Ultimately analysis

An unnamed man tries to speak truth, beginning with dryness and ending with an uncontrolled bodily overflow.^[2]

The poem refuses to make honesty elegant: truth leaves saliva on the speaker’s chin.^[4]

“Dry mouthed” suggests hesitation, while “drooled,” “slobbed,” and “dribbling” make release humiliatingly physical.^[2]

The poem leaves open whether confession is liberating or damaging; once begun, it may be impossible to contain.^[4]

• Truth and hesitation

  The movement from dryness to overflow dramatizes the difficulty of beginning to speak honestly.

• Loss of control

  He drooled and slobbed in the end;

  The verbs become increasingly involuntary, turning honesty into a physical process.

• Embarrassment and exposure

  Saliva on the chin rejects the comforting idea that truth-telling is always clean or noble.^[4]

“Ultimately” is a four-line free-verse poem with no fixed metrical pattern.^[2]

Semicolons divide attempted speech, dryness, overflow, and the final visible result; rough sound links keep the ending unresolved.^[4]

• Metaphor

  He tried to spit out the truth;

  Truth becomes a substance in the mouth rather than an abstract moral idea.

• Sensory imagery

  He drooled and slobbed in the end;

  Unattractive diction makes honesty tactile and embarrassing.^[2]

• Progression

  Dry mouthed at first,

  He drooled and slobbed in the end;

  The time markers create a compressed before-and-after narrative.

The poem appears in Hemingway’s early collection Three Stories & Ten Poems, published in 1923.^[3]

Its extreme compression anticipates the concrete, spare style associated with Hemingway’s later work.^[3]

• “The striking images in these lines depict truth as something messy and uncontrollable.”

• “This four line poem is written in free verse and has a rhyme scheme of ABCC.”

1. Wikisource
2. Poem Analysis
3. Project Gutenberg
4. Dusty Reviews