Now - Analysis

A bravado built out of self-disgust

The poem’s central claim is that writing, for this speaker, is less a noble calling than a stubborn habit he can’t stop—an addiction he half-mocks and half-defends. From the start he undercuts himself: he’s hunched over in yellow pajamas, not posed at a grand desk, and he calls himself Still pretending to be a writer. That word pretending keeps returning, as if he can’t bear to say I am. Even his age—at 71—is framed as Some damned gall, like continuing to write is a kind of indecency, not a triumph.

The room as an argument: books behind, decay inside

The setting quietly stages a contradiction. There are Rows of books behind me, a traditional emblem of literary legitimacy, yet the speaker feels his authority draining away: he scratch[es] my thinning hair and can’t find the word. The poem makes that search physical and humiliating, as if language itself has become something he has to paw at. His blunt line My brain cells eaten away by life turns experience—usually the writer’s resource—into a corrosive force. What should have fed him has instead consumed him.

Enemies, audiences, and the pleasure of being hated

The speaker’s mind moves outward to the people he claims to have antagonized: the ladies, the critics, and especially the university suck-toads. The insult is juvenile on purpose; it’s his way of refusing their standards before they can reject him. But he also imagines their future joy: They all will soon have their time to celebrate. The quoted sneers—Terribly overrated, Gross, An aberration—sound like reviews he has rehearsed for years, a chorus he both resents and depends on. The poem’s tone here is barbed, but also oddly intimate, as if their contempt has become part of his self-definition.

The old con that saved him

A hinge happens when the poem drops from reputation to survival. His hands sink into the keyboard of a Macintosh, a modern, almost comic update of the writer’s tools, but the action leads backward: writing is the same old con that scraped me off the streets and park benches. Calling it a con is double-edged. It admits fraudulence—he’s been pretending—yet it also credits the act with rescuing him. The phrase those cheap rooms suggests the formative apprenticeship wasn’t in seminars or salons but in poverty, where the simple line was learned like a trick that keeps you alive.

Repetition as confession: he can’t quit

When the poem repeats the opening scene—On this 2nd floor, hunched over in yellow pajamas, Still pretending to be a writer—it feels less like a refrain than a trap he’s circling. The key admission is plain: I can’t let go. Whatever he says about fraud, age, and critics, the compulsion remains. The repetition doesn’t elevate him; it pins him in place, showing a man who can’t convert his life into a neat late-career dignity. He is stuck with the same posture, the same costume, the same need.

The gods’ smile: blessing, mockery, or both

The last lines are the strangest turn: The gods smile down, repeated three times. Coming after all the self-scorn, the smile can’t be simple comfort. It might be approval from some larger force—fate, art, whatever he half-believes in—but it also reads like cosmic amusement at a man still tapping away, still running his same old con. The repetition makes the smile feel fixed and impersonal: the gods don’t argue with his critics, and they don’t absolve him; they just keep smiling. In that uneasy ending, the poem leaves him exactly where he began—writing anyway, while the universe looks on with a grin that could be mercy or ridicule.