All things must come to an end. Years come to a close, and seasons change as life moves on and continues forward. Richard Wilbur’s poem, Year’s End, focuses on the end of a season as life moves on and continues. The narrator examines his surroundings and discusses how life, ideas, and moments often end with no warning but in seconds. The end of the year is compared to the last vestiges of life that occur within a person or a place before all is lost and gone forever. The melancholy tone sets the stage for someone coming to terms with the end of this season of life.
The poem is divided into five stanzas consisting of 6 lines, each with a rhyme scheme that pairs the first and fourth lines, the second and third lines, and the fifth and sixth lines together. The rhyme scheme gives the poem its cadence, which feels hymn-like in nature and could be used in a recessional performance. The poem is reliant on allusions that expect the reader to be well versed in history and large natural disasters that left their make on the Earth. The use of the wooly mammoth extinction story pairs with the idea of winter, and what was considered the “changeless age of ice” came to an end and drove these massive creatures to extinction. All of these moments are caught in snapshots at the moment when everything fell apart. The narrator only discusses the fall of Pompeii underneath Vesuvius’s ash and not the thriving city it was in its prime. The poem does not discuss how great life was in these places but focuses instead on their fall and what was left when it all came to an end. These “sudden ends of time” came with very little warning and left destruction in their wake as people thought that they had more time. The moment when autumn turns into winter completely sneaks up on people after false alarms and brief autumnal weather, but the people and animals do not heed nature’s warning and become caught in the disaster. Disaster comes fast and often strikes quicker than expected, leaving people reeling in its wake. “Men expecting another sun” realize too late that their time has come and that they will not escape to see the new year and the new beginning taking hold. People and animals are rarely prepared for the worst, to the extent that they are often left grasping straws when everything suddenly ends.
Each stanza specifically focuses on a disaster or ending that changed the world irrevocably. Early people valued mammoths, and when they died, people lost not only a food source but also a source of materials to help them brave the winters and the snow. Vesuvius’s eruption disrupted trade across the Mediterranean and left thousands of people displaced and looking for shelter. Stanza four’s ending continues the idea of people left lacking when the narrator notes that people were unprepared to die because of “the shapely thing they had not done.” This moment in the poem recognizes that people may have unfinished business when the world ends, but humans often do not finish every project by the year’s end. How many people have not met their New Year’s resolution as the clock strikes midnight and continues on? People often end certain seasons of their lives with regrets or without saying goodbye when they move on from the people around them. Seasons change, and so do people. People grow and find themselves when they can, but sometimes, our season as one person must come to an end. The narrator reminds the audience that “the sudden ends of time gives us pause” to evaluate the next steps when so many are often left scrambling. Seasons come to an end, and lifetimes come to a close, after which they change the world completely from what it was before. If change and disaster were such a dangerous place to live, then where would we go for the next adventure? How have you felt as the world stands in the balance between one year and the next waiting for that one spontaneous moment?
Thanks for sharing this reading! What I find so fascinating in this poem is the tension between the clearly articulated despair at life’s passing and the extraordinary beauty with which this fleeting is rendered as we “fray into the future / rarely wrought.” The poem itself, then, becomes a monument–a well-wrought moment against the passage of time. I’m always struck by how conservative so many formal poems are–not in a political sense, but in a sense that they do their best to conserve or preserve something essential.
I’m also fascinated by the way media intrudes at the end–the muffled applause on the radio. This commercialization and celebration of time’s passing. To me, that seems to change the mood of the poem–to detract from its monumental qualify (as a fern imprinted in stone).
I really enjoy your reading of this poem. I think melancholy is the perfect word to describe the tone. It wasn’t despondent, it felt like more of a settled grief. Perhaps a way-of-the-world poem. I found it exceptionally beautiful as a picture of winter, both in its stillness and tone.