Echoing End: Fray Luis de León's "Oda en la Ascensión"

A concern with endings has been central to the study of narrative form as well as to inquiries into the cognitive and/or psychological desire for closure. In the stories we read, as much as in the stories we craft from chaotic experience into what we call our lives, "the end" represents a longing for the vanishing point of trauma, conflict, or uncertainty. From Walter Benjamin's meditations on storytelling to the psychoanalytic-inflected work of Peter Brooks, or Frank Kermode's classic lectures on the Sense of an Ending, endings have been inextricably bound to the meaning of narrative as such.¹ Linked by analogy to our own mortality, narrative endings become for all these thinkers tiny rehearsals in dealing with death. What's more, Kermode argues, the end not only completes narrative as form but more importantly, it graces the story with meaning. And it is through this retrospection—the Archimedean external point from which the whole can be viewed and comprehended—that literary endings may provide readers with some consolation.²

In contrast, with very few exceptions, little attention has been paid to lyric endings.

Giorgio Agamben writes in 1996 with some urgency about the need to examine what he calls, "a poetic institution that has until now remained unidentified: the end of the poem" (109).³ Indeed, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book Poetic Closure, which came out in 1968, one year after Kermode's, is the most exhaustive and systematic study of "how poems end" in the Anglo-American tradition. And while she claims in the introduction that she is more interested in matters of structure and form than in the psychological or existential aspects of "closure," she is as invested as Kermode in meaning-making; that is to say, in the proposition that literary works do not just stop but rather they come to an appropriate conclusion. A poem, unlike a sonata, she writes, does not simply end in a satisfactory resolution of built-in expectations and tensions but it also tells a story: "the argument is clinched, the catalogue of praise is exhausted, the lament is brought to some point of acceptable conclusion" (5). It is this last point that I wish to contest through an examination of the end (or really the ends) of Fray Luis de León's "Oda en la Ascensión."

Agamben's work is also aware of the double citizenship of poetic form in both the realms of the semantic and the semiotic (109), but for him, the "end of the poem" is not the place where these two aspects of language finally coincide. Instead, the "end of the poem" enacts the impossibility of the fulfillment of sense and the completion of form.³ He takes as point of departure a definition of poetry as the linguistic event where the possibility of enjambment—the hesitation of sound or rhythm to follow sense—exists.⁴ From this perspective, then, the end of the poem is at once part of the poem and separate from it; unable to run into the next line, the end does not belong to poetry. That is why, according to him, poems resist coming to this end and poets create devices such as the envoi or the rhyming couplet which allow the poem to conclude by breaking from what came before so that in fact it is something else that ends. The end of the poem thus resists the philosophical dream of the ultimate coincidence of logos and phone—of achieving final comprehension by "collapsing into silence." This silence, in turn, reveals the poem's true end according to Agamben: "to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said" (115). As will become clear in what follows, not all poems follow the Italian philosopher all the way to this communicative silence. But I do take to heart Agamben's warning not to confuse ending with closure as well as his call for readers to attend to the workings of the last verse as a privileged site of insights into...