The Anxious Music - Analysis

A party that feels like a test

In The Anxious Music, Ashbery turns a scene that should be uncomplicatedly pleasant into something nervy and evaluative. The opening—Everybody and his boyfriend—sounds like a breezy report from a crowded social gathering, but it also sets up a world where relationships are visible, legible, and therefore judgeable. The second line leans into the sugar rush—It doesn’t get much sweeter—yet the poem’s title keeps contradicting that sweetness: whatever music is playing here, it’s keyed to unease. The central claim the poem seems to make is that intimacy, once performed in public, becomes inseparable from appraisal, and that even affectionate language can carry a sting.

Terms of endearment that bite back

The poem’s voice toggles between tenderness and mockery so quickly that you can feel the speaker trying to keep control of their own mood. O churlish BFF is a perfect example: BFF is meant to be warm and teenage-cute, while churlish is archaic and scolding. Putting them together makes friendship sound like an argument carried out through pet names. Even Dink lands oddly—half nickname, half insult—suggesting the speaker can’t decide whether they’re flirting, teasing, or protecting themselves by staying slightly mean. That tonal wobble is the poem’s anxious “music”: not a melody we hear, but a pattern of emotional corrections mid-sentence.

The poisoned comfort of being appraised

The quoted remark—This was something they kept appraising—is the poem’s clearest statement of pressure. It’s not just that “they” look; they keep doing it, as if the speaker and their companion are items in a shop window. The vagueness of something intensifies the anxiety: is it the relationship, the speaker’s taste, their performance at the party, their social status? The poem refuses to specify, which mirrors how social judgment often works—felt everywhere, pinned down nowhere. In that light, the first-line crowd isn’t just festive background; it becomes the mechanism that turns sweetness into scrutiny.

No snow and the awkward physics of belonging

The poem then swerves: No snow in just anyone’s car. On the surface it’s a throwaway observation, but it reads like a strange rule for who gets to count as “anyone.” Snow is what you track in from outside; its presence would prove you’ve been in the cold, in the real world. Saying there’s no snow suggests a sealed, curated environment—everyone already cleaned up, already inside the acceptable circle. The line’s logic is deliberately skewed (why would “anyone’s car” have snow?), and that skew feels like the speaker’s mind trying to make a hard social feeling into a concrete fact: you can tell who belongs by the tiniest, most irrational signs.

Literature as both shelter and overdose

When the speaker adds, too much literature is a bad thing, the poem suddenly sounds like it’s talking about what’s happening in the speaker’s head rather than at the party. Literature here is not noble; it’s a habit you might need to cut back on. But the next phrase—you have to live with that—concedes defeat. The tension is sharp: the speaker knows the interpretive, over-associative mind can ruin a simple moment, yet can’t stop using it. In other words, the poem stages an anxious consciousness that critiques its own coping mechanism even as it relies on it.

The compliment that reveals the bruise

The ending looks like praise—You sing really good—but it’s immediately undercut: as if he’d ever be enough for his birthday. A birthday is supposed to be a day of uncomplicated affirmation; the idea that someone might not be enough even then is bleakly comic. The parenthetical aside reads like an intrusive thought the speaker can’t keep out of the room, turning a compliment into a verdict of insufficiency. That’s the poem’s final contradiction: it keeps offering sweetness (boyfriends, BFFs, singing) and then leaking contempt or despair into it. The anxious music, finally, is the sound of affection trying—and failing—to stay pure in a world of appraisal.

One sharp question the poem won’t answer

Who is the he who ever won’t be enough—the boyfriend, the speaker, or the whole crowd performing closeness? The poem’s pronouns keep slipping just enough to make the judgment feel transferable, as if anyone at this party could be the next object they kept appraising. That slipperiness is part of the dread: the criteria are unclear, but the failing feels guaranteed.