The Barber - Analysis

A haircut as a lesson in being handled

The poem starts in a place that should feel ordinary: The barber at his chair / Clips me. But Ashbery quickly turns that everyday scene into a meditation on what it’s like to be acted upon. The speaker is literally being trimmed, but the deeper discomfort comes from how casually it happens: He does as he goes. The central claim the poem keeps worrying at is that modern experience often feels like a sequence of small, efficient procedures that become strangely intimate and faintly violent—and the mind keeps trying (and failing) to convert them into meaning.

The comic nose, and the dread inside it

The barber’s work is described with a blunt, almost childish specificity: He clips the hairs outside the nose. The line is funny, even a little gross, and the speaker’s outburst—Too many preparations, nose!—sounds like mock-scolding. But that comedy is also a flare of anxiety. The nose is where air moves; it’s a threshold. Calling it out like a person suggests the speaker can’t quite bear how much fuss is required just to maintain a presentable surface. The tension here is between care as grooming and care as invasion: a service that resembles a tiny assault.

Saturday, a raincoat, and the sky that won’t stop growing

The poem then glances away from the chair to a Saturday world of objects and weather: I see the raincoat this Saturday. Instead of grounding us, the detail feels oddly displaced, as if the speaker’s attention slips to whatever is nearest in the mind. The next image makes that dislocation explicit: A building is against the sky— / The result is more sky. A building should block the sky, but here it produces it—like the attempt to define a boundary only enlarges what can’t be contained. That’s where the unease thickens: Something gathers in painfully. Ashbery doesn’t name the something, and that vagueness matters; the pain comes from accumulation without an object, the way dread can build even when nothing has technically happened.

The turn: wanting to be the razor, then fearing it

A clear turn arrives with the thought experiment: To be the razor—how would you like to be / The razor, blue with ire, / That presses me? The speaker tries to swap positions, to imagine the tool’s perspective, but the razor is personified as angry—blue with ire—and the closeness becomes pressure. The sentence This is the wrong way lands like a sudden verdict: not just on the barber’s motion, but on the entire direction of thought, life, the day. The poem’s key contradiction sharpens here: the speaker wants agency (to be the instrument), yet experiences agency as menace (the instrument that presses).

Canoe, waterfall, and the intimate accusation of prince

The last images accelerate from mild discomfort to imminent disaster: The canoe speeds toward a waterfall. It’s a cartoon-simple danger, and that simplicity makes it feel fated—as if once you’re in the current, speed is the only option. Then the poem pivots into a strange address: Something, prince, in our backward manners— The word prince both flatters and indicts, suggesting a private conversation with someone privileged enough to be sheltered, yet implicated. The closing line—You guessed the reason for the storm.—sounds like an accusation disguised as praise. Someone has intuited the cause, but the poem refuses to confirm it; the storm could be literal weather, social turbulence, or the psychic weather that began with a nose hair and ended at a waterfall.

One sharp question the poem won’t let go of

If the barber’s clipping is the opening scene of control, then the storm at the end raises a darker possibility: what if the reason was always guessed because it was always manufactured? When our backward manners lead the canoe toward the fall, the poem hints that catastrophe isn’t an interruption but a custom—something we enact politely, even while calling it weather.