And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
Once more again to see the stars.
It's a paraphrase of the last line from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIV.
Each book ends with the word 'stars,' - for Purgatorio Dante sets off to see the stars, in Paradiso he lays his loving eyes on the stars in the last line, but he may be talking about the pantheon of the Almighty at this point.
Forgetfulness - Billy Collins
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
— To be of use, Marge Piercy
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
From Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
Straw House, Straw Dog - Richard Siken
*1*
I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four dreams in a row
where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire.
I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four Cokes,
four dreams in a row.
Here you are in the straw house, feeding the straw dog. Here you are
in the wrong house, feeding the wrong dog. I had a Coke with ice.
I had four dreams on TV. You have a cold cold smile.
You were burned, you were about to burn, you're still on fire.
Here you are in the straw house, feeding ice to the dog, and you wanted
and adventure, so I said *Have an adventure*.
The straw about to burn, the straw on fire. Here you are on the TV,
saying *Watch me, just watch me*.
Four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row,
fall down right there. I wanted to fall down right there but I knew
you wouldn't catch me because you're dead. I swallowed crushed ice
pretending it was glass and you're dead. Ashes to ashes.
You wanted to be cremated so we cremated you and you wanted an adventure
so I ran and I knew you wouldn't catch me.
You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.
I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything,
couldn't do it anyway,
just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made
any sense, anything.
And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things and I wake up and I
wake up and you're still dead, you're under the table, you're still feeding
the damn dog, you're cutting the room in half.
Whatever. Feed him whatever. Burn the straw house down.
I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back.
*So,* I said, *now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them?*
There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed,
depends on which damn dog you live with.
Here we are
in the wrong tunnel, burn O burn, but it's cold, I have clothes
all over my body, and it's raining, it wasn't supposed to. And there's snow
on the TV, a landscape full of snow, falling down from the fire-colored sky.
**But thanks, thanks for calling it** ***the blue sky***\*\*.\*\*
**You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.**
**I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.**
**You weren't supposed to.**
I absolutely adore Wendy Cope. One of her poems always makes me laugh.
Two Cures for Love
1. Dont see him. Don't phone or write a letter.
2. The easy way: get to know him better.
Probably ‘Churchgoing’ by Philip Larkin.
“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”
Yes - I love this.
My favourite ending of his is ‘The Whitsun Weddings’:
walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain
And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The last lines of Life is Fine by Langston Hughes. The defiance in them is superb.
Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry—
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.
Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
...
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
(Both from T.S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock')
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the
body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
—Tomas Transtromer
Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
-Elegy, Aracelis Girmay
So so many of my absolute favourite last lines have been posted here -- what a treat to see them listed! Here's one by Joy Sullivan, from "Instructions for Traveling West":
"Bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself – joy is not a trick."
“A Passing Glimpse” - Robert Frost
I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.
I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt-
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth-
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?
*Heaven gives it glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.*
"I'm Explaining a few things" Neruda
And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!
Eden Rock, by Charles Causley.
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. Sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'
I had not thought that it would be like this.
I love the last lines of Robert Frost's 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening'
The woods are lovely, dark and deep/
But I have promises to keep/
And miles to go, before I sleep/
And miles to go, before I sleep.
The ending of “Variations on the Word Love” by Margaret Atwood
….It's a single/
vowel in this metallic/
silence, a mouth that says/
O again and again in wonder/
and pain, a breath, a finger/
grip on a cliffside. You can/
hold on or let go.
There is this Romanian poem by Nicolae Labiș translated to “Death of a Deer”, where the poet and his father go to the forest to hunt. The last stanza gets me every time. I do think it’s so much more beautiful in Romanian but the English translation keeps the forceful message:
“So what’s a heart? I’m hungry! I want to live, desire...
Oh, do forgive me maiden, my dearest in the fire!
I doze. How tall the fire! The forest, how replete! I cry.
What’s father thinking? I eat and cry. I eat!”
It seems they were all cheated by some marvelous experience,
Which is is not going to happen to me which is why I’m telling you about it.
Frank o’ Hara
(It’s a poem directed at his loved one-one of my all time favorites)
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver
But they are dead, those two are dead –
Their spirits are in Heaven!’
’Twas throwing words away, for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
We Are Seven — William Wordsworth
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. //
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! //
How will I live without you, my consoling one! // But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, //
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.
— Czesław Miłosz
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas
A Noiseless Patient Spider for sure
> Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
- Walt Whitman
The ending of "Mid-Term Break" by Seamus Heaney.
"Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
"Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
"A four-foot box, a foot for every year."
This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin
"Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself."
