At North Farm - Analysis

A visit that feels like fate, and like a threat

The poem’s central claim is that expectation can be as consuming as any actual arrival: the speaker lives under the pressure of a figure who is traveling furiously toward you, yet may never arrive in a recognizable, satisfying way. The opening sounds almost like prophecy—someone is coming at incredible speed, enduring blizzards and desert heat, crossing torrents and narrow passes. But that heroic forward motion immediately turns uncertain: will hem know where to find you, Recognize you, Give you the thing. The intensity of the pursuit is matched by the anxiety of misrecognition, as if the real fear is not absence but the wrong encounter.

Tone-wise, the first stanza is breathless and urgent; it reads like a warning whispered to oneself. The repeated questions don’t simply ask for information—they expose a wish that can’t quite admit itself plainly: that the traveler’s gift will make sense, and make the speaker feel correctly seen.

The barren place with bursting granaries

The poem’s hinge comes with the blunt statement Hardly anything grows here, which should mean scarcity, but the next lines insist on the opposite: granaries are bursting, sacks of meal are piled to the rafters. Ashbery sets up a vivid contradiction: a landscape that can’t produce, yet is stocked as if for a long siege or a grand welcome. The abundance feels slightly unreal, like supplies accumulated through habit rather than need, or like a household making itself ready for someone who may not come.

This is one of the poem’s key tensions: is the farm secure, or is it compensating? The speaker’s world seems to say: we have enough. But the earlier questions suggest that enough isn’t the point; the point is the particular person and the particular thing he has for you.

Sweet streams, fat fish, and the edge of the miraculous

The natural images in the second stanza tilt from practical storage toward something almost mythic. The streams run with sweetness, fish are fattening, and Birds darken the sky. That darkness could be sheer plenty, or it could be an omen—abundance so thick it becomes obscuring. The poem keeps both readings in play. Even the sweetness in the water is suspiciously heightened; it suggests a world made hospitable by desire, not by agriculture.

So the farm becomes a stage set for reunion: stocked, sweetened, thick with life. Yet the earlier fear of not being recognized still hangs over it. The speaker can prepare the world, but can’t control the meaning of the meeting.

The dish of milk: hospitality with conditions attached

The poem ends by narrowing from sweeping journey and overflowing storehouses to a single domestic gesture: the dish of milk is set out at night. It’s tender, even childlike—an offering to a guest, a stray animal, a folk visitor. But it’s also impersonal: milk can be left out for whoever arrives. That detail sharpens the poem’s emotional conflict. The household can be ready in general, yet still unsure about the specific traveler who has been imagined with such force.

The closing admission—we think of him sometimes, Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings—is where the poem’s honesty finally lands. The speaker’s mind can’t settle: the traveler is both occasional thought and constant presence; the feelings are neither pure longing nor pure dread. The final tone is quieter than the opening, but not resolved—more like a person trying to live normally while keeping a place set for something complicated.

Is the coming figure a savior, or a test?

If someone is truly racing toward you through every extreme—snow, desert, torrents—why does the poem end not with joy but with mixed feelings? The logic of the poem suggests a troubling possibility: the traveler’s gift may demand something in return, or may expose that the speaker’s careful abundance is beside the point. In that light, the question Is it enough isn’t about meal or fish or milk; it’s about whether preparation can substitute for the risk of being found.