Kenneth Fearing's "Conclusion" is a prophecy delivered in the second person, and its trick is that the prophecy sounds like a blessing. "You will give praise to all things, praise without end," it begins, and for a few lines the speaker seems to promise a contented life: serene days, undisturbed sleep, no faith that is hard, no love that is false. The poem's real subject is the opposite of what these lines advertise. It describes a person who has stopped judging anything, whose agreeableness has hollowed out their moral life until nothing remains but approval.
The key word is "praise," and Fearing shows how it curdles. At first it is harmless: "idly in the morning, bluntly at noon, cunningly with the evening cigar." That last adverb is the first hint of trouble, since praise delivered "cunningly" is no longer sincere but a strategy. By the second stanza the object of praise has become the "thousand quacks," the magnate who speaks of "sacrifice," the "routine killer" and the "loud suburban heroes." Fearing parodies the language of scripture here. "For theirs is the kingdom," "For his is the power," "For theirs is the glory forever and ever" echo the closing doxology of the Lord's Prayer, as if power itself had become the thing worshipped. The reader can feel the speaker's irony: the "you" of the poem has swapped devotion to God for devotion to whoever happens to be on top.
The poem's structure supports this slide. Its long, loose lines are unrhymed and sprawl like speeches, built from repeated "you will" and "so will" constructions, a rhythm of inevitability that mimics the pull of conformity itself. Lists carry much of the weight. The catalogue near the end, "the asylums, cathedrals, prisons, treasuries, brothels, shrines," sets holy and corrupt places side by side with no change of tone, and that flatness is the point: the praising person can no longer tell them apart. The same goes for the pairings of "colleagues, the derelicts" and "your twin, the pimp of gumdrops and philanthropy," where the poem's sharpest phrase makes charity and exploitation look like the same candy-coated business.
There is also a quiet reversal in the line "you will be a brother, on second thought, to all men." The words "on second thought" expose the cheapness of this universal brotherhood. It is not love but a refusal to choose, and it sits oddly beside the preceding claim that the person will be found "with the many resolved against the few," always on the safe side of the crowd. Fearing suggests that being friends with everyone, including the "free dead" in the morgue, is a way of being loyal to no one.
The ending is where the poem becomes truly chilling. The speaker walks "among millions, indifferent to them," reads journals "filled with studied alarm" and hears the statesman "vending manufactured bliss" "with no concern." The language of commerce ("vending," "manufactured") reduces public life to a marketplace of fake emotions, and the person is too numb even to be troubled. The final couplet drops the poem's long lines into short, stark ones: "You will be grateful for an easy death, / your silence will praise them for killing you." The word "killing" is startling because nothing violent has yet happened. The death is the death of the self, and the cruelest irony is that the victim is thankful.
What makes the poem significant is that it attacks not tyrants but the cooperation they depend on. The title "Conclusion" suggests the logical endpoint of an argument, and the argument is that endless agreeableness, practiced in small daily acts, ends in complicity and self-erasure. Since the poem is addressed to "you," the reader cannot sit back and blame others. It asks, uncomfortably, how many times we have nodded politely at something we knew was wrong.