The Curse Be Ended

The Curse Be Ended is a compact, charm-like verse whose movement from circular repetition to the ending of a curse gives the text a formal image of release. Printed after the heading for chapter forty-one, it stands between the preceding destruction and the narrative that follows, making its promise of closure resonant but not self-explanatory.

Form and Language

The verse begins, “Round and round the circle / Completing the charm,” establishing repetition as the means by which its work is done. It then presents a series of paired reversals: “So the knot be unkniitted / The cross uncrossed / The crooked he made straight.” The wording imagines disorder not as something merely endured, but as something actively undone. The source prints “unkniitted”; the unusual spelling is retained here rather than silently corrected.

The final line, “And the curse he ended,” gives the sequence its decisive claim. Its plain declarative cadence contrasts with the preceding images of knots, crossings, and crookedness: the verse moves from a process of unmaking toward an asserted result. The text prints the attribution as “I”. S. Eliot.

Placement and Significance

The verse follows a scene in which the burning platform is consumed by fire, the earth tremors stop, and the screams give way to silence. Gerry Fenn draws Sue and Ben close as they huddle near the flames; rain then begins to fall. Set after this aftermath, the verse’s language of a charm completed and a curse ended echoes the scene’s movement from violence toward stillness.

Its position at the opening of chapter forty-one makes that echo a frame for what follows, rather than an unambiguous account of what has happened. The poem declares an ending, but the brief excerpt does not specify who performs the charm or establish that the supernatural danger has definitively passed. Its closure is therefore both forceful and open: the words promise that the knot can be undone, while leaving the promise’s reach to the surrounding narrative.