Most love poems promise that love will last. "finale" tells the opposite story: love is the one that wears out. Addressed directly "to Love," the poem treats it as a fire-bringing presence, half god and half old acquaintance. It lit the speaker, changed him, and then walked away. Everything after that is aftermath.
The poem's logic turns on a reversal in the third stanza. "We did not get tired of ourselves / but you, just as you first burnt us, / seemed to get nothing but death again - / you got tired of us." Normally we blame lovers for love's failure. Here the lovers stay loyal and Love is the one who tires. The word "again" suggests a cycle: the same force that gave life ("burnt us") also returns to death, as though ending were its natural habit. The speaker's hedge, "seemed," leaves room for doubt. He cannot be sure what Love felt, only what he was left with.
Fire carries the whole poem. In the first stanza it "crackled a coal" and Love's breath "burnt me." By the fourth it has become an "eerie glow," what remains when flames have gone, and finally "my final fire desponds." The last verb is the most striking choice. "Desponds" is rare, a back-formation from "despondency," and the poem has already used that noun twice. Despair first appears as a mood the speaker lives in, then reappears as an action the fire itself performs. The speaker's inner weather has taken over the last thing he had to burn.
That repeated phrase, "even in my same ever despondency," frames the poem like bookends. In stanza one it comes just before the claim that he "changed for this world," so despair is there before the change and survives it. In stanza four it "returns like your eerie glow." Love's light and the speaker's gloom are drawn together, and the word "eerie" makes the afterglow feel haunted rather than warm.
The imagery turns stranger in the second stanza. "Twinkle-fingers" has a playful, almost childish sound, a hyphenated invention that makes Love seem light and teasing. Yet the speaker finds his comfort "hovering over the corpse that bears the lust, / mildness and wishful thinking all the same." The corpse is presumably what is left of the love affair, though the poem never says so outright. The picture is of someone keeping a vigil, and the list it carries is deflating. Lust, mildness and wishful thinking sit together as equals, and the phrase "all the same" suggests the speaker can no longer tell passion from self-deception. Comfort here is a bleak kind, drawn from watching something die.
Formally, the poem is four quatrains of free verse with no regular rhyme scheme. Its lines run uneven, with no fixed meter, so it reads like speech, halting and slightly awkward. Some of the syntax is strained ("crackled a coal," "I bid you hastily"), and the final sentence leaves its object missing. Whether the roughness is deliberate is a matter of inference, but it fits a speaker too worn down for polish. Punctuation helps the effect. Stanzas one to three run on with almost no full stops, and the only period in the poem arrives at the very end. The last line, "my final fire desponds," falls into a neat rhythm of rising and falling stresses, a small click of order after the loose lines before it, like a door being shut.
The title adds to this. "finale" is a musical term for the closing section of a piece, and the lowercase letters make the announcement quiet instead of grand. The "old friend" of the last stanza shows how the speaker says goodbye. There is no rage and no curse, only the weary courtesy of someone leaving a companion who has already left him. "For if not then," he says, he will lose even his final fire, which makes the farewell sound like self-preservation.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it dismantles the idea of love as eternal. Love here is mortal, even fickle, and the person who loved is the one who must go on living. It is a short, dark poem, and its sadness is hard to dismiss because it comes with so little decoration.