Breezeway - Analysis

A breezeway as an imagined exit for pressure

The poem’s central drama is a wish for a clean channel—an opening that would let chaos, weather, and feeling pass through without wrecking the house. The first line frames it as a communal need: we needed a breezeway. But the very next movement makes the breezeway feel like a fantasy of control, because the speaker can’t authorize it: it wasn’t my call, then even more starkly, I didn’t have a call. What begins as an architectural fix quickly becomes existential: the speaker doesn’t only lack a doorway; he lacks a sanctioned role, a voice, a purpose that counts as “a call.”

The diction is comically overstuffed—super storm, jugularly—as if the poem is trying to muscle its way to intensity. Yet that intensity is immediately undercut by self-abasement: a rather dull-spirited winch. A winch is a device for hauling and pulling, useful but impersonal; calling it dull-spirited suggests a life of function without inward fire. The breezeway becomes less a building feature than a symbol for the missing route between inner weather and outward speech.

Storm names that feel like brands

In Ashbery’s world here, catastrophe has a slightly ridiculous, consumer-name gloss: super storm Elias and Hurricane Edsel. Edsel carries the whiff of a famously failed car brand, which makes the hurricane simultaneously dangerous and faintly absurd. That doubleness matters: the speaker lives inside threats that are real enough to roar, but also mediated by naming, marketing, and public noise. When he says my voice dwindled in the hurricane’s roar, it’s not just nature overpowering him; it’s the whole culture-volume of the moment drowning out the small, complicated sentence he wants to say.

Even the breeze behaves like a messenger with nowhere to go: A breeze falls from a tower, finds no breezeway, then goes away on a mission to supersize red shutters. The breeze’s “mission” is hilariously misdirected—shutters are meant to block, not open—and supersize belongs to fast food more than carpentry. The poem keeps showing energy that should ventilate instead getting rerouted into enlargement, reinforcement, and spectacle.

Domestic responsibility versus the lack of direction

The speaker tries to broaden the complaint—Alas if that were only all—and lands in something grounded: children’s belongings that must be looked to. This is one of the poem’s most human moments: amid storms and towers, there are still backpacks, toys, shoes, the mundane care that cannot be postponed. But even here, the problem is orientation: if only one can find the direction needed. The phrase direction needed sounds like parenting advice and metaphysical instruction at the same time, and the trailing and stuff like that exposes a fatigue with the very language of responsibility. He knows there are obligations; he also can’t quite bear to name them cleanly.

The tension sharpens when the speaker reports saying, we were all homers not homos. It’s a clumsy defensive joke, and it lands badly on purpose: it shows a person reaching for belonging through easy labels, then realizing how quickly such lines dissolve in public noise. Whether “homers” means homebodies or simply people trying to get home, the point is the same: he tries to define the group as safe, normal, domestic. But his attempt at definition is swallowed by the roar. The poem stages a familiar contradiction: the need to be understood versus the speaker’s own compromised, half-formed ways of speaking.

The odd creed: living as precise experimentation

Midway through, the poem suddenly insists on a principle: We have to live out our precise experimentation. The phrase is both funny and startlingly severe. It makes daily life sound like a lab protocol—precise, controlled, repeatable—yet we’ve just watched breezes fail to find passageways and hurricanes erase speech. The speaker clings to the idea of precision because the alternative is terrifyingly blank: Otherwise there’s no dying, no crisp rewards. Death, in this logic, needs a life that has been conducted with enough intention to make an ending legible. Without the experiment, even the finality of dying can’t “take,” can’t yield the clean closure of a reward.

This is a deeply Ashberian bind: the speaker distrusts big meanings, but he also dreads the possibility that without some method—some “experiment”—experience won’t add up to anything. The poem’s humor becomes a way to state that fear without melodrama.

Batman as punishing authority and as absent god

Then the poem turns violent and cartoonish: Batman came out and clubbed me. Batman is a cultural savior figure, a vigilante who claims to restore order; here, he is the blunt force of correction. The speaker can’t even fully describe what Batman opposed—my view of the universe—without retreating into a hedge: except you know existential threads, and a foggy reference to peace beaters. It reads like someone trying to justify his worldview in the moment of being shut down, grabbing at intellectual history and generational memory while a stronger, simpler force decides he’s wrong.

Yet Batman is also oddly tender: he patted his dog Pastor Fido. The name turns the dog into a pastoral authority, a little minister of loyalty, which makes Batman’s violence feel moralized. The speaker is not simply attacked; he is disciplined by an emblem of righteousness that can harm and then pet its “pastor” as if everything is in order.

Whipped cream, baklava, and the sweetness of resignation

After the clubbing, the poem opens into a surreal pageant: mission girls came through the woods in special suitings, and suddenly It was all whipped cream and baklava. This is sweetness that verges on suffocation—too rich, too ornamental, too easy. The phrase It was like a goodbye arrives nearby, and the speaker asks, Why not accept it, anyhow? Acceptance here is not serene; it’s a shrug under dessert foam, a consent to the world’s odd ceremonial replacements for real consolation. If there’s still so much to be learned and researched, the poem also suggests that learning may be endless precisely because no final clarity is coming.

The last question: noticed, then dismissed

The ending recasts Batman as something closer to a god-figure, or at least as the imagined witness whose attention would make us real: Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us and promptly looks away. The cruelty is in the sequence: noticing happens, then dismissal. And what distracts Him is telling: a new catalog, another racing car expletive. Attention is captured by consumption and speed and noise, the very forces that have been drowning the speaker all along.

Challenging thought: The poem implies that the worst kind of abandonment isn’t being unseen—it’s being briefly seen and then treated as less interesting than a catalog. In that light, the missing breezeway isn’t just an architectural absence; it’s the absence of a sustained, receiving attention that would let a human voice carry through the storm without dwindling.