Poetic Closure

Barbara Daniels

X. J. Kennedy provides a simple criterion for testing closure: “A long poemChow well is it put together? Easy to tell. A simple test: Do you need to turn the page to know you’ve come to its end?” On the other hand, some poets don’t want their poems to click shut, preferring a less definite sense of closure. Ideas on the back of this sheet may help if you want more tentative endings.

The poet Gregory Orr believes many people drawn to poetry feel threatened by chaos and need the sense of order poetry can grant its readers and writers. In “The Interrupted Scheme: Some Thoughts on Disorder and Order in the Lives of Poets and the Lives of Poems,” Orr asks, “Don’t [poems] present us with a disorder that represents the randomness we feel threatened by in our lives and then respond with an ordering that seems to answer that disorder? Isn’t that what makes poems vitalCa genuinely threatening sense of disorder and an equally convincing order?”

When you want to signal closure, consider the following strategies.

1. In an irregularly rhymed poem, increasing the rhymes can provide a sense of closure.
2. More heavily stressed lines might give a sense of finality at the end of your poem.
3. Sometimes repeating a line provides an authoritative sense of an ending.
4. Certain themes signal closure, among them night, sleep, rest, ending, and death.
5. If the poem is a narrative, the story may be finished at the end of the poem.
6. Some poems end by returning to images used earlier. As with all repetitions, the feelings or meanings associated with the images should be deeper when they return.
7. Whatever happens at the end of a poem takes on greater significance, so choose your final moments with care.
8. At the end of a poem we hope to feel the truth of its most important ideas. This doesn’t necessarily mean stating them. Although some good poems end with clear statements of their themes, it’s usually best to avoid generalizing or moralizing at the end of a poem. Ending with an image is often stronger.
9. Changing your strategy just before a poem ends can strengthen closure. For example, if your method is raising questions and answering them, your poem might end by raising a question and rejecting the answer to it. If you’ve used heightened language, you might switch at the end to simpler, more straightforward wording. Or you could do the reverse, switching from plain speech to more intensely emotional language.
10. A poem may come to a point of rest or stability if it draws back from its strongest feelings and turns to a calmer mood.

Ways to undermine closure (if that’s what you want to do):

1. Ending with questions can weaken the ending of a poem you feel has overstated its points.
2. You may want to leave the impression that a poem has discovered its ending as it went along; if so, you might choose an ending that seems tentative, improvisatory, even random.
3. Consider concluding with themes that are anti-closural: dawn rather than dusk, birth rather than death, beginnings rather than endings.
4. If your structure is centrifugal, spattering out from its center, the poem’s restlessness will probably still be present in its final lines. Try reordering the lines if your poem’s strong closure seems at odds with its general method and theme.
5. Go beyond the natural ending of a poem that ends too predictably or too easily.
6. In a narrative, a quiet moment may provide a more expressive ending than a bigger event would.
7. A poem with fewer formal elements may need fewer closural devices.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (U of Chicago Press, 1968) is a pioneering study of this subject.