Boundary Issues - Analysis

The poem’s main claim: boundaries fail faster than our explanations can keep up

In Boundary Issues, Ashbery stages a world where the moment a limit weakens, everything that seemed manageable suddenly becomes uncontrollable. The opening insists that Here in life, they would understand, but that confidence immediately frays: the speaker and the group have groped till the margin began to give way. The word margin matters: it’s not just a border between territories; it’s the edge of comprehension, etiquette, sanity, consensus. Once it began to give way, what follows is not clean disaster but a muddier condition—sullen, or lost, or both—as if the poem can’t even decide what kind of ruin this is.

The “good meal” that doesn’t feed: comfort as proof of emptiness

Ashbery makes a sly contradiction out of survival itself. The speaker says, We had a good meal, with vivid, almost comic physicality: slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables. Yet the very next sentence declares, Yet life was a desert. The meal becomes less a refuge than an indictment—evidence that even tangible nourishment can’t fix whatever has broken. When the poem urges, Come home, in good faith. / You can still decide to, it sounds like reassurance, but it’s haunted by pressure: choice is available only barely, and only briefly, before something harder takes over.

From breach to chasm: how small failures become political realities

The poem’s anxiety sharpens into a kind of social physics. Once a breach emerges, it will become a chasm before anyone can even waver—a devastating idea, because it suggests that deliberation (the human pace) is already too slow for the damage (the world’s pace). Ashbery scales this up fast: A dispute erupts into a war and ends as abruptly. Even the end of war isn’t comforting; it’s just another abruptness. Strangely, the force that should help—The tendency to heal—is described like a flood that sweeps all before it, dumping everything into an arroyo or mine shaft or some private pocket of escape. Healing here doesn’t mend; it disposes. And the moral accounting is bitter: It's always us that has to pay, while the truly lost / make up for it—as if those most broken get absolution, and the merely living are charged for the repairs.

The turn into advice: “banish truth-telling” as a survival technique

Midway through, the poem pivots from narration to prescription: I have a suggestion to make. This is the hinge where the speaker stops describing the boundary failure and starts proposing how to live inside it. The advice is paradoxical: draw the sting out probingly—be investigative, even clinical—yet also Banish truth-telling. That isn’t simple cynicism; it’s the logic of a world where direct truth has become another accelerant, another way a breach becomes a chasm. The image of Plaster the windows over with wood pulp against the noon gloom captures this mood: it’s daytime, but it feels like an interrogation lamp that reveals too much and therefore destroys. The poem suggests that to keep living, you may need to block the light that insists on clarity.

Urgency as a sand wall: the mind builds what reflection destroys

What replaces truth isn’t peace; it’s a cycle of frantic meaning-making. Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency like a sand rampart, an image that admits from the start how flimsy the protection is. Then further reflection undermines it, guaranteeing eventual collapse. The poem’s mind is caught between two intolerable states: panic that props life up, and thought that erodes the props. Even the vantage point is estranging—seeing it from a distance, as on a curving abacus—as though the speaker can visualize the pattern but cannot step outside it. By the time the pattern is recognized, dispatches hardly mattered; information arrives too late to matter, or matters only as noise.

One sharp question the poem forces: is “camaraderie” just another cover story?

When the poem ends on camaraderie, or something like it, it sounds like consolation, but it’s a wary consolation. If truth must be banished, and urgency is both necessary and false, then what is camaraderie doing—saving people, or simply keeping them compliant? The final image, people poring over us like we were papyri, hunting for one / correct attitude, makes companionship feel like a scholarly autopsy performed on the living.

Night’s “friendly takeover”: warmth arrives as surrender

The last lines finally grant the warmth the poem has been craving: night's friendly takeover. But the adjective friendly is complicated; takeover is still takeover. After the failures of borders, truth, and urgency, the poem accepts a softer authority: darkness that stops the noon glare, a communal atmosphere of gaslit air where an attitude can be sketched rather than proven. The ending doesn’t solve the boundary issues; it proposes a gentler way to inhabit them—less honesty, less certainty, more shared dimness—because in this world, too much clarity is just another kind of breach.