The conclusion of a poem is considered one of the most sensitive and problematic poetic moments, as it embodies a tension between continuation and cessation, movement and stillness, expectation and completion.
Souad Khalil | Libya
The conclusion of a poem is considered one of the most sensitive and problematic poetic moments, as it embodies a tension between continuation and cessation, movement and stillness, expectation and completion. It is not merely a temporal ending of the text, but rather an aesthetic moment in which the meanings of the entire poetic structure are condensed, and through which the poetic experience is reread as an integrated whole. Hence, critics and theorists—particularly within the framework of structural and aesthetic studies—have devoted considerable attention to analyzing the function of poetic closure and its relationship to the concept of stability and artistic balance.
This article is based on a theoretical reading that draws upon Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s study on the conclusion of the poem and poetic closure, examining the mechanisms of expectation, modification, and cessation within the poetic text. It reconsiders the traditional understanding of equilibrium, viewing it not as a reflection of the poet’s psychological state, but as an aesthetic outcome formed within the reader’s consciousness during the reception of the artwork.
The perception of poetic structure is a dynamic process, whereby structural principles offer a state of expectation that is continually modified by successive situations, while the expectation itself remains constant. We anticipate the continuation of principles operating as they generally have.
In her study on poetic closure and stability—translated by Fatima Kazem—Barbara Smith clarifies the possibility of a poem’s theoretically infinite continuation, until a point is reached at which the state of expectation must be modified to prepare not for continuation, but for stopping. Thus, closure may be understood as a modification of structure that creates a pause or the absence of further continuation—that is, the absence of the most probable subsequent event. Closure allows the reader to celebrate and accept the cessation of continuation; in other words, it creates an expectation of nothingness.
This expectation of nothingness, and the feeling of final calm it establishes in our experience of the artwork, is referred to as stability, resolution of conflict, or equilibrium. It is a function or result of closure. However, its specific sources are worthy of attention here, given the frequent misunderstandings surrounding them. A. M. Delio Tillyard attributed poetic failure to the revelation of a disturbed and unintegrated mind. A second, familiar generalization is often invoked to support this view: that a highly successful poem dealing with painful experience does not reveal a disturbed mind, but one that has achieved balance afterward, despite sorrow.
Tillyard refers to Lycidas and to Coleridge’s elegiac lyric as examples of such successful poems. He adds that in Epitaphium—an inscription on a tomb commemorating the deceased—as in Meredith’s Modern Love, the pains that shaped the described experiences are not resolved, yet they remain moving and pleasurable. Both poems suffer from a grief that is difficult to dispel.
Tillyard errs in insisting that a poem cannot reveal a disturbed and unintegrated mind and still be successful unless that mind has achieved some final equilibrium, as evidenced by our recollection of many counterexamples. His mistake lies in placing the required equilibrium in the wrong location—within the poet’s mind rather than within the poem itself, or more precisely, within the reader’s mind. What must be resolved is not the poet’s described experience, but the immediate experiential encounter of the reader.
This opposition becomes evident when a poem or play remains static despite our clear demand for conflict resolution and artistic stability. We seek drama in drama, and development in poems, novels, and musical compositions. These demands are not contradictory. Rather, it must be emphasized that stability is a final state—a state of ending. Such a state is desirable at the end of a poem or a musical piece if we conceive of it clearly as an expectation of nothingness.
The writer seeks to maintain our interest in a play, novel, or poem throughout its performance by sustaining our expectation of further development—by providing continuous sources of instability. The familiar equation of introduction, complication, climax, and resolution, well known in dramatic structure, finds its counterpart in any temporally organized artwork, from the short story to the sonata. In all such forms, the sensation of stability is consistently avoided until the very end: false culminations are exposed, entrances are delayed, confessions postponed, emphatic cadences avoided, and a single melodic sequence is introduced before completing the previous harmonic progression in contrapuntal music, such as music composed for a lyrical poem. For this reason, there is no complete cadence until the final ending.
The writer also seeks that we possess no additional expectations at the end of a play, novel, or poem—no loose ends to be controlled, no unwelcome promises. The novelist or playwright tends to conclude the work at the point after which nothing remains except what is predictable, such as the death of the hero or a foreseeable event like marriage. The poet ends the work at a point of stability. Yet this point is not necessarily what we conventionally call the “end” of the poem, as the poem does not always follow a chronological sequence. Sometimes this point of stability is achieved through specification, or through harmony among the formal and thematic principles of poetic construction.
This does not mean that our experience of the work ceases with the final word, even though stability implies calmness and the absence of further expectations. On the contrary, at that point we should be able to re-experience the entire work—not as a sequence of events, but as an integrated design.
This becomes clearer if we consider our inability to speak of an “ending” in painting or sculpture, despite applying the concept of stability to visually perceived structures, as Gestalt psychologists affirm. Hypothetically, the idea of final stability here assumes a completely different meaning.
It has been suggested that the observer’s experience of a spatial artwork is also temporal, as it requires time for visual, motor, and sensory responses to unfold—until reaching the point at which the elements of the artistic design are perceived as coherently related within the whole.
Thus, in both painting and poetry, there exists a final stability of the work. This stability does not refer to the point at which the observer’s or reader’s experience ends, but rather to the degree at which one can, without residual expectations, experience the structure of the work as both dynamic and unified at the same time.
We may now summarize some of the observations made here regarding the functions of poetic closure. Closure occurs when the final part of the poem creates in the reader a sense of appropriate stopping. It announces and justifies the absence of further development, reinforces the feeling of finality, completeness, and calm present in all artworks, and grants the final unity and logical coherence to the reader’s experience of the poem by providing the vantage point from which all preceding elements are perceived broadly, and their relationships understood as parts of a meaningful artistic design.
Recalling the ending of ‘To the Lighthouse’, we may say that closure is like the final brushstroke on Lily Briscoe’s painting—one that completes, clarifies, and fulfills all the contrasting lines and colors of the composition, revealing its ultimate principle by virtue of its presence.
For this reason, it is easy to see why, in metrical (verse) compositions, the overall power of the work often resides in the closure, which frames the poem as a whole with a band of gold. The final phrase leaves the strongest imprint, and it is this that renders it memorable.
In light of the foregoing, it becomes clear that the conclusion of a poem does not merely serve a formal closing function, but constitutes a decisive cognitive and aesthetic moment in which expectation is suspended and a sense of completeness and calm is created—without implying a rupture in the reader’s experience of the text. Poetic closure, as a state of final stability, allows the work to be reconsidered not as a sequence of events or units, but as an integrated dynamic structure whose elements cohere within the reader’s consciousness.
Accordingly, stability should not be understood as a psychological resolution of the poet’s experience, but as an aesthetic effect achieved within the poem itself and completed in the reader’s mind. In this sense, the conclusion of the poem resembles the final touch in a work of visual art or music—a gesture that does not terminate the experience so much as grant it definitive clarity, leaving its deepest imprint on aesthetic memory, and affirming that the power of a poem is often distilled in its ending, where meaning settles and form is fulfilled.
Read: The Concept of Formalism
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Souad Khalil, hailing from Benghazi Libya, is a writer, poet, and translator. She has been writing on culture, literature and other general topics.
