Art's limitations
From the title, we know that "The End of Poetry" is a self-referential poem about poetry. Limón addresses the fact that, in her career as a poet, her job is always to write about things, to abstract the concrete world into words. Thus, writing always results in a layer of separation between the reader and the thing being described. This was an idea explored in Modernist writing and art—think of Rene Magritte's 1929 painting "The Treachery of Images," which shows a pipe and says in French, "this is not a pipe" (it's a painting of a pipe!) As Limón said to Vanity Fair, "all writing is basically failure"—that is, writing is a constant process of getting closer to what's described but will never be perfect. As she attempted to write The Hurting Kind during the COVID pandemic, Limón used this poem to express the irony that writing is no substitute for real human connection.
Separation and abstraction
Building on the previous theme that art is always one layer removed from what it depicts, many of the images in this poem share that kind of abstraction or separation. The other beings mentioned in the poem are all vague rather than specific: "the stoic farmer," "the acquaintance," the "mother... father and the child," even "the animal." (See "Characters" for an analysis of these archetypes). The speaker is tired of being separated from people, tired of people only being described in these generalized terms, and wants real intimate contact instead.
Tragedy and exhaustion
Many of the images in the poem reference human coping mechanisms and perseverance: "faith," "the will to go on and not go on," "the kneeling and the rising and the looking / inward and the looking up." Later Limón includes emotion words like "weary," "sorrow," and "desperate" (twice). Without mentioning tragedies by name, she evokes the difficulty of living through many recurring tragedies, like COVID pandemic losses, or perhaps like gun violence, which she writes about in "The Leash." Limón acknowledges this burnout and exhaustion and calls for a reprieve.
Religion
Religious language is a subtle theme throughout the poem in phrases like "prophecy," "faith and our father," "god / not forgetting," "kneeling and rising." For Ada Limón, who is not religious, religion is seen as an unnecessary layer of metaphor that obscures real human connection. She writes about her refusal to call anything "God" in her earlier poem "What it Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use." The abstractions that she sees in religion, like those of poetry or politics, are part of what this poem's speaker is trying to see past.
