Four short lines, no full stop, and a shrug big enough to cover the end of everything. That is the manner of "world", a poem that treats the apocalypse the way someone else might treat a late bus.
The speaker announces a policy: "I dont pay attention to the / world ending." The justification follows: "It has ended many times / And began again in the morning." A literal world can only end once, so the claim works only if "world" means something smaller and more personal: a friendship, a reputation, a bad year, a way of life that once seemed solid. The title supports this. It is lowercase and in quotation marks, as if the word were held at arm's length. The central idea is that endings are survivable, even routine, and that the plain return of morning outlasts any catastrophe. The phrase "many times" hints at a whole history of collapses without telling a single one of them, and that restraint makes the calm feel earned.
The line breaks do much of the work. The first line stops on "the", a word that cannot stand alone, so the sentence hangs for a moment before "world ending" arrives on a line of its own. The reader feels a small drop before being told what has fallen. "World ending" is then clipped and headline-like, two heavy words with no article to cushion them. As the poem is printed here, the second and third lines are indented by a single space, while the first and last sit flush with the margin. The dramatic middle is nudged back from the edge, and the opening statement and closing image stand firm.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only the rhythm of speech. But the sound is not random. "Ending" and "ended" repeat the same root, so the word for finishing keeps returning in the first half. In the second half, "began" and "again" chime with each other through their shared "-gan/-gain" sound. The poem's vocabulary moves from endings to beginnings, just as its claim does. The last two line-endings also differ. Line three closes on "times", a hard, clipped syllable, while line four trails off on "morning", two soft syllables. The poem finishes on its gentlest sound. A reader might even hear "mourning" inside "morning", grief and a new day sharing one word, though the poem never presses the point.
The grammar adds to the voice. "Dont" has no apostrophe, and there is no punctuation anywhere. The speaker sounds unfussy, as if talking rather than composing. Notice too the tense: "has ended" is followed by "began", where strict grammar would expect "begun". Whether or not it was deliberate, "began again" is how people actually talk, and the offhandedness suits a speaker who refuses to dramatize. The last line starts with "And", as though the sentence could carry on past the edge of the page. A poem about endings that never gets a full stop is a neat irony.
It is worth asking whether the calm can be trusted. Someone who says "I dont pay attention" has paid just enough attention to say so. The indifference might be hard-won wisdom, or it might be a defence, a way of not looking at something painful. The poem does not choose between these readings. Its flat tone allows both, and that ambiguity keeps four plain lines from becoming a slogan.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. In a handful of words it sets the language of disaster, "the world ending", against ordinary time, "the morning", and lets the ordinary win. Nothing about when or why it was written is supplied with it, and it doesn't need that context. Its authority comes from tone, from the dropped "the", the repeated "-end" and "-gan" sounds, and the soft landing on "morning". For students of poetry it shows how much a few choices about line breaks, punctuation and word endings can do.