Closure, in Western poetry, wants to be more or less evident
formally and/or thematically. A poem
ends on a rhyme of some sort, or it ends by arriving at some conclusion or
insight. Closure satisfies because it
completes a thought or a series of sounds and beats, that is, it completes a
structure. To put this into the obverse:
a structure makes closure recognizable.
I almost said a structure makes closure necessary, in the Aristotelian
sense:
POSSIBILITY → PROBABILITY → NECESSITY
And while some of this logic—the teleological—underlies some
kinds of poetry written out of some traditions or literary histories, it does
not apply across the board or to all literary cultures, for the possibility to
probability to necessity relations that make up a well-structured poem are
merely tools for creating the recognizable, which in turn is a factor of what
satisfies, or gives pleasure, which is made possible through expectation.
This is to say, form creates expectation. Expectation, in
good poetry, is then fulfilled in some way: we recognize something when we
expect it and are satisfied only when we do.
A poem resolves like music.
Fulfillment can come as a confirmation of our expectations or it can
undermine our expectations (in a satisfactorily surprising way) or it can cause
us to reassess our expectations.
Barbara Hernnstein Smith, in her famous book, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End,
argues that poems can fail to close properly in various ways. Their endings can “feel” wrong or incomplete
or premature/late or irrelevant or unnecessary. Failure to close stems from two main causes,
she says: 1. A poorly structured poem, or 2. An innovation in style or
structure for which proper closure has not yet been invented. She cites John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
with its famously controversial ending, as an example of a new kind of poetic
structure with a formally traditional ending.
Keats may or may not have been aware of his predicament.
· · ·
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
· · ·
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail ─
Assent ─ and you are sane ─
Demur ─ you’re straightway dangerous ─
And handled with a Chain ─
· · ·
I am pretty sure you will recognize the two passages above. The first is the last part of Section 52, the
last section of Whitman’s Song of Myself. The second is unmistakably by Emily
Dickinson. Since it’s short, I’ll
reprint the entire Dickinson poem, so you get the context for the ending:
Much Madness is divinest Sense ─
To a discerning Eye ─
Much Sense ─ the starkest Madness ─
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail ─
Assent ─ and you are sane ─
Demur ─ you’re straightway dangerous ─
And handled with a Chain ─
And yes, the poem concludes (or simply ends?) with the
familiar dash.
I’ve been thinking about how poems end since last week, when
we started talking about the subject.
Inevitably, the famous conclusion to Whitman’s great poem comes to mind—one
of the best poem endings that I know of.
I searched through my copy of Final
Harvest, the Little, Brown edition of her complete poetry to find another
kind of ending, one marked by that dash.
The search led me to a question: What’s the difference, if any, between
lines that conclude a poem and those that bring the poem to an end? Well, for one thing, conclusions are
teleological, that is, “planned for” by the logical progression of the poem
(either thematically, formally, or in some other way). “Mere” endings are just that: a poem
stops. A list poem, which we’ve tried
before, often makes for a good example of a poem that just stops. There is no
progressive structure to a list poem that leads necessarily to some
conclusion. It just stops listing
things.
Interestingly, both Whitman and Dickinson wrote poems with
concluding lines/passages and poems that just get to a point and end. I assert above that the passage quoted from Song of Myself concludes rather than
ends the poem. If that long poem seeks
to equate the speaker-poet Walt Whitman and America in a kind of
national-cultural-artistic autobiography (the song of myself is the song of
America), then this section is strongly conclusive thematically. [1] It emerges from the argument of the poem. Similarly, the argument of Emily Dickinson’s
poems goes something like this: majority opinion determines whether you are
sane or not. The first three lines set
up the argument thematically (sanity and madness are in the eye of the
beholder, often enough) and the last five conclude it (if the beholder holds
the majority position, then you are sane or dangerous, and must live with the
consequences).
Think of all the sections of Song of Myself, which work like poems in themselves, that are
hardly more than laundry lists of one thought or another, or an extended
repetition of rhythms. Think of all the
brief lyrics of Dickinson that function something like Eastern bright image
poetry, that is, series of images without further comment or “lesson.” In these cases, both poets wrote poems that
could have gone on almost endlessly, but simply stopped.
Thematic structure
and closure. One kind of thematic
closure is based on rhetorical devices like “if . . . then,” “either . . . or,”
“then . . . now” where the theme or themes of a poem are constructed like an
argument that leads to a logical conclusion and possibly even a comment on the
conclusion. This kind of closure
dominates Renaissance poetry. It’s very
evident throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, where the first two
quatrains develop an argument, the third quatrain complicates or “turns” toward
a resolution, and a closing couplet sums up, comments on, or delivers some kind
of final judgment.
Formal structure and
closure. Another kind of closure is
“formal,” that is, is based on more or less strict rules of rhyme, meter, line
length, all of which contribute to the formal structure of a poem. This kind of structure and its logical (or in
other words, inevitable or “right”) closure is pretty evident in Emily
Dickinson’s poems, many of which are constructed in the form of hymns: exact or
near rhyme, strict metrics, fairly exact rhythmical repetition. In these cases, since hymns are nearly always
constructed in quatrains of iambic meter of two or three feet per line and
extend somewhere between two and six quatrains, as a reader you start to look
for one of Dickinson’s poems to get to a conclusion fairly soon.
