Shall I devote a poem to the fragment, the unfinished?
Yes, because each thing is a fragment
and some works were meant to be unfinished
like Schubert’s Unfinished, my prime example
of the aesthetic of incompleteness,
or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” its sublime ending
belying the fable of the poem’s composition,
an opium dream. Nor shall we overlook
the slaves of Michelangelo, encased in marble,
Shelley’s exit line (“ ‘Then what is Life?’ I cried”)
and Kafka’s novels, which begin everywhere
and end nowhere, as if no ending were equal
to the nothingness at the end of the rainbow,
the wall too high to climb at the end of the walk.
— David Lehman
Schubert’s unfinished” is one of “Three Aesthetic Questions” published in “Literary Matters.”
For the other two poems, click here: https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/
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Author: The Best American Poetry
