Blueprints And Others - Analysis

A mind speaking in other people’s sentences

This poem’s central drama is a speaker trying to locate a stable self in a world made of borrowed scripts: commercial talk, military talk, moral advice, scraps of small-town caricature. The voice moves as if it’s channel-surfing through language that doesn’t quite belong to it, so identity becomes a set of “blueprints” that never build an actual house. The opening glance—The man across the street who seems happy—offers a simple human reference point, but it’s instantly disrupted by the odd, administrative intrusion of a porter who evades the grounds. Even perception feels like it’s being translated into institutional jargon.

The tone is breezy and comic on the surface, but the comedy has teeth: it keeps hinting that ordinary connection has been replaced by impersonal roles and transactions.

Intimacy rewritten as commerce and command

One of the poem’s sharpest tensions is how quickly the language of closeness slips into the language of use. you are my own best customer turns a “you” that could be a lover into a buyer; affection becomes a business relationship. In the next breath, the speaker is counting tasks—I’ve done five of that—as if life is a list of completed units. Even the plea Make my halloween sounds like a customer request, then immediately becomes self-censorship: Ask me not to say it. The poem keeps staging moments where the speaker approaches confession and then swerves away, as though the available phrases are all wrong for what’s actually felt.

This is where Ashbery’s emotional pressure builds: the poem isn’t refusing meaning; it’s showing a person forced to negotiate meaning through prepackaged modes—sales, orders, tallies, slogans.

The poem’s uneasy “now”

A sudden urgency arrives with The old man wants to see you—now. “Now” should anchor the poem in time, but the speaker immediately deflects: That’s all right, but find your own. The line sounds like advice, even a blessing, yet it also feels like abandonment—an instruction to be self-reliant at the very moment someone is demanding presence. Then comes the oddly practical question: Do you want to stop using these? Whatever “these” are—habits, excuses, substances, phrases—the poem frames life as dependence and attempted quitting. The “turn” here is subtle: the poem starts to sound like it’s talking about compulsion, not just randomness.

Embarrassing bodies and impossible ethics

The body enters not as intimacy but as humiliation and public exposure: sit on the urinal lands like a cruel prank, or like the logic of degradation that crowds can impose. Against that, the poem offers a proverb-like rule: Do not put on others what you can put on yourself. It’s a distorted version of moral common sense, but the distortion matters: “put on” could mean blame, clothing, responsibility, even performance. The line tries to restore ethical order, yet it’s phrased in the same generic, secondhand register as everything else, which makes its goodness feel unstable—another blueprint, not a lived principle.

Right after, tenderness flickers—my loved one—but it’s attached to a logistical problem: How to be in the city. Love is not a destination; it’s a companion to disorientation. The city is less a place than a condition of being seen, judged, and flooded with competing messages.

Merchandise, caricature, and the final refusal of sight

As the poem approaches its ending, people and histories turn into objects and categories: A biography field reduces a life to a form to be filled in, while Troves of merchandise and the goofy advertising phrase boomer buzz suggest a culture that replaces experience with stockpiles and noise. The phrase Hillbilly sculptures is especially telling: it’s a manufactured “outside,” a caricature of rural life made for display. Even the briefly pastoral note—where we live in the mountains—is immediately followed by a falling, as if any attempt to stand somewhere real collapses under the weight of these prefab descriptions.

The ending—(They won’t see anybody.)—sounds like a stage direction and a verdict at once. After all the talk, all the roles, all the merchandise and “biography,” the poem lands on a bleak idea: the system of representations is so thick that it blocks actual recognition. Nobody gets seen; perhaps nobody is fully there to be seen.

What if the “others” are the real subject?

The title points to blueprints and others, and the poem keeps asking which one is shaping the speaker’s life. Are the “others” the people across the street, the old man, the men in underwear—or are they the anonymous voices inside the speaker, telling him how to talk, what to buy, how to behave? When the poem says find your own, it sounds brave, but the surrounding language suggests how hard that is when your inner life is already crowded with other people’s instructions.