Ways to End a Poem #3: Stop Sooner

This article is for: Everyone!

Welcome to part #3 in my series on how to find strong ending for a poem.

Endings matter a lot—so I’m going over a range of ways that you can make them work.

In the first article, I discussed a very common strategy: ending with an image.

In the second article, I talked about using the ending to round off themes and images that were important earlier in the poem.

In this article, I’m going to approach the ending question differently, because I’m not going to give you a technique for creating an ending.

Rather, I’m going to suggest that maybe you’ve already written a great ending—it just isn’t at the end yet!

Why sometimes we mess up endings

When you come to the end of a poem, you usually have a lot that you want it to do.

You might want it to:

Sum up the main ideas of the poem
Take the poem in a new direction
Create a surprise
Leave readers with a strong image or phrase to remember.

In fact, you might want it to achieve all of these things at once!

So as you’re writing the ending, you’re often working hard to cram everything in that you want it to.

But that can be just too much for it! The ending can become overloaded, too told, and/or confusing.

How to solve this?

The ending before the ending

I have some good news—in fact, great news.

Many times, you have actually already written a fabulous ending for your poem—it just isn’t at the end yet!

You see, it often turns out that all those things you thought the ending “had” to do are not needed, and you can take it out.

Here are three reasons why that might be true.

1. You can trust the reader

Readers are smarter than we give them credit for.

We think we have to explain everything for them: come to a final conclusion, make sure they’ve gotten the moral we want, finish the story, and so on.

But in all likelihood, your readers have already figured all this out from the hints and implications you put into your images and description earlier on.

So final lines that you laboriously put everything into are just telling them what they already know, and you can cut this ending out without the poem losing any impact. In fact, it will gain some.

2. “Kill your darlings” if it helps the poem

Sometimes the ending does indeed introduce new ideas, yet is still better left out!

You see, sometimes we overburden the ending by asking it to say too much. We’re afraid that the body of the poem hasn’t conveyed everything we wanted to say, so we make sure the ending fills in the gaps.

For example, we might ask it to get across two new ideas, finish a narrative, and show the moral at the same time!

In this case, the rest of the poem doesn’t support the cumbersome ending that has been attached to it—perhaps rather like a tree branch that’s too weak to hold up a large fruit that’s growing on it.

The branch will be better off without the fruit, and the poem will be better off without its weighty ending.

The poem might say less overall—but what it does say, it will say much better!

3. You were writing better earlier on

In the middle of a poem draft, you are probably in creative flow, completely absorbed in the ideas and images and sounds you’re creating.

You’re probing the possibilities of the images and form that you’re using, you’re amazed by what you’re coming up with, and most of all you’re enjoying yourself.

Then you realize you need to end the poem, and things change.

Instead of being completely focused on what you’re writing right now, you start to ponder, how am I going to finish this off? Have I said enough? Should I try to make my ending different? Will the image I have in mind work?

This little bit of anxiety or preoccupation about how to end takes you out of that creative flow, which had been so productive. And quite likely, it results in words that just don’t work as well.

So sometimes, the best ending is hidden in that earlier material, when you were writing with the most intensity and engagement.

An example in a published poem

In case you think this is just a beginner’s problem, I want to show you very good poet making the mistake of letting his poem go on too long.

The poet is James Wright, and the poem is “Inscription For The Tank.”

In this poem, Wright reflects on two lines that he wrote in another poem: "My life was never so precious / To me as now." He is astonished and embarrassed that he, a struggling, poor alcoholic, could have written something so naked and hopeful. He cringes at the thought of them, he sees himself as deserving of pity and/or being laughed at by other "hopheads," and he wishes he had disguised his raw feeling by copying the words of some other writer.

When I first read this poem, what impressed me most was the ending:

    But I wrote down mine, and now

    I must read them forever, even

    When the wings in my shoulders cringe up

    At the cold’s fangs, as now.

This struck me as a superb example of how to end with a strong image. Out of this bleak, self-critical poem, Wright conjures the image of himself as an angel, with wings in his shoulders. He sees that he is worth something, after all. Yet the ending isn't cloying, because the hardness of his life is still acknowledged in the "cold's fangs," and this hardness also has the power to make his eternal side shrink up and "cringe," just as he had cringed earlier at the honesty of his two lines. So the ending manages to be both glum and uplifting; it is a turn that both changes the poem's meaning and at the same time is a continuation of the existing mood and themes.

Except that it isn’t the ending!

I thought it was, because that was where the page stopped. Then I turned the page, and discovered this:

    Of all my lives, the one most secret to me,

    Folded deep in a book never written,

    Locked up in a dream of a still place,

    I have blurted out.

    I have heard weeping in secret

    And quick nails broken.

    Let the dead pray for their own dead.

    What is their pity to me?

I was (and am) so disappointed, because these two stanzas completely ruin the "ending" I had admired.

In these stanzas, Wright directly states, totally unnecessarily, the themes and meanings of the poem—I've said too much, I'm unhappy, I don't want anyone to pity me. It's just so, so clunky, compared with the image of himself as cringing angel in the cold.

In my opinion, he’d have done much better to chop them off!

Finding your hidden ending

So if you are struggling with the ending of a poem, try ending it sooner.

There’s a very simple way to do this—suggested by my experience with the James Wright poem.

Simply insert a page break before the last stanza or sentence and print out the poem without it. How does the poem read now? Can you end the poem there?

And what about if you put that page break before the second-last stanza or sentence? Have you said all you need to say already? Or before the third-last, or even the fourth-last?

You might find yourself discovering the most amazing image or line to end on, that was there all along, and you just hadn't seen it.

It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try

However, I should of course add that this approach is not guaranteed.

Some endings really are needed, and you have to keep working at them until you’re happy.

But this approach is easy, it's playful, and if you don't like any of the results, you can just add the old ending back in! And you never know what might leap out at you.

Next Steps:

Here’s another way to do the cutting—perhaps a more fun one!

Choose a poem whose ending is not working, and print it out.
Using scissors, physically cut off the last stanza or sentence. Does the ending work better now?
Then cut off the next-to-last stanza or sentence. What about now?
Repeat this as many times as you can bear! How far back can you go? How much can the ending be trimmed back?