What we don't know at the beginning of the movie- that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den-gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, "Once more into the fray-into the last good fight I'll ever know." The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, "Live and die on this day. Poison … And I’ve stopped doing this world any real good.," he writes.
I know I can’t get you back … I don’t know why this has happened to us. And I can’t get you back … I don’t know why I’m writing this. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: "I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. Indeed, at the beginning of the film-during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide-the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter. Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster).
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