The Bicameral Eyeball - Analysis

A world that keeps happening without anyone consenting

At its core, The Bicameral Eyeball reads like a report from inside a mind trying to stay cheerful while it watches meaning fall apart and reassemble in real time. The poem opens with the unsettlingly casual line No one noticed that it was midnight, as if an objectively significant fact can simply fail to register when a crowd is preoccupied. That sets the poem’s central claim: history, work, grief, desire, and even language itself keep moving forward, but our awareness lags behind—sometimes comically, sometimes painfully. The speaker keeps insisting on the everyday—workers released by a factory whistle, people crowding down the pavement—yet the atmosphere is already dreamlike, full of misdirections and wrong emphasis, like a public scene staged by accident.

The title hints at divided perception: an eye that sees in two chambers at once. The poem keeps doing that—holding a civic exterior (factories, workers, an era) alongside private, strange, half-embarrassing interiors (the fear of farting, a man’s maladdress, the trollish funeral litany). The joke isn’t just that these things don’t belong together; it’s that they evidently do, because that is what consciousness feels like.

Tools making tools, and the self as an assembly line

Early on, the poem offers a neat little riddle of modern life: The tools to make the tools are forthcoming. It sounds optimistic—industry is readying itself, progress is on schedule—but it also implies a world where purpose is endlessly deferred. If you always need a tool to make the next tool, you can stay busy without arriving anywhere. That loops back into the crowd scene: the workers are released by the whistle, yet they were inside to begin with, as though the factory contains them even as it “frees” them. The poem’s humor—like the aside about other thieves getting wind of someone’s maladdress—feels like the mind entertaining itself to avoid naming a simpler dread: that we are caught in systems we can’t quite locate, and therefore can’t quite resist.

The sudden appearance of oodles of trolls chanting a funeral litany is a perfect Ashbery-style collision: mythic grotesquerie shoved into an industrial, maritime-tinged workplace (the fo’c’sle). The trolls don’t mourn; they perform, and they complain about turns and timing—why / be perturbed ahead of time. The line makes anxiety sound like bad etiquette, which is funny, but also bleak: if grief is just another rota, then feeling too early or too late becomes the only offense that matters.

Walking on stilts: amazement that’s also weightlessness

Midway, the crowd becomes physically wrong: As though walking on stilts, people blew up in amazement like pieces of trash lifted by a desultory wind. The simile is both airy and insulting. The workers’ amazement isn’t noble; it’s inflatable, temporary, and at the mercy of forces that return them for no visible reason. That phrase—no visible reason—matters. The poem keeps presenting events as if causality is missing, or at least hidden: wind lifts trash and drops it; accusations seek attribution; revolutions are promised but unspecified. The speaker’s vision is alert but not explanatory, as though explanation has become just another object the mind tries on and sets down.

Yet the tone here isn’t purely despairing. The speaker calls the crowd tired / and happy, plodders on life’s great thoroughfare. It’s an almost affectionate demotion: not heroes, not martyrs, just people keeping pace. Then comes the poem’s crucial tension, stated with a calm paradox: None of us were in it for the long haul, but paradoxically / all of us were. The contradiction is not a trick; it’s the condition of being alive. We don’t feel chosen for permanence, yet we are drafted into it anyway—by time, by habit, by the body’s insistence on continuing.

Her sadness: not bereavement, but a stem in dry ground

The most intimate moment arrives almost quietly: the speaker looks over at her and understands why they meant sadness. Importantly, it is not from any bereavement. This sadness has no sanctioned cause; it isn’t the socially legible kind that follows a funeral litany. Instead it grows like a stem in barren ground: a living thing that shouldn’t be there, stubborn and thin. The image is oddly hopeful—stems imply growth—but the hope is harsh because it springs from emptiness. The poem’s emotional intelligence is sharp here: it separates sadness from event, making it more like weather or biology, something that happens inside a person even when the “story” doesn’t justify it.

Against that sadness, the poem piles up household and landscape details that feel like museum vitrines: majolica on buffets, chafing dishes with lids lifted and replaced, mild / pools in the woods that exist far from any stream. The objects are pretty, complete, and faintly pointless. Lifting a lid only to put it back again mimics the mind’s motion through the poem: revealing, then unrevealing. The pools without streams echo sadness without bereavement—effects without clear sources. Even the ant-size / buggies patrolling slopes feel like miniature bureaucracies, tiny systems keeping order in a world that doesn’t need them.

The poem’s second voice: advice that knows it isn’t serious

One of the poem’s strangest turns is its direct address: Good thing for you, I told you, you seemed to believe me. The speaker becomes a counselor, almost a scolder: not to be a gnat about things. The advice is that worrying will grow up and become part of experience, which is both comforting and grim. Comforting because it normalizes fear; grim because it implies there is no exit—only incorporation. The line you seemed to believe me lands with a small ache: belief is granted not because the speaker is wise, but because the listener is willing, even when the speaker isn’t especially serious. That raises a quiet ethical question inside the poem: what does it mean to offer reassurance when you don’t fully stand behind it?

Revolutions and rain-sunshine: causes searching for a label

The third section widens out again: the tens of revolutions to come appear as a vague, looming multiplication. The speaker suggests going inside, as if retreat is the only coherent response to the mixture of rain and sunshine, which always defeats him. That particular combination feels important: contradictory weather that refuses a single mood, like the poem itself. Defeat here isn’t a catastrophe; it’s a recurring condition, a sensitivity to mixed signals. Then, almost comically, other causes come along, / seeking attribution. The world is full of effects looking for a reason—an inversion of logic that captures how modern explanation often works: we feel something first, and only afterward do we hunt for a story that can hold it.

Even the line about matriculating—in one to ten years—undercuts itself with its range. Time is both scheduled and unknowable. The speaker worries about being stodgy, laughs at his strife, watches the fire burn, notices maids growing petulant. These are domestic, almost novelistic signals of a household under strain, but the poem refuses to settle into plot. It keeps everything in the condition of meanwhile, a word that implies suspension: life as an ongoing parenthesis.

A napkin over the era: the ending’s forced sense

The final image is both absurd and chilling: time brings up the rear, placing a napkin—folded just so—over the era and whatever it thought it was up to. Time is a waiter clearing a table, tidying away our grand narratives with practiced decorum. The napkin is polite concealment: it doesn’t solve anything; it covers it. And the closing question—Now doesn’t that make a lot of sense?—rings with staged confidence. It’s the voice we adopt when we want the listener (or ourselves) to stop asking for coherence. The poem ends by dramatizing that impulse: the need to call the story meaningful even while the images have been showing us how meaning is patched, provisional, and sometimes merely well-folded.

One sharp pressure point

If sadness can grow in otherwise barren ground, then the poem implies that consolation can, too—but it may be just as uncaused, just as involuntary. The speaker’s final demand for agreement—doesn’t that make sense—sounds like comfort and like coercion at once. The poem leaves you inside that double bind: wanting the napkin, and also wanting to pull it away.