Ways to End a Poem #2: Tying Up the Threads
This article is for: Everyone!
We all know that the ending of a poem is terrifically important.
That’s why I’m creating this series of articles that goes over different ways to do it.
Every time you get to the end of a poem, I want you to have at your fingertips a whole range of strategies, so you can try them all out until you find the ending you love!
In the first article, I discussed a very common strategy: ending with an image.
The approach I’m going to show you now is an extension of that technique:
How to use the threads of imagery that you’ve used throughout your poem to create a stunning ending.
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What is a “thread of imagery”?
Many times in a poem you’ll use several images that connect together. They come from the same overall comparison, and readers will see that they are all explorations of one core idea.
This is a very common technique because the connected images create both depth, because you explore an idea in several ways, and breadth, because each image will also add something unique to the mix.
This is what I mean by “threads” of imagery: two or more images in a poem that all refer to a single base comparison.
Some poems that use threads
To show you this, I’m going to use some poems from the chapbook Bright Glint Gone by Suzanne Langlois, which won the Maine Chapbook Series prize in 2019.
Langlois uses this technique particularly well.
For example, in “Drink To This,” a wonderful hymn to the pleasurable dangers of alcohol, Langlois repeats images of drinking as fire or flame, such as:
the night starts with a flame
that fits in the palm of a hand
In “Traffic,” she builds almost the whole poem around literal and metaphorical depictions of traffic, like this one:
Still, I could not resist
the urge to chase down
whatever needed chasing—
whatever beckoned from
the far side of traffic.
And in “Self Portrait as Turtle,” the speaker compares herself all the way through to aspects of a turtle, such as:
I would invite you inside
but there is no room in here,
even for me
and
I hunker
down for a while, become
my own bunker until I have
to move again.
A big part of the joy of reading these poems are the ways Langlois finds to explore every nook and cranny of these repeating threads of ideas, so that the final poem feels coherent and tightly woven.
Using these threads to create an ending
Threads of imagery like this can pay off particularly well when you get to the ending. All you need to do then is to go back to your threads, and find a way to tie them up. This should give your poem a satisfying completeness.
Note that in this case, the ending itself does not need to be an image: it’s enough just to refer to the other images. You’ve already done all the hard work making up the images—now you can get a payoff!
A question here might be, How can you make such an ending big and strong enough to make the poem feel complete? Why should this aspect of the thread be the ending, not just another part of the poem?
I suggest you look for an aspect of your thread that does two things at once:
It relates to your previous images, but at the same time…
It also creates some kind of change or widening.
How Suzanne Langlois does it
Let’s go back to the three poems I told you about earlier, and see how Langlois used her threads to end her poems powerfully.
In “Drink To This,” with its theme of alcohol as fire, she ends with:
so many mistakes begin
with wanting to be warm
This is not an image in itself: it’s just a statement. But because we’ve seen more than one image of alcohol as fire before it, we will connect the “warm” with that fire. That gives the ending all the force of those fiery images. The ending also neatly rounds off the fiery images, by suggesting that the whole reason for drinking is a desire to feel “warm”—which I read both as meaning loved and connected to other bodies, and also as wanting the excitement of risk.
So this ending connects to the thread of images, but also introduces a change by explaining the others, which takes it beyond them. It’s a widening.
She uses a similar approach in “Traffic,” where the speaker ends with her younger self
more convinced than ever
that nothing bad was fast enough
to catch me.
This time, “fast enough / to catch me” is a kind of image, but it would be rather a vague one by itself, if we’d seen nothing else in the poem about fast vehicles. But because we have seen lots of images about cars travelling at speed, it’s perfectly clear what earlier parts of the poem this ending is referring to, and so the ending is tightly connected to the poem. Yet, at the same time the image is also open enough to make the ending expand its meanings and resonate beyond the idea of just traffic.
Finally, in “Self Portrait as Turtle,” the speaker finishes with
when there’s space
for another soul in this shell
it will be because I’m
no longer here.
This is a kind of image, and it’s very much like the other images of turtle-ness that I gave you a taste of earlier, but it creates an effective ending by changing by the timescale and the stakes, by bringing in the speaker’s eventual death. It’s definitely part of the original thread, but that zoom forward and the pathos of death means it gathers and ties the ends very well.
So, I hope these examples have shown you how this approach can work.
An ending that ties up your imagery threads may be just what you need.
Next Steps:
Here’s a way to use both threads of imagery and the tying-up kind of ending.
Take some ordinary object you have in your home—a mug, a dish sponge, a needle, a lamp.
Create a lot of comparisons (metaphors) for it—at least 10.
If you want help, the first section of my free download, 8 Steps To Better Poems tells you how you can do this. (You can get the book using the signup box at the bottom of this article.)Pick one comparison that seems to say the most about your object.
For example, maybe the needle is a private detective, pursuing a case through fabricated lies!Draft a simple poem about that object, using that single comparison in several ways.
In my needle as private detective poem, the needle could be interrogating pointedly, sewing clues together, and perhaps dangerous to the person who hires it (uses it).Create an ending that connects to the thread of imagery and also changes or widens it, even if itself it’s not an image (though it could be).
In my needle poem, I might want to say what happens once the case is closed—when the needle is in the dark again.