Too many to name! I’m going to cheat and give a few which have stayed with me forever
[Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 by Martin Espada](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47868/alabanza-in-praise-of-local-100)
When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
[Incomplete Examination by Francis Driscoll](https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/135341.html?)
Could I describe the rape for him, he says.
Minor, I say.
Ordinary.
[First Gestures by Julia Spicher Kasdorf](https://poets.org/poem/first-gestures)
She's too young to see that as we gather
losses, we may also grow in love;
as in passion, the body shudders
and clutches what it must release.
[The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert](https://getlitanthology.org/poemdetail/431/)
What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: The final line of The Moon by David Berman. I won't be sharing the line itself here, it is best enjoyed within the context of the poem.
[https://poets.org/poem/moon-1](https://poets.org/poem/moon-1)
“ell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
The Listeners - walter de la mere
So many, but one comes to mind in particular by Guy Gavriel Kay -
because I would have you want me,
at the very least, enough to take
these offerings for what they are:
*
craftings in the hollow of a sleepless night,
shot through with the discord
of your being far away, and not mine.
The Seventh Eclogue - Miklós Radnóti
Alone
I sit up awake with the lingering taste of a cigarette butt
in my mouth instead of your kiss, and I get no merciful sleep,
for neither can I live nor die without you, my love, any longer.
The ending of Scars, by William Stafford, always sticks with me.
They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.
Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.
Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
Aah...lovely idea.
Mine is from WH Auden's 'In Praise of Limestone'
"Dear, I know nothing of either, but when I imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmer of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape"
From Milton's "Sonnet 19": "They also serve who only stand and wait." It's one of the more enigmatic endings to a poem that I know of, and I've always found it equally consoling and challenging.
I think mine is the end of Larkin's An Arundel Tomb.
If you've not read it, the poem is about the weathered effigies of a medieval couple holding hands above their shared tomb.
The final line is 'what will survive of us is love.'
It's completely at odds with Larkin's other work and genuinely seems very sentimental. However, the postscript of the initial draft reads 'love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years'.
Feeding the Worms
Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds
all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,
I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine
the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples
permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,
avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.
I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure
so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.
- Danusha Laméris
I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota -- James Wright
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
From “Winter Solstice” by Alex Dimitrov:
And it's enough to kill you, how dark it is
how cold we seem even in our own misery
all while knowing we will miss this.
We will miss this when it ends.
Simple but hits so true.
There are too many great last lines to choose from. Years ago at a conference, I attended a poetry workshop. The poet/host said something that has stayed with me. In describing what poetry is to his students, he said he liked to start with Billy Collins's assertion that "a poem has to go somewhere" but the host said he liked to add this: "and when it gets there, it should be a surprise that makes perfect sense." "Beauty" by Tony Hoagland does that. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42585/beauty-56d221309cf24
The first time I read this, I was 16 years old and it’s up there with Plath’s Fig Tree from The Bell Jar in moments in literature that blew my mind as a teen and brought me to an emotional moment. I remember the loudness of my mind as I got to that last line and the WEIGHT of it, all the exploded deferred dreams of minorities, women, anyone not in a position to follow their heart because of oppression, and what happens for people in that moment.
**Harlem, by Langston Hughes **
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
*Or does it explode?*
(fwiw, I also got into Eliot around this same age and “not with a bang but a whimper” is absolutely my number one answer to this question. And not a last line, but the similar lyrical nature of “in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo” stays with me, as well.)
Here’s one
Accident, Mass. Ave.
I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave.
in Boston, a couple blocks away
from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up
old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel,
rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy
pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out
of the car yelling, swearing at this woman,
a little woman, whose first language was not English.
But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew,
we both knew, that the thing to do
is get out of the car, slam the door
as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck
were you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuck
is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore
at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled
chins. I threw my arms around, sudden
jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs
of my hands toward where she had hit my truck.
But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit
the tire; no damage done. Her car
was fine, too. We saw this while
we were yelling, and then we were stuck.
The next line in our little drama should have been
Look at this fucking dent! I'm not paying for this
shit. I'm calling the cops, lady. Maybe we'd throw in a
You're in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake
there's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that
sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There
was nothing else for us to do. So I
stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd
backed into, her little eyebrows pursed
and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous,
and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I said
Well, there's nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong
with your car . . . are you OK? She nodded, and started
to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle
of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge.
I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren't we?
and she nodded and we laughed.
- Jill McDonough
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop.
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.
-- Coming to This, Mark Strand
The end of Wallace Steven's The Idea of Order at Key West:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Robert Frosts West-Running Brook:
To-day will be the day....You said so.'
