Gough conceived of the work as an overheard conversation which would compare the blurring of video games and real life to the space between dreaming and wakefulness, two forms of being "between two worlds".

The dialogue, set in green and teal, scrolls across the player's screen over the course of about nine minutes; certain parts are obscured as intentionally glitched text.

[4] Gough was not directed to explain the origin of the Ender Dragon or deliver a comprehensive narrative tying into a greater story, which he agreed was a stark contrast from usual writing for video games.

As the player started to return to reality after beating the game, Gough wanted to "play with that moment, where you're between two worlds, and for a short little period you're not sure which one is more real".

[4] Gough says that the writing process was "quite odd", and that around halfway through it he felt like "my hand started moving faster than my thoughts and [I] was just watching",[4] while his conscious mind did not know which words would "simply appear on the page" before him.

[4][6][9] After players win the game by killing the Ender Dragon and step into the End Portal, the poem comes on-screen.

[12] An early impression by Eric Limer in The Mary Sue was sharply critical, calling the End Poem "nothing but a bunch of text that scrolls down the screen excruciatingly slowly for an excruciatingly long time", which "reads like a stereotypical JRPG ending mashed up with some stuff written by a highschooler who just discovered post-modernist literature".

[6] Subsequent commentary leans more favourable: Kevin Thielenhaus in The Escapist calls the poem "mysterious, and kind of weird, and probably not what most of us were expecting from a Minecraft ending".

[7] Ted Litchfield in PC Gamer describes it as "warm and humanistic" and compares it to the 2015 video game Undertale and the 2017 multimedia narrative 17776.

[15] Lori Landay, writing in the anthology Revisiting Imaginary Worlds, calls it "weird" and unlike anything else "except maybe" the ending of Battlestar Galactica (2004)".

[9]: 79–82 Landay, agreeing with Parkin, reads the poem as a reward for making it to the End and finds it to echo her own thoughts about dreams and video games.

[3]: 140–141  Regarding the final exhortation to "Wake up", Landay writes that some interpret it as a call to do things offline, while others view it in the context of the myth of Herobrine, a supposed supernatural Minecraft mob.

[4] The Irish Independent describes the End Poem as revered by the Minecraft community,[13] and RTÉ reports it to have been widely quoted by fans of the game.

[8] In a December 2022 post on his blog, The Egg and the Rock, Gough wrote that he had never signed any contract with Persson's Mojang AB over the poem.

[5][2] According to Gough, he was approached in August 2014 to sign over the poem as a "housekeeping" matter, and upon finally taking the time to read the contract, found the comprehensive buyout to be "worse than I'd even imagined".

At that point unaware of the context that Mojang was being purchased by Microsoft, Gough learned of the buyout in a leaked news story, and further email exchanges followed.

[5][2] Gough says that Persson and Manneh had paid for his time and writing experience, not permanent ownership, and that Microsoft would have needed to work out a separate deal with his agent for their use, but they did not.

[8][5] He recalls telling "the universe" to "forget about what I want; just give me whatever you think I need", and it gave him advice about the situation with Minecraft and Microsoft, and also about the public.

[23] Gough has also said that he received PayPal donations from Microsoft employees following his release of the End Poem, as well as messages of solidarity from writers and other creatives who feel "screwed over" by companies controlling their work.