I would ask that the reader indulge me a little here; the matter dealt with is not really a metrical one. It is, however, the direct product of a metrical phenomenon, that of the line, without which closure would not exist in the same form. Closure is a field of study in its own right, but I would be remiss if I did not make some brief account of it.1

With ‘closure’ I refer to the end-points of the larger structural elements of the poem, which, in their proximity to silence, inevitably produce expectations of significant information. In both symmetrical or regular forms and in free verse, the poet takes advantage of this pattern of anticipation, and often concentrates new or important semantic content at these points, preparing their shocks, surprises, revelations, punchlines and ‘moving’ details. ‘Cadence’ is a notoriously slippery term, and has gained an undeserved credibility through its importance and clear definition in music theory. We would be better to confine its use to intonational phenomena, and replace it with the term ‘closure’, with which it seems to be more or less synonymous in this context. (I have for now ignored the grave limitations of the word itself and the various conceptual metaphors it brings with it; as Jennifer Baker points out, their domains and connotations have unnaturally narrowed our discussion of ‘the end of the poem’, a far richer and more varied field than mere ‘closure’ could ever accommodate.)

Closure remains – and must remain – an inexact science. It is as instance-specific as metonymy, and has a terrifying number of salient parameters, leaving the would-be taxonomist with an impossible and pointless task. These few remarks are offered in lieu of a more in-depth study.2

Poems are initially read as linear, temporal sequences. On rereading, the reader’s experience becomes more spatial: the domain is revisited as a semantic space in which connections between non-contiguous elements can be forged across greater textual distances and in any direction. Often the reader is prompted to do so by new, recontextualising information, frequently made salient by its occurring at significant and rhythmic points in the poem’s structure, especially before its patterned silences. This new information can do more than merely recontextualise: it can declare the poem as actually ‘about’ something else entirely – revealing, say, some new meaning hitherto latent in the title; it can have a catalytic effect, freezing the whole poem into shape, like a single ice crystal in a bottle of cold water, making suddenly manifest and tangible hidden structural properties of the whole domain. At this point – the discovery of connections, relations between lines, ‘images’ and themes – the reader additionally enters a spatial territory that is much more akin to the poet’s own compositional experience, that of a network of linked elements; they have entered the realm of creative authorship. Closure, then, often provokes the very rereading needed to turn the poem from a series of elements experienced in linear time to a set of memorised, spatial elements which can also be connected in parallel. (Again, this process projects paradigmatic parallelism into syntagmatic series, and represents the ‘neural network-ification’ of the poem itself.)

The reading eye or ear begins in anticipation; as it moves through the poem, what has been anticipated is then read and processed; if it is memorable, it becomes memory, if it is not, the mere past. Anticipation starts to grow around line and stanza endings, with the principal weight of expectation bearing down on the last line or lines, to the extent that poem-endings constitute part of the cognitive template; they are a promise of significance – one which will be projected into those lines, regardless of whether the poet has created an effective ending or not. Try the simple experiment of showing readers half a poem, and telling them it is the whole poem: the meaning of medial lines transposed to a terminal position are wholly altered. Here in its entirety is Matthew Arnold’s famous sonnet, ‘Dover Beach’:

Ah … How that note of eternal sadness seems to infect every earlier line in Arnold’s little poem. Don’t you think? (Setting aside his rather wayward rhyme-scheme, of course.)

If the title is often neutrally ‘what the poem is about’, or at least subverts that convention to some degree – final closure is sometimes the ‘key’, the ‘secret title’ by which the full meaning of the poem will be unlocked, and often wholly recontextualised. As with titles, this expectation may be subverted: while the poem must play out against this expectation of final significance, it need not actually honour it.4

Endings may be roughly categorised as either more or less ‘surprising’. Those that do not surprise usually honour the thematic propositions of the title, engage with the summed semantic content of the previous lines and do little to disturb the slowly building thematic domain; but these are relatively rare. Endings will often provide the reader with the now-expected ‘unexpected’ semantic surprise. They do so, almost invariably, through the drama of some form of deictic or metatextual shift. While deictic shift need not be an essential aspect of this new data or content, it is very often the means by which it is made salient. (Such shifts are themselves often flagged by being allied to other ‘arresting’ devices: syntactic, lineal and stanzaic effects, most of them ‘slowing’ in their effect, like shorter sentences, parataxis, unusual punctuation, end-stopping, odd line-lengths or monostichs; or anomalous metrical, lyric or rhyming strategies.) It will achieve this via the four familiar deictic routes: the temporal, the locational, the pronominal and the metatextual (i.e. various destabilisations of the mimetic ‘reality’ conceit).