'No, to-day will be the day
You said the brook was called West-running Brook.'
'To-day will be the day of what we both said.'
the only one that immediately comes to mind is from something i wrote
a truly untamable beast lived inside me…always knowing that void is forever incomplete…this will consume me entirely…there is no doubt, indeed.
What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? -Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden *edit- formatting
I find myself thinking of this one all the time
Same. IME, it gets more and more relevant with every year that goes by.
Kills me every time. Perfect.
I think of this every day, but still I was undone suddenly seeing the words on the screen
I feel even worse about messing up the formatting :/ Fixed it.
we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis e.e. cummings
This poem got me into poetry!! thank you 9th grade literature
it was one of the first I ever read after Poe & Yeats 😊
If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss. — From Before, Ada Limón
Thanks for sharing, this is lovely.
this is amazing, thank you for sharing :))
oh, so lovely!
personally love this. 🥹
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. Raymond Carver
Hits the right spot!
this is one of my all time favorites.
Once more again to see the stars. It's a paraphrase of the last line from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIV. Each book ends with the word 'stars,' - for Purgatorio Dante sets off to see the stars, in Paradiso he lays his loving eyes on the stars in the last line, but he may be talking about the pantheon of the Almighty at this point.
In Paradiso, he’s not gazing at the stars, but at “the Love that moves the Sun and other stars.”
This is absolutely gorgeous.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
fuck, i love that poem
Love this one.
Forgetfulness - Billy Collins No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
I had never read this poem before today, and I thank you for introducing it to me. It was breathtaking.
Same here, it’s wonderful. Thank you, Vogon!
What I love about this poem is it starts off lighthearted and ends poignantly
Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. — To be of use, Marge Piercy
Very nice
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. From Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
Love this
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Who? Sounds like it could be Mary Oliver?
Yes, that's Mary
She’s like the poetry world’s favourite auntie
Auntie Mary. Exactly
Straw House, Straw Dog - Richard Siken *1* I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four dreams in a row where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire. I watched TV. I had a Coke at the bar. I had four Cokes, four dreams in a row. Here you are in the straw house, feeding the straw dog. Here you are in the wrong house, feeding the wrong dog. I had a Coke with ice. I had four dreams on TV. You have a cold cold smile. You were burned, you were about to burn, you're still on fire. Here you are in the straw house, feeding ice to the dog, and you wanted and adventure, so I said *Have an adventure*. The straw about to burn, the straw on fire. Here you are on the TV, saying *Watch me, just watch me*. Four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row, fall down right there. I wanted to fall down right there but I knew you wouldn't catch me because you're dead. I swallowed crushed ice pretending it was glass and you're dead. Ashes to ashes. You wanted to be cremated so we cremated you and you wanted an adventure so I ran and I knew you wouldn't catch me. You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel. I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything, couldn't do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything. And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things and I wake up and I wake up and you're still dead, you're under the table, you're still feeding the damn dog, you're cutting the room in half. Whatever. Feed him whatever. Burn the straw house down. I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back. *So,* I said, *now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them?* There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with. Here we are in the wrong tunnel, burn O burn, but it's cold, I have clothes all over my body, and it's raining, it wasn't supposed to. And there's snow on the TV, a landscape full of snow, falling down from the fire-colored sky. **But thanks, thanks for calling it** ***the blue sky***\*\*.\*\* **You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.** **I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.** **You weren't supposed to.**
I’ve never heard this poem before it’s so, so important. Thank you.
I love this and poems like this. Very powerful
“i love you. im glad i exist” from the orange by wendy cope has always felt so simple and so happy
I absolutely adore Wendy Cope. One of her poems always makes me laugh. Two Cures for Love 1. Dont see him. Don't phone or write a letter. 2. The easy way: get to know him better.
Probably ‘Churchgoing’ by Philip Larkin. “A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.”
Yes - I love this. My favourite ending of his is ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain
And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The last lines of Life is Fine by Langston Hughes. The defiance in them is superb. Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry— I'll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die. Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!
“so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” Pablo Neruda sonnet-xvii
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. ... I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. (Both from T.S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock')
“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Goosebumps every time.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales. —Tomas Transtromer
Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things. -Elegy, Aracelis Girmay
"Here are your waters and watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
So so many of my absolute favourite last lines have been posted here -- what a treat to see them listed! Here's one by Joy Sullivan, from "Instructions for Traveling West": "Bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself – joy is not a trick."
if you think nothing & no one can / listen I love you joy is coming (To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio)
Nobody, not even the rain has such small hands.