Whitman’s poetry, on the other hand, is rhythmically
“tidal.” Its lines ebb and flow without
recourse to strict rhyme or meter. The
lines are long and the stanzas are more like paragraphs that can be of any
length. The rhythms approach song, but
more in the sense of a chant than a hymn.
It’s much harder to sense a conclusion approaching in a poem by Whitman,
though some poems of his do point more or less clearly to conclusions. “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
Dim” is a famous example of a poem with a formal conclusion.
Epigrammatic
structure and closure. Epigrammatic
closure is again based on rhetoric: final lines conclude a thought, usually
both thematically and formally, and do so in the most strict ways, and often in
short bursts of language. Augustan
poetry (think Alexander Pope) provides the best examples of this, and so do
almost all of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Nature, like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained.
· · ·
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
· · ·
How vain are all these glories, all our pains,
Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains.
You can see by these couplets that rhyme provides closure
through sound and sense. Closure also
works through the metrics of the lines: note that in each case, the second half
of each first and second line ends with strong iambic meter.
Open structure and
closure. Finally, there is the
so-called “anti-closure” poetry that is mostly associated with modern writing.[2] It is poetry that refuses to sum things up,
to comment conclusively, to create logical bookends to a set of ideas or images
or word associations. But I don’t
necessarily mean poems that are nothing more than experiments in word-splatter
or that are mere or pure sound experiments.
I also mean the so-called “open forms” of modern and contemporary
poetry, poems that grow organically from a writer’s own sense of rhythm,
breath, and way of looking at whatever world he or she observes.
“For modern poets—for everyone after Yeats—rhyme and meter
amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing . . . In rhyme and meter
one has to be concerned with how to say something,[3]
perhaps anything, which fulfills the formal requirements. It is hard to move into the open that
way. If you were walking through the
woods in winter, rhyming would be like following those footprints continually
appearing ahead of you in the snow.
Fixed form tends to bring you to a place where someone has been
before. Naturally, in a poem, you wish
to reach a new place.[4] That requires pure wandering—that rare
condition, when you have no external guides at all, only your impulse to go, or
to turn, or to stand still, when each line does not, by the sound of the word
on which it ends, force the direction of the next line, when the voice does not
subjugate speech, but tries only to conform to the irregular curves of reality,
to the rough terrain itself.”[5]
The question of open forms with respect to closure is How do
you know you’ve come to the end of the poem?
(Many formalists still might say, in so-called open forms, How do you
even know you are writing poetry?) The
answer is, You don’t. In fact, open forms
resist closure in the traditional sense.
In open forms, closure is artificial and does not “conform to the irregular
curves of reality, to the rough terrain itself.” This resistance is often called
“anti-closure,” but the characterization is filtered through a formally
traditional mindset. Closure provides a certainty. Put slightly differently, closure satisfies our need for certainty. But as Yeats once wrote in an essay, modern
poets “sing amid our uncertainty.”
I am wandering, like Kinnell’s natural poet. So let me finish by quoting Barbara
Herrnstein Smith once more: “Whereas the weak closure of much modern poetry can
be understood partly as the result of the prevalence of formal and thematic
structures that offer minimal resources for closure, the reverse is also
likely: the prevalence of free verse, for example, probably reflects, in part,
the impulse to anti-closure, the reaction against poems that ‘click like a
box.’” (242).
[1] Barbara
Hernnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study
of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1968. Here are the other
types of poetic closure she identifies: formal
closure and epigrammatic
closure. Hernnstein Smith also studies
what she calls “anti-closure” in modern poetry.
Poetic Closure: A Study of How
Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1968.
[2]
Hernnstein Smith argues that anti-closure exists throughout literary history and
across cultures, usually when one literary generation is trying to escape the
gravity of earlier literary generations, and in much Eastern or Oriental
poetry, which is not epigrammatic so much as imagistic. She also argues that serious modern Western poetry
assumes all forms of closure—thematic, structural, anti-closural—except the
epigrammatic, which is usually considered “light” or “cheap” and not
sufficiently poetic. Limerick is one
example. W.H. Auden might have had an
argument with this last point.
[3] My
italics here. For writers working in the open, so-called organic, forms,
process (the how of craft) is of less value than the what, which is the
becoming of a poem, its natural growth into itself. Writing in rhyme and meter,
moreover, encourages us to develop ready-made themes as well.
[4] I
might argue with this assertion. Not every writer of poems “naturally” wishes
to reach a new place. But every serious writer of poems, every artist, that is,
does wish to create something as new as he or she can make it, for that is what
an artist does.
[5]
Galway Kinnell, “The Poetics of the Physical World,” excerpted in The New Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry
in Open Forms, eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Pp. 133-34.
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