All the examples below are from Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems.

a) Changes of tense or dramatic jump in chronology

[…] instead of now, when I hear of your death,

after your stroke at my age give a month or two,

now, when you never made it to Mexico

And Claire remarried and never had children

And the clapboard safe house fell down at last

And the blue pickup went for scrap years back.

(‘From The Safe House’)

b) Movements or jump-cuts to another location

Accept this small glass planet then, a shard

Grown smooth inside an oyster’s craw.

Like us, it learns to opalesce

In darkness, in cold depths, in timelessness.

(‘More Machines’)

c) Changes in address (which may affect either pronoun, voice, addressee, manner, or rhetorical pitch)

We long to lose ourselves amid the choir

Of the salmon twilight and the mackerel sky,

The very air we take into our lungs,

And the rhododendron’s cry.

And when you lick the sweat along my thigh,

Dearest, we renew the gift of tongues.

(‘Pentecost’)

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,

Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,

Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.

‘Maxine, Laverne, Patty.’

(‘Shibboleth’)

d) Destabilisation of the literal conceit

This can be done through moving into the imaginary or figurative from the natural-mimetic, or vice versa; from moving from the concrete to the abstract; and (increasingly, these days) through metapoetic effect, either punning of the word or line to draw attention to its position or role within the poetic structure, or even ‘breaking the fourth wall’ by some form of self-reflexive movement, and declaring the poem to be a poem.

I know. My world’s encircled by this prop

Though all my life I’ve tried to force it shut

(‘Upon a Claude Glass’;
the omitted final period was deliberate.)

e) Changes within two or more deictic aspects simultaneously

[…] and when you spoke

in no child’s voice but our of radio silence,

the hall clock ticking like a radar blip,

a bottle breaking faintly streets away,

you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.

(‘Haunts’)

In the last example we see shifts of tense, location, address, and – in referring to the very poem we are reading with ‘as I say now’ – a metatextual, ‘fourth-wall’ shift too.

Often the ending will be anticipated or foreshadowed at a significant point (first line, line ending, stanza-ending, turn, etc.) to give it salience, either strongly (in which case it specifies the nature of the anticipation) or quietly (where the cue may be rediscovered or unearthed in the rereading the closure itself prompts).

However, even at the closural level of the line ending, we often see identical deictic shifts in miniature: the teleuton will metatextually pun, play or lean on its own terminal position. If we look at those lines from Heaney’s ‘The Skylight’ again:

You were the one for skylights. I opposed

Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove

Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,

Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof

Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,

we see several examples of virtuosic, self-aware line endings: ‘opposed’ stands oppositionally before the break, with the next line beginning with the even more boldly oppositional trochee, ‘cutting’; ‘closed’ is closurally end-stopped, and so on. Note too the extravagantly disruptive later lines ‘But when the slates came off, extravagant / Sky entered and held surprise wide open.’ Here the syntax is driven against the frame of the metre – and the sparks fly as the line executes a handbrake turn on the bend, to beautifully expressive effect. Such disruptive enjambments give the teleuton great prominence, and provide the opportunities for all sorts of quiet metatextual paronomasia, where the reader is asked to consider not just the word, but its position within the line. The artifice of closure potentiates a little moment of self-consciousness or awareness which the poet can exploit: when placed just before the gap, the word seems to wake up to its own word-ness.

Poetic closure varies not only in its logical form but also in its strength, and in the degree of its ‘surprise’. This last quality, while far too subjective and vague for serious attention, usefully allows for some broad caricature. These types frequently occur at the other closural points of the poem (i.e. stanza endings and line endings) to lesser degrees.

1. ‘The non sequitur’

This effect is often – or intends to be – shocking, disruptive, surreal, ‘stream of consciousness’, or part of a discontinuous strategy (assuming the whole poem does not pursue this strategy globally, in which case it comes as no surprise at all).

