Natalie Ann Holborow

It’s the last line that gets you. You’ve been strolling through the poem, absorbing its essence – a striking metaphor here, an unexpected line break there – when suddenly, the ground drops out. Or maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps the poem ends like a slow tide edging out, so quietly you barely notice, until you find yourself standing on the wet sand, realising it’s over.

I always find that best endings don’t stitch you up – they press their fingers into the wound and look you in the eye, like: yeah, I know, me too. You need that moment where everything the poem has been saying pulls tight, snaps, and leaves you with the sound of the air rushing back in.

And it’s often one of the most challenging things to get right. I’ll tweak an ending countless times, day after day, until one day, frazzled and exasperated, it finally makes me feel something.

So, how can you create a poem ending with impact?

1. Peel the poem back to the core

The best endings feel like the moment when the poem steps out of its clothes, leaving everything bare, every artifice gone. To end a poem well, you have to know what you’ve been circling all along, the small, unspoken truth at its centre. It’s less about tying things up and more about unveiling. The ending is the point where the poem stops explaining itself and simply is.

Take Kim Addonizio’s What Do Women Want: that furious, raw exploration of desire. The red dress she fixates on throughout the poem isn’t just a dress – it’s a symbol of rebellion, defiance and unapologetic want:

“…When I find it, I’ll pull that garment

from its hanger like I’m choosing a body

to carry me into this world, through

the birth-cries and the love-cries too,

and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,

it’ll be the goddamned

dress they bury me in.”

By now we understand that the poem has been shedding layers, stripping down to the primal hunger at its core. The ending feels sharp and inevitable, like the poem has taken its own teeth to the bone.

Peeling back to the core doesn’t mean the poem has to scream its meaning, though. It can whisper, as it does in Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break (the very first poem that made me fall in love with poetry):

“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.”

The ending strips the grief to its rawest, simplest form. It doesn’t embellish; it doesn’t explain. The stark arithmetic of loss – a four-foot box for a four-year-old child – is all that’s left. The poem’s power lies in the restraint, in Heaney’s refusal to soften the blow or dress it up in metaphor. It lands like a weight in the reader’s chest, impossible to shake.

When ending a poem, ask yourself: what is this poem really about? Not the surface images or the clever metaphors, but the thing that drew you to write it in the first place. Maybe it’s about love, or grief, or the strange, wild joy of being alive. Whatever it is, the ending must deliver it, stripped down and undeniable; to show how it’s been there all along.

2. End with a nod, not a bow

A poem’s ending shouldn’t feel like a grand finale with fireworks and cymbals crashing. It’s more of a knowing glance, a raised eyebrow as the poet steps offstage. When you hear a satisfied hmm or a sigh at the end of a poetry reading, this is usually a sign you’ve got it right (if you’re attending a poetry reading and feel a ‘hmm’ or an ‘ahh’ coming on, let it out. Loudly. It reassures us that we’re doing okay).

Sometimes, it’s the image that does the work, holding everything you’ve built in the poem without breaking. The ending doesn’t explain – it offers the thing itself, like an open hand.

In Jericho Brown’s The Card Tables, the ending is a deceptively simple question:

“Didn’t that bare square ask to be played

On, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away,

All so we could call ourselves safe

Now that there was more room, a little more space?”

The poem ends with an understated irony: the safety created by folding the table and clearing space is not triumphant – it’s fragile, temporary. The word “safe” feels more like a wish than a certainty, and the “little more space” seems both necessary and insufficient. Notice how this tension amplifies the weight of those final lines? It resists closure, instead leaving us with a feeling of bittersweet survival, and a question about what safety and space really cost.

3. Leave room for the reader

A great ending doesn’t need to stamp the ticket as the reader exits. A poem’s final lines are most effective when they trust the reader to do some of the work – when they don’t over-explain, but instead leave space for interpretation, reflection, and discovery.

It helps to think of it this way: the best endings are less like the closing of a book and more like the folding of a map. You’ve been shown the terrain, the paths, and the landmarks, but now you’re left to decide where to go next.

Caroline Bird’s The Rags leaves room for the reader by refusing to tie its themes into a neat conclusion, so that the ending is as much about what is withheld as what is revealed. By focusing on a single, loaded image and allowing contradictions to coexist, Bird creates an ending that feels deeply human – raw, unresolved and painfully real:

“…you gather up the rags

and press them to your face

like the dress of a lover, hoping for

a slight effect, the remnants of a rush –

not enough to change your mind – just

enough to pacify the night.”

The speaker both craves and fears connection. They press the rags – symbols of their barricade against love – to their face, mimicking intimacy but only in the safest, smallest measure. The tension between wanting “a slight effect” and actively resisting change leaves the reader in a space of unresolved longing. 

By leaving the reader with a gesture rather than a conclusion, Bird ensures the poem’s emotional resonance continues beyond the final line. The reader isn’t given closure; they’re given a moment to sit in the speaker’s longing, perhaps now reflecting on their own.

A last word on poem endings

The best endings don’t hold the reader’s hand. They nod, they gesture, they murmur something just quiet enough that you have to lean in to hear it. And then they’re gone, leaving you to sit in the poem’s aftermath, figuring out what it all means.

During the editing process of my latest poetry collection, Little Universe, I learned that so many poem endings were in fact halfway up the poem and needed to cut there with no further explanation. It was a lesson in trusting my readers more, leaving the door open and peeling things right back to the core.

“Killing your darlings” can feel hard when you’ve got attached to certain images or conclusions, but sometimes dropping a powerful line can make those preceding it carry a weight you didn’t know they were capable of. As you write your own endings, remember to leave room. Trust your reader to carry the poem forward, to make something of the silence you’ve left behind. 

Because poetry, at its best, isn’t about closure: sometimes it’s about the opening that comes after the final line.