The Bungalows - Analysis

A world that won’t quite arrive

The poem begins with a collective impatience that keeps failing to find its object: The land had not yet risen into view. That line makes the central predicament feel almost physical, like waiting for a coastline that refuses to appear. Instead of a stable landscape, there are substitutions and erasures: gulls sweep away gray steel towers, and the speaker’s attention settles on boxes, / store parts—things that are present, installed, and oddly final. The poem’s central claim grows out of this: modern life promises “home” and direction, but what it delivers is a manufactured immediacy—objects, designs, programs—that both comforts and quietly seals off real change. Even the relationship that follows doesn’t deepen; it waxed, billowed like scenery, expanding like a stage backdrop rather than a place you can enter.

The tone here is simultaneously grand and provisional: it speaks in big historical gestures—further revolutions, this combat was the last—but keeps undercutting itself with vague labels like whatever you wanted to call them. The world is there, but it is also always being renamed, as if certainty were one more consumer option.

Homesickness for a landscape that’s already a dream

The poem presses its first major paradox as a question that sounds almost naïve, but isn’t: They are the same aren’t they, / The presumed landscape and the dream of home. The force of presumed is crucial; it suggests the landscape isn’t perceived so much as assumed, like a background everyone agrees to. Meanwhile, the dream of home is treated as equally external—another “scene” that can be mistaken for a place. People are homesick today or desperately sleeping, which makes homesickness less a personal emotion than a cultural weather system. The rectangular shapes—buildings, bungalows, boxes—become so extraneous and so near, a sharp contradiction that captures the poem’s feeling: what surrounds you is intimate in distance but alien in meaning.

That contradiction ripples into time. The poem describes a quiet foreground where youth had grown old, and where the songs of youth are already wise hymns that Will sign for old age. It’s as if the culture has learned to pre-age itself, turning experience into prepackaged wisdom. The past is not recovered; it’s handled: it gets lift[ed] up to be persuaded and then put down again, like an object briefly examined and returned to its shelf.

Warnings reduced to breath; lessons reduced to noise

Midway, the poem makes “warning” almost comically tiny: nothing more than an aspirate "h". Danger exists, but it’s been thinned to a sound—barely more than breath. At the same time, the problem is sketched completely, a phrase that implies a total diagnosis without any lived remedy, like an instructional diagram. The strange pairing of fireworks mounted on poles with Complexion of evening and the accurate voices of the others creates an atmosphere where spectacle, mood, and social consensus fuse into something persuasive and shallow.

Even education feels like branding: During Coca-Cola lessons, things become patent—not simply clear but proprietary, stamped, owned. And then the poem admits a historical lurch: we had so skipped a stage. That missing stage matters; it implies a society that has leapt into design and consumption without passing through whatever would have taught it how to mourn, remember, or refuse. The great wave of the past doesn’t instruct; it Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike, drowning both thought and those who supposedly live without dreams. The tone here turns acidic and gleeful at once, especially in the drain-cleaner burst—sticky, icky stuff and pfui!—as if the poem briefly enjoys the fantasy of flushing history’s residue away, while knowing that fantasy is itself part of the problem.

The hinge: being inside and outside at once

The poem’s most explicit turn comes when it asks, How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time. This is the question the earlier sections have been circling: how to inhabit a world that is both shelter and display, intimacy and set design. The answer begins seductively—The delicious feeling of the air that contradicting and secretly abetting / The interior warmth—but quickly sours. The land itself curdles the dismay, turning feeling into something spoiled, thickened, inedible. What should be grounding—land, landscape—becomes the agent that drives the poem toward folly and doom, as if the environment carries and concentrates the accumulated errors of these generations.

That accusation sharpens in the imperative: Look at what you've done to the landscape— / The ice cube, the olive—. The landscape is reduced to cocktail garnishes: chilled, preserved, decorative, consumable. The subsequent tri-city mesh of things stretching along the river suggests a seamless infrastructural spread, impressive and suffocating. And when thought turns to construction, it escapes into alps and thresholds—grand natural forms and romantic crossings—yet even that fantasy is set Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory. The longing for “elsewhere” can’t restore glory; it can only decorate the same mesh.

A protest against the “new school” that drains life

The poem then stages a mock-official declaration—the pleasure of recording, put first upon record—as if bureaucracy has become the voice of aesthetics. What it records is unanimous tergiversation, a mass turning-away, a collective capacity to reverse oneself without admitting it. The speaker offers a stark preference: better decaying art that tries for an impossible "calque" of reality than The new school of the trivial, described as sludge and leaf-mold. This isn’t nostalgia for “old art” so much as horror at a culture where life itself becomes a slow leak: life / Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve, All in one direction. Direction here is not purpose; it’s drainage.

Direction, immortality, and the doors shutting

When the poem addresses You who were directionless, the voice becomes both intimate and prosecutorial. It challenges the reader’s—or society’s—faith in permanent things: Just because a thing is immortal / Is that any reason to worship it? The clincher is bleakly witty: Death, after all, is immortal. Immortality is exposed as a trap category; it can justify reverence for what should instead be questioned. The response is withdrawal: you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, ending discussion by retreating into private “homes.” Meanwhile, the river continues its lonely course, and even color becomes ominous: green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur. The quoted couplet—chartreuse mountain, absinthe plain, strong man's tears—turns the landscape into intoxication and grief, as if nature now speaks in the vocabulary of artificial liqueurs and staged despair.

The program that “worked perfectly,” and the final contradiction

In the last movement, the poem steps back into a long view: All this came to pass eons ago. The distance is chilling because it treats the present as already finished, already archived. The program has worked out perfectly, and even the flaws were installed to avoid the monotony of perfection: A forced handshake, An absent-minded smile, nothing left to chance. The poem’s most unsettling image of consciousness arrives when the ideal observer is yourself, watching so patiently from afar, The way God watches a sinner. This is selfhood turned into surveillance: a person becomes both actor and detached evaluator, living inside a design while judging it from the outside.

The ending refuses a clean moral. The world builds into something meaningless or meaningful / As architecture, because it is planned and then abandoned, left to last a certain amount of years in sunlight and shadow. And then the poem lands on its final, necessary contradiction: standing still means death, and life is moving on, Moving on towards death. The last sentence—But sometimes standing still is also life—doesn’t resolve the tension; it preserves it. After all the meshes, programs, and shut doors, the poem insists that both motion and stillness can be forms of survival—and that the hardest task is telling which kind you’re practicing when the landscape itself has started to feel like scenery.