2. ‘The punchline’

‘Joke’-type ‘bisociative’ endings – though the effect is often not humorous. Nonetheless they will rely on the same technique of engineering the collision of domains or contexts, where an expectation will be both delivered and simultaneously confounded, often through pun or paronomasia.

Was it the white pine face like a new moon?

The wet splutter and moan of the shakuhachi?

Was it the actor’s dispersal in gesture and smoke?

What part of Noh did you not understand?

(MICHAEL DONAGHY, ‘Hazards’)6

You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say

Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare …

The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,

only our silence made us seem a pair.

…

3. ‘The clincher’

These usually both belong within and indicate argumentative or narrato-argumentative forms, where closure delivers the sealing remark – one which the reader need not see coming, though in retrospect it often seems logically inevitable. (Weaker versions of ‘clinchers’ can often be seen in the infamous couplet of the English sonnet; these can stray perilously close to mere summary, moralising homily, or over-obvious sententiae.)

Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,

Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild;

But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,

It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray

We part not with thee at this meeting day.

(WALTER RALEIGH, ‘To His Sonne’)8

Then No-No lifts up Clumsy’s trembly chin,

And leans to hiss with loud stage whisper in

The big pink ear of Clumsy, ‘My dear friend,’

No-No enunciates. ‘This is The End.’

(GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG, ‘Two Tales of Clumsy’)9

4. ‘The dying fall’

The standard closural device of the lyric narrative or meditation. The ending is not a ‘surprise’, and is continuous with the flow of the whole; it nonetheless contains enough unexpected information to create a ‘poignancy’, often through a peristasis that carries some element of deictic shift, or some original but non-disruptive abstract phrase-making. The effect is often tonal and emotional, i.e. works through the invocation of an often inarticulable patheme shared between the poem’s elements.

The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,

The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,

And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest

In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover’s breast;

I’ll lean upon her breast and I’ll whisper in her ear

That I cannot get a wink o’sleep for thinking of my dear;

I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away

Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

(JOHN CLARE, ‘Summer’)11

5. ‘The anticlimax’

This ends the poem on a quieter note than mere tonal neutrality, defying the expectations of more conventional closural strategies that have perhaps been hitherto encouraged by the poem. It is often a kind of double-bluff, however, and just a ‘clincher’ in disguise. Take the unexpectedly low-key end to Hecht’s ‘A Hill’, to my mind the epitome of ‘quietly devastating’:

6. ‘The non-ending’

This might be identified as an ‘anti-closural device’, if one believes in such things: here, the poem appears to less ‘end’ than stop. Outside avant-garde practice, this kind of closure is rare; its closural quality depends largely upon its simply occupying a terminal position, and the reader’s inevitable projection of closural importance (some post-modern and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Lyn Hejinian seem to explicitly request that their poems not be read closurally; whether they have the right to do so is questionable). Ironically, because the non-ending is highly destabilising in its refusal to honour traditional closural expectations, it’s therefore a perfectly effective closural technique – so long as only a few closural refusniks exist and we don’t all start doing it.13 Michael Hofmann has, from the start of his career, used it to brilliant effect:

The motor-mews has flat roofs like sandpaper or tarpaper.

One is terraced, like three descending trays of gravel.

Their skylights are angled towards the red East,

some are truncated pyramids, others whole glazed shacks.

(MICHAEL HOFMANN, ‘From Kensal Rise to Heaven’)14

Someone brought me some cigarettes from America

called Home Run, and they frighten me half to death

in their innocuous vernal packaging, green and yellow.

(MICHAEL HOFMANN, ‘Snowdrops’)15

I freely confess that I find this a rather silly little cline; nonetheless it may propose a more systematic one that others will have the time to pursue.

1 Most academics have been trained to reflexively yell Agamben! at this point, whether they have read him or not – see Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) – but the relevance of his work to the nuts and bolts of poetic closure has been overstated, and is not really relevant to our specific purposes here.

2 Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s study Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968) remains the single important monograph on the subject, but is now rather dated. Several points in this short section have their origin in insights borrowed from a St Andrews PhD candidate, Jennifer Baker, or emerged jointly from our conversation. Specifically, her work looks at varieties of terminal deictic and non-deictic shift (between them comprising a real-world and literary origo) and their centrality to the effect of closure, which forms a smaller part of what she calls Closural Poetics. All this occurs within in a dynamic frame where the poem is effectively ‘spatialised’ after its initial temporal reading; this spatialised and part-memorised reading is itself often further shifted, following the radical recontextualising effects of closure itself. (I.e. not only do we read the poem again and link memorised elements in a non-linear way, we often also go ‘Oh – that was what it was about!’ and then reinterpret the meaning of those elements.)

