Types of Closure, Part 3: Using Repetition to End a Poem

One tried and true way to create closure in a poem is to use repetition. Repeating a phrase, line, or series of lines establishes that the poem has come full circle and is now ending. Paradoxically, the fact that some words in the poem are the same indicates to the reader that these words are different from any others, since they announce the ending.

There are different ways that poets use repetition to create closure. One way is to use the rhythms and cadences of the repeated lines as a sort of chorus, the way a song often ends with a repeated refrain. The master of this sort of repetition is the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. 

Federico García Lorca

In his classic “Sleepwalking Ballad” [“Romance sonambulo”], Lorca opens with these unforgettable lines:

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.

Green how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea,

and the horse on the mountain.

(translation by William Bryant Logan)

The poem depicts a surrealistic world where strange and mysterious events take place, such as a young gypsy woman with green hair being suspended over water by an “icicle of the moon.” But in some ways, this poem is much like a traditional ballad. Lorca repeats the opening lines in various permutations in the poem, sometimes just duplicating the opening line, sometimes the first two lines. But at the end of the poem, he repeats all four of the opening lines, as if we are hearing the refrain of a ballad, and it’s clear that the repetition signals the end of the poem. By extension, that repetition indicates the fate of the gypsy bandit who is bleeding and pursued, and his doomed lover.

A different way of using repetition is to repeat a phrase at the end in a very different context and with a different emphasis. This sort of repetition establishes closure by contrast—we hear or read the same words as we did earlier in the poem, but now we understand their deeper meaning. It’s the sharper insight that makes for closure in the poem.

Lorca uses repetition in this way in his poem “Your Childhood in Menton.” Here he describes a lover who cannot answer the call of his passion because of social conventions. The poem begins and ends with the same line:

Sí, tu niñez ya fábula de fuentes.

Yes, your childhood now a fable of fountains.

In the epigraph, Lorca attributes the line to a poem by Jorge Guillén. The first time we hear these words, they sound innocent and carefree: they refer to youth and fables and running water. By the end of the poem, the line resonates very differently, since we know that the person addressed in this poem has betrayed his own desires in favor of norms he absorbed in childhood.

Another example of using repetition in a different context at the end is “Each Bird Walking,” by Tess Gallagher, one of my favorite poems. 

Tess Gallagher

Gallagher uses a fascinating series of flashbacks, quickly going backwards and forwards through different layers of time to tell a complex and moving story that the reader has to construct, like a detective solving a mystery.

The poem is about the end of an affair, an affair between the speaker and her lover, who is in a long-term relationship. To end the romance without bitterness, the speaker asks her lover to bestow on her the gift of an unforgettable memory. He chooses to tell her how he bathed his own mother by hand at the end of her life, as if he had been her mother instead of her son. Describing this incredibly intimate moment of cleansing, the lover quotes his mother as saying, “That’s good, that’s enough,” when the washing of her body is complete.

That's a banal enough phrase. But it becomes extremely powerful when it’s repeated only 10 lines later. Now the speaker is the one saying the phrase, since she is satisfied that her lover has given her access to a part of his soul that no one else has shared. The second time the poet quotes, “That’s good, that’s enough,” the phrase has a deep resonance, since we know it means not only that the speaker and her lover have exchanged an imprinted moment of intimacy, but that their relationship is now done.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Deliver Your Message, Part 3: Creating an "Aha!" Moment for the Reader

One method of delivering a message in a work of literature that I find satisfying and effective as a reader is when the writer gives me just barely enough information to figure out the puzzle on my own. That puzzle solving creates the “Aha!” moment. And the closer it comes to the ending, the better it works for me. If I don’t get it till the very last word, so much the better.

For the writer, it’s a bit like writing a murder mystery. In a mystery, you want to plant little clues for the reader, but unobtrusively, so you don’t tip your cards. You want the readers to enjoy the guessing game, to want to solve the mystery, but you don’t want the readers to guess who the murderer is before you reveal it. Once the secret is out, you want the readers to think, “Of course! That’s so obvious.” But it shouldn’t be so obvious that the readers know on page 10 what you reveal to them on page 210.

But in a way, creating an “Aha!” moment for the reader is like writing a mystery where you rip out the last chapter. The reader becomes the detective and solves the crime. There shouldn’t be a moment like the one in the classic mystery where Inspector Burley-Hyde confronts the murderer in an English country house where he has gathered all the suspects in the well-appointed parlor with its lace doilies and concealed revolver. For the kind of “Aha!” moment I’m thinking of, all the suspects should be under one roof, but the reader should be the one to finger the murderer.

That may sound fairly abstract, so I'll give an example of a short poem by Tess Gallagher that creates an “Aha!” moment for the reader.

Tess Gallagher

                                                    
Here’s a link to Gallagher’s powerful poem, “Each Bird Walking.” Please read this marvelous poem before taking in the rest of this blog, so I don’t spoil the surprise of the poem for you. Gallagher’s poem is a mystery from the start, with its oddly convoluted phrasing:

Not while, but long after he had told me

This phrasing becomes more poetic and feels more necessary, though, each time you read the poem.

The poem starts with a lengthy and almost utilitarian description of a man washing the body of his frail and elderly mother, shortly before her death. The description is fascinating, and so wonderfully paced that it imitates the patience and care of the man who is washing:

…the rag

dripping a little onto the sheet as he

turned from the bedside to the nightstand

and back…

Notice how the enjambments mimic or enact the actions of the man going back and forth from the mother’s body to the washbasin with the damp cloth.

But why this meticulous description that takes up most of the poem? That question itself becomes the mystery. We get a clue in the stanza that begins “as though he were a mother,” where the man who must be unnamed is transformed into a kind of mother by the act of washing his own elderly mother, an act that is loving without being sexual. We get closer to the heart of the mystery in the next stanza:

And because he told me her death was

important to his being with her,

I could love him another way.

But even in helping to clear up the mystery, Tess Gallagher is creating more mystery with the phrase, “I could love him another way.” What does that refer to? It’s like a murder mystery where a second victim hits the ground before our detective can even begin to figure out the first crime. And then Gallagher adds that haunting and incredibly simple phrase from the mother:

“That’s good,” she said,

“that’s enough.”

It seems as though the labyrinthine mystery of this poem could continue a long time before arriving at an explanation, but the whole story careens to an end in the last ten lines. We find out the speaker of the poem was the lover of the man who washed his mother. We find out that he ended their affair “so as not to hurt/the one closer to you”, i.e., his wife or partner. And finally, we find out that the speaker asked for a parting memory that would allow her to remember the man with love despite his hurting her, and that’s when he told the story about washing his mother. Gallagher concludes by echoing the quote from the mother that she had given us just ten lines earlier, but now in such a different context—or is it so different?

It’s a breathtaking ending. It breaks my heart every time I read it. The culmination works so well because Tess Gallagher takes us right up to the edge of the cliff, shows us where to look, but never says, “See, that’s the Grand Canyon.” In this case, the Grand Canyon is—what? I’m not entirely sure.

Maybe the title gives us another clue. Birds fly beautifully, but they only walk very awkwardly, the poet has explained in an essay about this poem. So when we attempt to love without sex, in a spiritual way, we are like birds wobbling on the ground, moving forward, but clumsily, and yet that is part of the hard work of being human. But if Gallagher had come out and flatly said all that at the finale of her poem, it would have been a terrible ending.

Yes, “Each Bird Walking” has a message, it has deep emotion, it has a beginning and a middle and an end (though definitely not in that order!), but the final “Aha!” is in the reader’s thoughts after taking in the poem, the way a chord lingers in the air at the end of a solo piano concert.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry