David Epstein : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished? 

Being finished is the question of “closure” which means that one has to balance the opening, the reason for the poem’s conditions and the work the poem attempted.  One can have openings where the closing is in an entirely different mode. This is very hard to respond to abstractly.  At the simplest level, closure is accessible in rhymed couplets.  Frost: 

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village--    

And if one stops there, anyone can fill in the end-rhyme: though.  

At the conceptual level of an entire poem, there are any number of methods of closure, and what closure means or how it is enacted changes, across time, across cultures.  What we get for ancient Chinese poems is usually highly eidetic; ditto Haiku.  We are left with an image, and our own emotions and associations are the closural aspect of such image-based evocations.  

What I am looking for in terms of finishing a poem is a point where a circle of textual mirrors reinforces the tropes of meaning within the poem.  That is highly abstract, and I don’t want to punt and use the cliché of knowing it when one sees it.  This is craft, at its highest level, and being able to finish, a poem should combine insight, homily, image, all in such a way that we feel satisfied, even if we’re finished off by a rhetorical interrogative.  The best questions reveal the conditions of the world. In terms of the poem being completed, I’m looking for a poem that has both open and closed doors.  If the ends are all tied up and there are no open questions, that’s no good.  Leave me pondering and exploring, not putting on my coat and going home.  

Here’s an example of a poem that I find fulfilling in all these aspects, by Angela Shaw.  It’s called “Children in a Field,” a poem of seventeen lines (from The Beginning of the Fields, Tupelo Press: 2009).

The opening line is so good: “They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.”  And the poem describes the grasses in animation, how the field draws in the children.  And about a third in, the poem, which, by drawing the reader in, positions us like the wading children, the poem declares: “It is the way of girls. It is the sway/ of their dresses in the summer trance-/ light…”  And we’re in the realm of youth, of generativeness of both fields and of women.  Then the poem questions: “What songs will they follow?”  The poem answers, but I won’t spoil it for you.  And then the poem admonishes: “Let them go. Let them go traceless…”  into this realm of beyond the field, beyond what we can know, “…to the long dark bodies/ of the conifers, and over the welcoming/ threshold of nightfall.”

Reading this poem at the level of metaphor, the field is time, and the threshold of nightfall is the end of our apprehension.  It is a poem of imagery, of generations, and what it means to be a member of one, and not a member of another.   It is evocative, moving, instructional without pedantry.  Closure, in this poem, allows us to grasp the possibility of accepting one’s place in a scheme of mortality.  It is ineluctably sad in a most luscious way.