3 Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems (New York: Dover Publications, 1994).

4 One thing of which I am certain is that closure is not a patriarchal structure. Any writer who gets halfway down a page and decides that this is where the writing stops is in engaged in an act of self-conscious, knowing termination – and attempts not to inscribe this fact somewhere, in some way, in the final line are invariably far more strenuous than actually doing so. This is all closure is: the deliberate as opposed to the accidental cessation of poetic speech. We must distinguish this from less neutral definitions. One knows just what Lyn Hejinian means when, in supplying a bad example of a ‘closed text’, she arraigns ‘the coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry [which] can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth’ – Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 41. And, more often than not, therein will we find the patriarchy deeply inscribed, in all its self-satisfaction, in all in the uninterrogated presumption of its own power and rectitude. However, I feel we must allow for the possibility that a handful of poets may well be the Guardians of the Truth, and that their articulation of the universal might actually be well served by just such rhetorical ‘coercions’. That particular closural mode might serve fools badly, and indeed make them look more foolish than ever; but it sat pretty well with Emily Dickinson. More generally: ‘closure’ may appear to map easily to certain sociopolitical structures many of us detest, but this is mere correlation; to say it is continuous with those structures and that its use perpetuates them is a far harder thing to prove. By all means go nuts, but it sounds to me like another case of the ‘fallacy of reciprocity’. Besides, any argument which ignores all actual content and focuses purely on the means of its presentation tends to bear little scrutiny. Hejinian, for example, is notably weak on evidence, and the adduction of a terrible poem proves nothing other than that the poem was terrible. If you intend to prove that anti-closural practice is superior, you have to go after the canon, claim some evolutionary or cultural advancement (one sees none), or defend it as an adequate symbol for our unclosed times.

5 James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992). The non sequitur is often a bluff. This is a fine example of an ending that – in its very unexpectedness – pretty much demands that we read the poem again, in case we had missed some cue. And on doing so, we discover the shared patheme, the ground of the tonal metaphor that seems to unconsciously prepare the mind of the speaker for the final outburst: there is a movingly distinct note of départ running through every image.

6 Michael Donaghy, Collected Poems (London: Pan Macmillan, 2014).

7 Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1987).

8 Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘To His Sonne’, in Willard M. Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 267.

9 Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–2000 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2001).

10 Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).

11 John Clare, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2000).

12 Anthony Hecht, Selected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Random House, 2011). This poem has haunted me for years, and I invite the reader to tilt the plane on Google Earth and follow the road Hecht describes in the poem; soon they will encounter this miserable, bare, mole-coloured little knoll, just as he paints it.

13 For the record, I consider the ‘anti-closural’ an entirely false category. As much as some theorists desire it to exist, will it to exist – usually for perfectly admirable political or ideological reasons – it cannot. If you contrive such a thing, you are plainly engaged in consciously constructing closure of some kind, and are simultaneously calculating for its effect. In literature, things do not stop unselfconsciously unless the author is shot mid-sentence. Readers know this, and invariably project closural expectation wherever they see writing end. (I have also seen too many occasions where the critical diagnosis of ‘refused closure’ did not seem justified. Poems we do not understand tend to read as ‘open’.)

14 Michael Hofmann, Acrimony (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). Excepting those youthful gunslingers who will learn soon enough, the poetry of our ‘bravest critics’ is invariably revealing – in exactly the same way. Most of it seems modest and conservative to a fault, as if they were trying to make their work as small and inoffensive as possible. They all write like baby hedgehogs. Hofmann is a notable exception, and seems somehow to have parlayed Ian Hamilton’s ‘English cringe’ into something like a powerful, Lowellian indifference to the consequences of honest speech – including saying no more when one is done talking. I feel his endings are often far closer to the ‘anti-phallogocentric’ structures others identify elsewhere, and they seem have little interest in either convincing or impressing anyone via the usual Flash-Harry tricks, epiphanies, look-at-me zingers or wise conclusions.

15 Ibid.