And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name - Analysis

The poem’s central wager: stop trying to be right and start being real

Ashbery’s poem argues that the only honest way to make art now is to abandon the fantasy of saying things that way—the old, confident way that promised a clean match between inner truth and public statement. The opening prohibition, You can’t say it that way any more, isn’t just advice about style; it’s a diagnosis of a whole modern situation in which sincerity is tangled with self-consciousness. The speaker nudges a you—at once a poet, a painting, a muse, and a social self—toward a different posture: come into the open, into a clearing, and simply rest. That rest is not laziness; it’s the only alternative to a frantic demand for perfect meaning. The poem keeps insisting that whatever happens—however funny—is OK, not because it’s all equally good, but because insisting on more clarity than life can give would be strange, a refusal to accept what consciousness actually feels like.

Beauty in daylight: the clearing that doesn’t solve anything

The early mood is oddly consoling and slightly scolding. The speaker is Bothered about beauty, yet beauty can’t stay a private obsession; it must be brought into the open. But the open space the poem offers is not triumphant revelation. A clearing suggests a pause in the woods, a temporary break in confusion, not the end of it. Even the reassurance—whatever funny happens to you / Is OK—sounds like a friend trying to calm someone who overinterprets every emotion. That’s the first key tension: the poem wants openness, yet it also wants permission to stop explaining. The word rest lands like a small rebellion against the pressure to turn every experience into legible content.

Lovers, admirers, and the fear of being found out

Then the poem swerves into social psychology: the you has so many lovers, people who look up to you and will do things for you. This could be the artist’s audience, or the artwork’s viewers, or simply anyone surrounded by approval. Yet that abundance produces shame rather than ease: but you think / It’s not right, and the sentence trails into the dread that if they really knew you—ellipsis included—admiration would collapse. Ashbery lets the thought break off, as if even naming the fear gives it too much solidity. And then comes a brisk dismissal: So much for self-analysis. The speaker isn’t denying inner complexity; he’s denying that introspection can deliver the stable self the anxious mind keeps trying to locate. The contradiction here is sharp: the poem invites candidness, but it also treats sustained self-explanation as a dead end, something you must drop if you want to keep moving.

The “poem-painting” shopping list—and why it sounds wrong on purpose

When the speaker turns to composition—About what to put in your poem-painting—the poem briefly imitates the most ordinary, even corny advice. Flowers are always nice, especially delphinium; add Names of boys you once knew and their sleds; toss in Skyrockets—and the parenthetical doubt, do they still exist?, punctures the nostalgia. This is a parody of ready-made lyric material, the kind of catalog that promises charm on demand. Yet Ashbery doesn’t merely mock it; he shows its seduction. These items share a quality: they are vivid, easily pictured, socially acceptable. They’re the kinds of images that behave. The poem’s suspicion is that a well-behaved image can become a way of avoiding the more embarrassing truth: that you want to communicate and don’t know how, that you want to be understood and fear what understanding would cost.

Low-key words and the eruption of bananas and Japanese clangor

The poem’s hinge comes when the tidy advice collapses into lived unpredictability. We’re told, almost like a recipe, to Find a few important words plus many dull-sounding ones. Then—without warning—an anecdote intrudes: She approached me / About buying her desk. It’s mundane, even slightly comic, and then the street turns Bananas with the clangor of Japanese instruments. That jump is not random decoration; it’s the poem showing what consciousness does: it turns a small encounter into a sensory storm, then drops in Humdrum testaments as if the debris of ordinary documents could coexist with exotic noise. The point isn’t that reality is surreal; it’s that the mind’s associations are. The speaker can’t hold to a controlled palette of important words and dull ones because perception keeps yanking the poem into new registers—comic, strange, intimate, bureaucratic—all at once.

Intimacy as entanglement: His head / Locked into mine

Out of the sensory chaos emerges a startling closeness: His head / Locked into mine. The image is physical but also cognitive, as if two consciousnesses are intermeshed. We were a seesaw turns intimacy into a mechanism: one rises as the other falls, balance depends on imbalance. This is another contradiction the poem refuses to smooth over. Communication is desired, even erotic, but it is also a struggle for equilibrium between selves. The line Something / Ought to be written sounds almost dutiful, as though the poet is obligated to turn this collision into art—yet the experience itself resists being turned into a stable “aboutness.” The poem keeps us inside the sensation of trying to write while being tugged by other minds, other demands, other rhythms.

The final claim: an empty mind hitting its own lush need

The closing sentence finally names what has been dramatized all along: writing happens when an almost empty mind collides with its desire to communicate, a desire imagined as lush, Rousseau-like foliage. The mind is both barren and overgrown—austerity and foliage at once. That pairing clarifies why the earlier catalog of delphiniums and sleds felt both plausible and inadequate: the mind wants ready images, but it’s also being flooded by something wilder than taste. Communication occurs between breaths, precariously, as if speech is always running out of air. And the poem adds the most painful social dimension: you speak for the sake / Of others, yet those others want to understand you and desert you for other centers of communication. Understanding is not a final union; it’s a transit system, a series of exits.

A sharp question the ending won’t let you avoid

If others can only begin to understand by leaving—if they must desert you toward elsewhere—what kind of success is a successful poem? The ending suggests that the best communication doesn’t secure a bond; it starts a process in which meaning may begin and then, inevitably, be undone. The poem doesn’t call that failure. It treats it as the only honest outcome once you stop trying to say it that way.

Where the tone lands: tender permission with a sting of realism

By the final clause—so that understanding / May begin, and in doing so be undone—the poem has traveled from gentle coaching to a bracing realism about art’s social life. The tone is companionable, even funny in flashes (do they still exist?; the street gone Bananas), but it ends on a sober paradox: we communicate because we crave contact, yet the very act of being understood sets meanings in motion, away from us. Ashbery’s poem offers a kind of mercy: you are allowed to rest, to stop self-interrogating, to accept the mind’s emptiness and its foliage at once. But the mercy comes with a clear-eyed condition: no final explanation will hold. The best you can do is make the collision audible, and let the undoing be part of what you meant.