Thinking, Full Stop

This is an essay about how poems end, particularly how they end their thought processes. Looking at examples ranging from Emily Dickinson to Simonides, Shakespeare, and Herder, it demonstrates how poetic thinking proceeds by interrupting itself even as it reaches for a fitting last word or phrase to close analytical loops and scratch cognitive itches. It presents poetry as an art and act of settling the mind amid intellectual desire's unrest. Learning how to end, it ultimately suggests, is the poet's and poem's art of calibrating mind and world, through the membrane of the difference between words and things, thinking and dying.