The film ends with a quote from a Walt Whitman's poem "On The Beach at Night" describing how frightening an approaching cloud bank seemed at night to the poet's child, blotting the stars out one by one, as the father and child stood on the beach on Massachusetts' North Shore. As much as it resembles the plot of the movie and of Shute's novel, however, the book gives only an incidental reference to the Whitman poem, and the phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service." However, there seems to be little doubt about the provenance of the book's title, since at least some editions of it bear on the flyleaf two stanzas from the T.S. Eliot poem "The Hollow Men":