By An Earthquake - Analysis

A world retold as plot damage

John Ashbery’s central move in By an Earthquake is to treat human experience as if it were nothing but a string of plot summaries after a disaster: identities slide, motives simplify, and everything that feels intimate gets translated into impersonal event. The poem reads like an index of sensational narratives, but the accumulating effect is stranger and sadder: the earthquake isn’t only geological. It’s an upheaval of how stories give us stable selves. By turning life into synopsis, the poem shows how easily a person can be replaced by a letter in a scheme.

The tone is cool, brisk, and oddly bureaucratic, as if calamity were being filed. That deadpan steadiness is part of the disturbance: betrayals, deaths, and revelations are delivered with the same neutral emphasis as any other item, making the reader feel the emotional ground continually shift underfoot.

The alphabet of people: A and B as disposable selves

The early lines reduce characters to variables: A hears by chance a name; B, in love with A receives an unsigned letter; later A is so content that ambition is throttled. These are recognizably human situations—jealousy, passivity, discovery—but their presentation makes them feel interchangeable, like problems in a logic textbook. Even when the poem introduces sub-variants—A-4, A-5, A-8—identity becomes something that can be copied, numbered, and swapped. The tension here is sharp: the poem keeps gesturing toward melodramatic interior life (love, fear, shame) while refusing the usual privileges of character (a name that holds a history).

That refusal is not simply a joke. It creates a world where relations are clearer than persons. Everyone is defined by attachment and threat—mistress, enemy, friend, uncle—so the self is continually outsourced to whatever role the plot needs next.

Secrets that literally fall out of walls

One of the poem’s most telling images is the way truth appears by accident, as if the world itself is collapsing and spilling evidence. When falling plaster reveals the hiding place of old love letters, the revelation isn’t earned through insight; it drops into the room as debris. Likewise, A flees into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock: the image is comic, but it also suggests a mind trying to escape exposure and instead locking itself into airless confinement.

This is the earthquake logic at work: hidden histories don’t emerge through confession or understanding; they are dislodged. The poem’s revelations feel less like moral reckonings than like structural failures—walls cracking, locks snapping shut—so the characters’ lives are governed by sudden mechanical turns rather than chosen meanings.

Money, bodies, and the flat voice of crisis

Ashbery keeps interrupting the A/B abstraction with jarringly specific modern humiliations. Angela tells Philip about her husband’s enlarged prostate and asks for money; Philip responds not with intimacy but with procedure, placing it in an escrow account. The detail is almost aggressively unpoetic, and that’s the point: the poem’s voice treats bodily vulnerability and financial arrangements as equally narratable “facts.”

The contradiction deepens when the poem turns to disguises and secrecy: A discovers that his pal W is a girl masquerading as a boy, and then keeps it to himself, trying to save the masquerader. Care exists here, but it has to operate inside a world of concealment—where identity is both fragile and policed. The poem keeps asking (without pausing to ask) what kind of tenderness is possible when everything is already being summarized, categorized, and filed away.

Proper names arrive, and the world gets even less stable

Midway, the poem starts releasing proper names—Albert, Elvira, Kent, Jenny, Petronius B. Furlong, Morgan Windhover—and the effect is not greater realism but a new kind of dreamlike overload. Elvira investigates a house in the hills, but during an electrical storm the house vanishes and the site becomes a lake. Jenny drives homeward bound but keeps driving, no nearer home than at the start. These episodes feel like nightmares told in the calm tone of a police report: impossible events narrated as ordinary occurrences.

Here the poem’s “earthquake” becomes existential. Places dissolve. Destinations recede. Even when names appear, they don’t anchor identity; they simply add surface specificity to a reality that won’t hold its shape.

When society enters: crowd pressure and seditious stories

The poem widens from private predicaments to collective absurdity: Too many passengers have piled onto a San Francisco cable car, and the conductor must push some off. New narrative is judged seditious, and Hogs from all over go squealing down the street. These moments hint that the instability isn’t only personal; it’s social and political. Systems manage excess by expulsion. Stories are policed. The deadpan tone makes the violence feel routine, which is precisely what makes it unsettling.

Even the poem’s recurring dreams—Kent’s vivid dream, A’s dream mistaken for actual experience—suggest a culture where private reality can’t reliably compete with whatever narrative is being officially enforced.

A sharper question the poem won’t stop posing

If the characters can be reduced to A and B, and if houses can vanish into lakes, what exactly is left to call truth—a confession, a document, a sensation of shock? The poem offers psychic shock and hidden letters, escrow accounts and vanishing architecture, but it never lets any one form of evidence win for long. The earthquake may be the poem’s method: it keeps shaking every claim until it becomes just another item in the list.

The ending’s trap: care, memory, and the inescapable device

Near the end, the poem returns to intimate betrayals and staged identities: Beatrice once loved Alvin; a wife dons the mask and costume of a paramour to restore a husband’s memory; someone is left to shrivel in a tower; Gwen falls into a concealed trap and cannot escape. These aren’t “conclusions” so much as a final set of emblematic confinements. The mask that restores love is still a lie. The tower preserves a person only by forgetting them. The trap is literally hidden in the landscape.

What holds the poem together, finally, is its insistence that narrative itself can be a trap: a mechanism that snaps shut, summarizing a life into a plot point. Under Ashbery’s steady, impersonal voice, the earthquake is the reader’s growing realization that the ground of story—name, home, motive, ending—can fail at any moment, and yet the filing continues.