Types of Closure, Part 4: The “Killer” Ending

One of the most dramatic methods of creating closure in a poem is to include a last line that is a dramatic revelation, a surprising or even shocking disclosure or insight that switches the entire mood of the poem. Poets often refer to this type of closure as a “killer ending.” This is the type of writing Emily Dickinson was describing in her famous letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

The killer ending takes the top of your head off because it says something so deep and so true in an artful way. The poet I think of first in the context of the killer ending is Sharon Olds, who has succeeded so many times in writing poems that end with deep revelations, often incredibly honest and personal.

Sharon Olds

In Sharon Olds’s “I Go Back to May 1937,” the speaker of the poem imagines traveling back in time to the period when her parents met and became a couple. Instead of being a happy and nostalgic moment, though, it is almost unbearably painful for the speaker:

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,  

he’s the wrong man…

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

That is one of the darkest moments I can imagine, a child asking her parents never to become a couple. But the poem doesn’t end there. The speaker instead opts not to tell her parents what will happen, she even pushes her mother and father to conceive her, like a child playing with paper dolls. Olds finishes with this stunning line:

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

When I first typed that line, I accidentally typed it as, “and I will write about it.” But no, that’s not the verb in the poem. The speaker is going to tell the story, like a parent speaking to a child. Telling is a more direct form of communication than writing.

That action of the speaker seems to redeem all the pain of her parents’ lives and of her own life. And all of that happens in the last line. Of course, Sharon Olds is an incredibly skillful poet, and she has been preparing us for this redemptive ending even before the poem’s first line. The poem’s title situates us in the month of May, in the renewing season of springtime. In the very first line of the poem, the speaker positions the parents, “standing at the formal gates of their colleges.” By placing the parents at gates, Olds both evokes the myth of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise for their sins, and creates a sense of something beginning, an entrance as well as an exit/exile. She is so brilliant!

In other words, the killer last line may seem totally unexpected the first time we hear it, but a good poet will subliminally create the possibility of that revelation from the very start of the poem. Otherwise a disclosure unrelated to the rest of the poem can seem as if it doesn’t belong. The perfect killer ending is one that the reader could never guess, which seems to come out of nowhere. And yet the killer ending feels moving, authentic, and connected to the rest of the poem in a way that is anything but obvious.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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

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

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 2: Ending a Poem with a Resonant Image

For me, one of the most effective ways to achieve closure in a poem is to end with a resonant image.

The temptation when you are ending a poem is to try to tie up every loose end. You want to tell the reader exactly what it is that you’re trying to say, what you’ve been building up to for the entire poem. That strategy is very likely to put the reader off. Why? Because no one likes being lectured to. Least of all, fans of poetry. The chances are, if you’ve written the entire poem with a particular emotion or idea in mind, the reader has gotten the message by the time the poem is almost done.

So, don’t end a poem by hitting the reader over the head. Instead, expand the horizons the poem has explored. Finish with an image that lingers in the reader’s thoughts and echoes other elements in the poem. Ending with a particularly vivid and haunting image changes the tone so that the poem has closure at the end.

The best way to explain this is to give an example. The classic instance of this is John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Basically, the speaker of this poem is saying that he’s read a lot about Homer’s Greece, but he never really got it till he read George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. Now he understands the beauty and majesty of Homer’s poetry and the world he describes.

John Keats

But instead of saying that flat out, in the poem’s sestet, or final six lines, Keats gives us two seemingly unrelated images. The first is an astronomer discovering a new planet when it “swims” into view (you gotta love that verb, “swim”!). The second is the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, leading an exploratory party to a cliff in Panama, where for the first time, Europeans gazed on the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, from the Americas.

More than any didactic conclusion, these two images give a sense of the incredible wonder that Keats felt when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer. That last image, of the ocean that was undreamed of by Cortés and his men, just rolls on and on in the mind, like a long chord, as vast and inspiring as the Pacific.

What provides the closure here is that we have switched from Homer to another realm, but one that vibrates with Keats’ feelings about discovering Chapman’s version of The Odyssey. The poem has shifted, but is still in the mode of awe, in fact, deeper in that mode because of the resonant image. The image Keats chooses is so much more expansive than someone sitting in a library reading a translation from ancient Greek. The image also reflects on how amazing a reading experience can actually be.

One contemporary poet who has mastered the art of ending on a resonant image is Joseph Millar. Millar has a way of finding a final image that engages the reader, brings together threads in the poem, but opens the door to deeper emotion or contemplation. 

Joseph Millar

In his poem “Labor Day,” for instance, Millar describes all the ways that labor is not being done on that holiday. The speaker is celebrating all those who have earned a day off because of their hard work. Instead of winding up with this theme, though, he ends with a cinematic image that encapsulates and expands the poem’s ideas and emotions:

the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines

turning a little, this way and that.

This last image is a symbol of Labor Day itself, with the boats docked and not in use (and you know tuna boats see some serious fishing!). But that image also lets in another range of ideas and emotions, because of the restlessness of the boats in the water. This motion might suggest that Labor Day may be a time of repose, but it also highlights unresolved issues about those who work with their hands, and those who manage or profit from their labor.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 3, 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

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1: Introduction

When I was starting out as a young poet, I kept hearing other writers talk about “closure.” I couldn’t image what this odd word meant. It sounded like getting your hand caught in a door. A poem ends when it ends, right? Why does there even need to be a name or a word for that?

The more I’ve written and the more I’ve read, the more I realize that closure is a crucial part of a poem.

Elizabethan poet Sir Thomas Wyatt was one of the first to use rhymed couplets to close a sonnet

But what is closure? Here are a few possible definitions:

• Closure is the way that a poem completes itself.
• Closure is the way a poem fills out its own shape.
• Closure is the way that the poet and reader both understand that the poem is winding down, or reaching back into the world.

There are three main types of closure in poetry, and I’ll discuss each one in this series of blogs. The three main techniques that poets use to end poems:

1) A resonant image
2) Repetition or a rhythmic change
3) The killer last line

Of course, very few endings are purely one or the other type. There are many variations and combinations of these types.

I think all these ways of ending a poem have one thing in common: at the conclusion of a poem, something changes from the way the poem has progressed prior to the finale. Every poem creates a kind of pattern for the reader. At the close of a poem, that pattern usually changes. The change can be in the structure of the poem, the mood, the awareness of the speaker and/or reader, the imagery, the subject matter, the sounds of the language, the emotion, or the point of view. In other words, almost any aspect of the poem or combination of facets can create closure, providing that the poem changes in some significant and palpable way toward the end, breaking the poem’s pattern.

Here are the sections of this blog that deal with the different types of closure:

Resonant image
Repetition or rhythmic change
The killer ending

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