as that of where and how to begin
in the case of a poem. It is partly a question of form dictated by the requirements of the
poem itself. The ending should, however spell 'a natural culmination'.
In lyrical poetry the form is related to length which decides the question of where to
end.
The poem may end with the same line or lines with which it has begun; i.e. its ending
is a repetition of the opening line or lines which is called a rounded ending.
A rounded ending, characteristic of the 'closed' poem may take the form of summing
up the theme, attitude or the internal experience projected in the poem.
The poem may have an open ending i.e., the poem, while about to wind up, opens a
new window or a fresh vista.
The tone, usually established in the opening lines, plays an important role in the
ending of a poem which may either manifest the same tone as is manifest in the poem
or spell a change of tone.
The importance of the ending of a poem cannot be overemphasised because of its
crucial contribution to the totality of the effect or value of the poem.

4.8 ACTIVITIES : AIDS TO ANSWERS

Activity 1
a) The poem opens with the information that Ben Jonson lies buried with the rest of
the poets and ends with a farewell to him (and to the person observing the grave?)
The poet has come back to where he began, here the ending is 'rounded'. Had he
just said 'Now go and read his works' or words to that effect, the ending would have
been open.

Activity 2
Hints
a) Refer to Section 4.3 and 4.4
b) Read 4.5, before attempting this question.

4.9 ADDITIONAL READINGS FOR BLOCK 2

Brooks, Cleanth and Penn Warren, Robert, Understanding Poetry, Japan: Holt
Sanders, 1985
Hughes, Ted, The Making of a Poem, Faber and Faber (Indian Agents: Oxford
University Press)
The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, ed. D.J. Enright.
Two Decades of Indian Poetry 1960-1980, ed. Keki N. Daruwalla, Vikas, 1980.