How to End a Poem

Great poems “stick the landing,” but sticking the landing is hardly intuitive. In this craft essay, we do a close study of a great poem with a surprising ending, followed by thoughts on how poets can end their poems. 

Poetry Recommendation: “Night Walk” by Franz Wright

Retrieved from his collection God’s Silence.

Night Walk

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

This gorgeous, intense poem captures the irony of urban life: what it means to be alone in a city of lonely people. Franz Wright’s poetic legacy is filled with poems like these, as Wright often grappled with loneliness, meaninglessness, and the pain of existence—before a late-in-life transition to Catholicism completely transformed his outlook.

I love this poem for its intensity and its many little ironies embedded in the writing. I’m most keen on the following:

• The poem’s very intentional line breaks, often creating ironies and double meanings.
• The poem’s many lonely images, which reinforce:
• The poem’s abstract yet simple (and powerful!) ending.

The line breaks in this poem are absolutely stunning. Many of them create ironies or double meanings in the text, or else simply string you along into another devastating line. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.

The first line, on its own, makes it seems like the speaker has left without paying, until the following line clarifies the speaker’s action, but that sense of abandonment lingers in the poem’s mood nonetheless.

There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,

Notice what each line emphasizes here. The first line emphasizes, simply, how many people there are. Of course, the fact that the poem is enjambed (rather than end-stopped) begs the question: what about those people?

That second line is particularly powerful. In any big city, there probably are thousands of people who are dying. So that line holds up as its own kind of fact, but then is very ironically reinterpreted in the following line. “To welcome” completely shifts the tone of the poem, but then, again, we’re in these peoples’ “small bolted rooms.” That sense of confinement introduces a different kind of intensity to the poem; it’s as though the “welcoming” is wedged between two entrapments, a little light flickering in a large, dark city.

And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.

The first line marks a very abrupt transition. We’re back in the speaker’s body, instead of his musings about the loneliness of the city. And yet, the smell of snow (what does snow smell like, perhaps a vague cold nothingness?) extends that loneliness. It feels omnipresent. The following line is interesting in isolation: does the speaker feel something in the moment, or do they only take a moment to walk home? There’s a weird, disconnected sense of distance happening here, a dissociation made present here. Then the following line, introducing a sense of hope, takes on a fleeting quality, as do all the glimmers of light in this piece.

I’ll note here that the poem is written in the second person point of view. Why might that be the case? Perhaps this generalized “you” points towards the universality of this poem’s feeling for anyone who lives in a big American city. (In Wright’s case, he’s writing about Boston.) Perhaps the “you” also heightens the poem’s sense of disembodiment, that all of these intense thoughts and feelings are happening to the speaker, but the speaker feels outside of his own body. The narrative certainly feels autobiographical, yet eerily familiar.

This brings us to the poem’s ending:
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

Most of the poem up until this point has been glaringly concrete: the loneliness of an empty convenience store; the lights of the city (the speaker’s own engulfed in the chaos); the bolted rooms; the smell of snow. But here we get a pile of abstraction: love, the symbolic heart, hope, and the repetition of “unendurable.”

There are a few reasons this works so well:

1. It presents a tonal shift in the poem. By moving from the concrete to the abstract, the reader is aware of an important transition; the language here feels highlighted.
2. The abstractions are “earned.” Poets should be wary of abstraction without connection to the tangible world. The abstraction “lonely,” for example, might mean and feel something very different for me than it does for you. Yet, in the context of this poem, it’s much easier for the reader to understand what the speaker means by “hope” and “unendurable.”
3. There’s a sense of surprise. Those final lines are undoubtedly unexpected.

Even in the presence of love and hope, irony is also present: these feelings must be so profoundly intense for the lonely speaker, they can’t be endured. No, this poem isn’t a joyful one. But, for me at least, it’s relatable and cathartic, and every word feels so perfectly chosen. I follow the speaker’s short journey to the convenience store and back as though I’m the subject of the piece, and I know what he means by a hope that’s unendurable. Situated atop a hill of ironies and dualities, Wright’s poem has captured what it means to be lonely in a city of lonely people.

Craft Perspective: “50 Ways to End a Poem” by Emily Skaja

Read it here, in Lithub.

How do you end a poem? For many poets, the ending is the hardest part. It’s easy to find the line, idea, or image that opens the door into a poem, but where does it end? How do you know if you’ve said everything you need to? What is the ending supposed to do?

Skaja’s article offers great ideas for what the ending of a poem can accomplish. And, in truth, the purpose of a poem’s ending depends on factors like the poem’s topic, the intended effect on the audience, and even the poet’s own taste. For example, I prefer it when a poem ends at a moment of revelation: all of the ideas and images are building up to a realization that can’t be disentangled from its context. But there are plenty of other aesthetics and poetics to be discussed on this.

I’m particularly keen on what Tracy K Smith says on this topic: a poem should end with a door opening, not a door closing. What can a poem say that makes us question and consider? How can a poem stay with us, shift our perspectives, invite us to step into a new, shared world?

I’ll leave it up to you to decide how these tips apply to your poems. If you’d like, reply to this essat with the kinds of endings you like in poetry, or which endings you want to try!