Great Endings

[imthefoolonthehill]

Hey everyone, I'm looking for some poetry (preferably modern) that has endings that you think are worthy of praise. Let the recommendations flow liberally.

[Alexander III]

Its not modern but it's ending is grand



When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

[Lokasenna]

The last 9 lines of Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day are some of the finest lines of poetry ever written, in my opinion.

[kelby_lake]

The last verse of Les Noyades:

But you would have felt my soul in a kiss
And known that once if I loved you well
And I would have given my soul for this
To burn forever in burning hell.

[stlukesguild]

The closing lines from Ode o a Grecian Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

[mayneverhave]

I've always been partial to the ending of the final poem of Montale's Cuttlefish Bones, which is "Sul muro grafito"/"Above the graffiti-covered wall":

Tomorrow I'll see the wharves again,
and the long wall and the traveled way.
In the future that begins, mornings
ride at anchor like boats in the bay.
(tr. W. Arrowsmith)

The effect is really built up from the thematic development of the previous poems, particularly of a varco, or passage. In this poem, the graffiti-covered wall - itself a telling image for human culture - blocks the poet's transcendence to the sea, leading us to a superb final image of the boats anchored in the bay. The boats, like the human spirit, are very well intended for varco, but are contained and halted. Fantastically resigned ending to a very disillusioned group of poems.

The other one, on the Italian theme, is the ending of Leopardi's "On the Likeness of a Beautiful Lady Carved upon Her Tomb", which is actually in my signature. In English, it's:

How do we rise - if we
Are wholly low and frail,
Dust and shadow - to such high sentiment?
And if noble at all,
How is it that our finest reverie
Can be so readily
For such slight reason both aroused and spent?
(tr. J.G. Nichols)

[Scheherazade]

e.e.cummings' "somewhere i have never travelled" is the first one that comes to my mind (great opening lines too):

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/336/

[donkeygospel]

The closing lines from Ode o a Grecian Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Haha, T.S. Eliot really hated that ending:

"this line [i.e. "beauty=truth"]strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement ... The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me."

[Emil Miller]

I have shamelessly neglected poetry over the years but some of it always remains at the back of the mind. The last lines from Oliver Goldsmiths 'Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog' are magical.

But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied:
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died.