After suggesting, to many of my students’ dismay, that the poem isn’t the paean to uniqueness that innumerable high school valedictory addresses claim it is, I ask them why it might have been that Robert Frost would have written so poorly in those stanzas that very few readers can be taxed to read them, given that he obviously knew how to choose powerful words (hence the poster-quotable, soundbyte qualities of the language in the first and last stanzas, which people do read). The diction in those stanzas consists of a mere two images, one of which (“grassy”) is hastily hung between a weak being-verb and a soporific alliteration; the other of which (“leaves no step had trodden black”) is vivid only by dint of its negation. This is certainly not technicolor diction, nor is this diction energized by active verbs or affirmative syntax, as the diction in the first and last stanzas surely are. Further diluting the strength of these middle stanzas are these prosaic equivocating phrases and qualifiers: “as just as fair,” “as having perhaps,” “though as for that,” “really about.” The hemming and hawing of these stanzas has all the gracelessness of a low-rate insurance policy! And for that reason, the gracelessness is productive, for it textually recreates what is essentially the muddle of most of our present moments, in high contrast to the high purpose with which we approach those moments when they still belong to the future (the declarative crispness of stanza one) and the great significance we ascribe to them when they become part of our past (the absolute yet wistful tone of the last stanza).

A third type of gracelessness in poetry has to do with endings. Every four years, when the summer Olympics play out and I indulge my fascination with gymnastics, I find myself saying things in workshops like, “You have to stick the landing.” That sounds good, but what does it mean? Early in our apprenticeship in poetry, sticking the landing often means landing the poem on two solid feet, with full closure, a bit of fireworks or epiphany at the end, a rhythmic blossoming and skipping, followed by a smoothing-out. Indeed, it’s important to close some poems in this full way. Where would poetry be without the closing to Yeats’s “Second Coming” (with all its tympanic prophecy): “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” But some of the most memorable endings land on one foot, off-balance. They close without true closure or without symmetry. The reader is left waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn’t. This is the way the world ends, T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men,” not with a bang but with a whimper, aptly ending the poem on an unstressed syllable. Sometimes our poems should end with a whimper. Modern orchestral music can give us examples here; compared to the pyrotechnics and orgasmic conclusion of a Beethoven piece, modern music often ends, well, anti-climactically.

And why might that be a good thing? There are many possible reasons, and they vary from situation to situation. We can use the old show business slogan in a lot of cases: Leave them wanting more. Or, to be more theoretically sophisticated, we could say that off-balance endings leave the reader with something to contemplate rather than doing all the work for the reader. If 75% of all poetry is rooted in human longing, then it just might make sense for some conclusions not to satisfy. Conclusions are the most-revised parts of any poem. In a first draft, just to get my ideas down, I might build a full conclusion complete with moral, punchline, etc. But conclusions like that often do worse than satisfy: They sate. You know, like too much stuffing on Thanksgiving. Not every day is Thanksgiving. Not every poem should sate at the end.