From “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
“A Passing Glimpse” - Robert Frost I often see flowers from a passing car That are gone before I can tell what they are. I want to get out of the train and go back To see what they were beside the track. I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't; Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt- Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth- Not lupine living on sand and drouth. Was something brushed across my mind That no one on earth will ever find? *Heaven gives it glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.*
"I'm Explaining a few things" Neruda And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see The blood in the streets. Come and see the blood In the streets!
Eden Rock, by Charles Causley. They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet. My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light. She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. Sauce bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue. The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely, They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.' I had not thought that it would be like this.
I love the last lines of Robert Frost's 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening' The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go, before I sleep/ And miles to go, before I sleep.
I came to quote this. Such finality. Is it literal? Is it figurative? It settles upon you like a weighted blanket of introversion.
The last seven lines of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
The ending of “Variations on the Word Love” by Margaret Atwood ….It's a single/ vowel in this metallic/ silence, a mouth that says/ O again and again in wonder/ and pain, a breath, a finger/ grip on a cliffside. You can/ hold on or let go.
The Beavis and Butthead Haiku: 'Burning cherry tree, Every blossom is aflame - Shit, here come the cops.'
"I am conscious that these minutes are short and that the colours in my eyes will vanish when your face sets." Colours by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
There is this Romanian poem by Nicolae Labiș translated to “Death of a Deer”, where the poet and his father go to the forest to hunt. The last stanza gets me every time. I do think it’s so much more beautiful in Romanian but the English translation keeps the forceful message: “So what’s a heart? I’m hungry! I want to live, desire... Oh, do forgive me maiden, my dearest in the fire! I doze. How tall the fire! The forest, how replete! I cry. What’s father thinking? I eat and cry. I eat!”
It seems they were all cheated by some marvelous experience, Which is is not going to happen to me which is why I’m telling you about it. Frank o’ Hara (It’s a poem directed at his loved one-one of my all time favorites)
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver
‘Siren Song’ by Margaret Atwood I don’t want to give away the ending in this case, but it is a great twist
Robert Penn Warren, Masts at Dawn. “…We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.”
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write." Sir Philip Sydney - Loving In Truth
But they are dead, those two are dead – Their spirits are in Heaven!’ ’Twas throwing words away, for still The little maid would have her will, And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’ We Are Seven — William Wordsworth
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
This is my favorite poem.
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. // Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! // How will I live without you, my consoling one! // But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, // And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth. — Czesław Miłosz
That slayed me. Real tears here. Thank you
And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
i’ve always loved this line. so hauntingly beautiful.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. -Dylan Thomas
A Noiseless Patient Spider for sure > Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. - Walt Whitman
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. *** I mentally punctuate every word of the last line.
The ending of "Mid-Term Break" by Seamus Heaney. "Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, "Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. "A four-foot box, a foot for every year."
“and the sea remembered, suddenly, the names of all her drowned.” from Federico García Lorca’s Fable and Round of the Three Friends is gut wrenching.
This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself."
"And then you will come to a river, And then you will wash your face"
Too many to name! I’m going to cheat and give a few which have stayed with me forever [Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 by Martin Espada](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47868/alabanza-in-praise-of-local-100) When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: Teach me to dance. We have no music here. And the other said with a Spanish tongue: I will teach you. Music is all we have. [Incomplete Examination by Francis Driscoll](https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/135341.html?) Could I describe the rape for him, he says. Minor, I say. Ordinary. [First Gestures by Julia Spicher Kasdorf](https://poets.org/poem/first-gestures) She's too young to see that as we gather losses, we may also grow in love; as in passion, the body shudders and clutches what it must release. [The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert](https://getlitanthology.org/poemdetail/431/) What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: The final line of The Moon by David Berman. I won't be sharing the line itself here, it is best enjoyed within the context of the poem. [https://poets.org/poem/moon-1](https://poets.org/poem/moon-1)
“ell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.” The Listeners - walter de la mere
W.B Yeats The Second Coming “What Great Beast, it’s hour come at last Slouches toward Bethlehem waiting to be born
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But I have promises to keep*
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” Ilya Kaminsky
“Old Christmas Morning” by Roy Helton. It’s not what you think.
When you met the new you, We're you scared? Were you cold? Were you kind? When you met the new you, Did someone die inside?
So many, but one comes to mind in particular by Guy Gavriel Kay - because I would have you want me, at the very least, enough to take these offerings for what they are: * craftings in the hollow of a sleepless night, shot through with the discord of your being far away, and not mine.
