Finale - Analysis

A relic that makes death newly real

Judith Wright’s central claim is that grief can turn on a single object: not a sentimental keepsake, but a leftover piece of the body that forces the living to confront how death is handled by institutions and by hands at home. The poem begins with a blunt accusation—The cruellest thing—aimed not at death itself but at the people or system that send home his teeth. Those teeth arrive days after the funeral, which means mourning has already performed its public rituals; then this parcel reopens the loss in a private, almost administrative way.

The domestic hands asked to do the impossible

The speaker focuses tightly on what the widow can do—small, practical actions that become unbearable. She wraps the teeth in one of his clean handkerchiefs she had laundered and taken down, chores associated with care and ordinary continuity. But the care has nowhere to go now. The line What could she do with those is not rhetorical flourish; it’s a real problem of disposal, custody, and meaning. The home is turned into an extension of the hospital’s work, and the widow is assigned an after-task no one should have to complete.

The “smile” that isn’t his

When she cradles the teeth, the poem makes a cruel visual pivot: they are utterly jawless yet fixed in a constant smile. The word smile is a bitter counterfeit of comfort—an expression without a face, a sign of life without the living person. The teeth are not in the least like his, and that detail matters: the object that should represent him instead estranges him. This is the poem’s key tension—between the impulse to keep a part of the beloved and the shock of realizing that a part of the body is not the person. Her statement She could cry no more suggests not healing but depletion, as if the tears have been used up by repeated, senseless tasks imposed by death.

Midnight: reclaiming agency through a violent gesture

The hinge of the poem comes at midnight, when she takes heart and aim and throws the teeth out the kitchen door. The phrasing gives the moment the force of a deliberate act, almost like taking a shot: heart (courage) and aim (precision). It’s a refusal to keep performing tenderness toward an object that only mocks tenderness. Yet it is also a dark kind of caretaking—returning what shouldn’t be in a kitchen back to the land, to somewhere unowned. The throw is both release and aggression, and the poem doesn’t soften either one.

Where does a body part belong?

The teeth rocketed out, and then the poem suddenly can’t locate them: into the gully? the scrub? the neighbour's land? Those question marks do emotional work. Grief wants to place things—grave, urn, shelf, memory—but this act creates an unmarked, possibly trespassing afterlife for the relic. The neighbour’s land especially sharpens the unease: her private mourning spills into someone else’s property, just as the hospital’s package invaded her home. The world of boundaries—hospital/home, dead/living, mine/yours—won’t hold.

“By her hand”: relief braided with guilt

The ending lands on a bleak calm: she fell into stupid sleep, a sleep described not as peaceful but as dulled, anesthetized. Still, she sleeps knowing him dead at least—as if the teeth had kept a small, irrational doubt alive, a sense that some part of him was still demanding attention. The final phrase, and by her hand, is the poem’s hardest knot. It can mean simply that she disposed of the teeth herself, but it also carries the shadow of agency in death: the relief of being the one who finally separates, mixed with the guilt of having thrown a piece of him away. Wright leaves us with that contradiction intact—grief as an act that must be done, and an act that will haunt the doer.