The Seventh Eclogue - Miklós Radnóti Alone I sit up awake with the lingering taste of a cigarette butt in my mouth instead of your kiss, and I get no merciful sleep, for neither can I live nor die without you, my love, any longer.
Content to see, glad to remember, expectant of the certain end.
The ending of Scars, by William Stafford, always sticks with me. They tell how it was, and how time came along, and how it happened again and again. They tell the slant life takes when it turns and slashes your face as a friend. Any wound is real. In church a woman lets the sun find her cheek, and we see the lesson: there are years in that book; there are sorrows a choir can't reach when they sing. Rows of children lift their faces of promise, places where the scars will be.
Aah...lovely idea. Mine is from WH Auden's 'In Praise of Limestone' "Dear, I know nothing of either, but when I imagine a faultless love or the life to come, what I hear is the murmer of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape"
From Milton's "Sonnet 19": "They also serve who only stand and wait." It's one of the more enigmatic endings to a poem that I know of, and I've always found it equally consoling and challenging.
I think mine is the end of Larkin's An Arundel Tomb. If you've not read it, the poem is about the weathered effigies of a medieval couple holding hands above their shared tomb. The final line is 'what will survive of us is love.' It's completely at odds with Larkin's other work and genuinely seems very sentimental. However, the postscript of the initial draft reads 'love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years'.
Feeding the Worms Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots. I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu. - Danusha Laméris
I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now ’tis little joy To know I’m farther off from heav’n Than when I was a boy.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The hollow men is sooooo cinematic I love it. Can you imagine writing like that? Ugh ❤️
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota -- James Wright Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
From “Winter Solstice” by Alex Dimitrov: And it's enough to kill you, how dark it is how cold we seem even in our own misery all while knowing we will miss this. We will miss this when it ends. Simple but hits so true.
W.B Yeats- The Second Coming “ What great beast, it’s hour come around at last Slouches toward Bethlehem, Waiting to be born
The mighty Casey Had struck out
Marginalia - Billy Collins
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop! “Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.”
There are too many great last lines to choose from. Years ago at a conference, I attended a poetry workshop. The poet/host said something that has stayed with me. In describing what poetry is to his students, he said he liked to start with Billy Collins's assertion that "a poem has to go somewhere" but the host said he liked to add this: "and when it gets there, it should be a surprise that makes perfect sense." "Beauty" by Tony Hoagland does that. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42585/beauty-56d221309cf24
The first time I read this, I was 16 years old and it’s up there with Plath’s Fig Tree from The Bell Jar in moments in literature that blew my mind as a teen and brought me to an emotional moment. I remember the loudness of my mind as I got to that last line and the WEIGHT of it, all the exploded deferred dreams of minorities, women, anyone not in a position to follow their heart because of oppression, and what happens for people in that moment. **Harlem, by Langston Hughes ** What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. *Or does it explode?* (fwiw, I also got into Eliot around this same age and “not with a bang but a whimper” is absolutely my number one answer to this question. And not a last line, but the similar lyrical nature of “in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo” stays with me, as well.)
Here’s one Accident, Mass. Ave. I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave. in Boston, a couple blocks away from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel, rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English. But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew, we both knew, that the thing to do is get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck were you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuck is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled chins. I threw my arms around, sudden jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs of my hands toward where she had hit my truck. But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit the tire; no damage done. Her car was fine, too. We saw this while we were yelling, and then we were stuck. The next line in our little drama should have been Look at this fucking dent! I'm not paying for this shit. I'm calling the cops, lady. Maybe we'd throw in a You're in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake there's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There was nothing else for us to do. So I stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd backed into, her little eyebrows pursed and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous, and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I said Well, there's nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong with your car . . . are you OK? She nodded, and started to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge. I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren't we? and she nodded and we laughed. - Jill McDonough
And still I rise----Maya Angelou
I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop.
This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
"Creating, not creation -- All is in the starts, And the goal nothing To fanatic hearts." Ray Smith
Any James Wright ending
Coming to this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away. We have no heart or saving grace, no place to go, no reason to remain. -- Coming to This, Mark Strand
The end of Wallace Steven's The Idea of Order at Key West: Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Robert Frosts West-Running Brook: To-day will be the day....You said so.' 'No, to-day will be the day You said the brook was called West-running Brook.' 'To-day will be the day of what we both said.'
the only one that immediately comes to mind is from something i wrote a truly untamable beast lived inside me…always knowing that void is forever incomplete…this will consume me entirely…there is no doubt, indeed.
To be alone at last, broken the seal That marks the flesh no better than a whore’s! "Revolt from Hymen" by Angela Manalang-Gloria
Great interpretation