By Guess And By Gosh - Analysis

Ashbery’s central move: turning nonsense into a social reality

This poem’s oddity isn’t random; it’s a way of showing how public talk, private feeling, and cultural noise blend until they become hard to separate. The speaker begins by inviting us into a shared moment of departure: O awaken with me the inquiring goodbyes. Even the phrase inquiring goodbyes sounds like an emotion that can’t decide what it is: a farewell that keeps asking questions, a leaving that refuses to close. From there, the poem keeps staging the same problem in new disguises: we try to sort experience into neat items, but it comes as a mess, a tangle and muddle, and the mind’s only consolation is that it can be made to seem quite interesting.

The opening “messy business” is both complaint and seduction

The tone in the first stanza is mock-grand and intimate at once: the operatic O and Ooh sit beside the plainspoken admission that life is a messy business. That parenthetical aside, (and made it seem quite interesting), quietly exposes a tension the poem will keep worrying: are we actually living something meaningful, or are we dressing up confusion as fascination because that’s what we know how to do? The poem doesn’t fully condemn this impulse. It also recognizes a genuine human skill: the ability to keep looking, to keep finding a hook in the chaos, even when the material is just a tangle.

“He ticks them off”: the urge to inventory what can’t be inventoried

When the poem shifts to He ticks them off, it introduces a manager-like figure in the mind: someone trying to make a list of what must be handled, shared, or remembered. But the list refuses to behave like a list. It begins with something almost plausible, leisure top and a different ride home, then slides into near-baby talk and sonic fragments: whispering, whispered whiskers. The comedy here is pointed: the organizing impulse keeps producing items, but the items aren’t stable things; they’re tones, textures, half-heard phrases. The line so many of the things you have to share brings a social pressure into view. Whatever this is, it’s not merely internal whimsy; it’s the strange burden of having to translate a life into communicable pieces, even when the pieces are absurd or private.

“But I was getting on”: impatience with the very sharing the poem performs

The poem’s turn arrives with But I was getting on, a phrase that suggests age, impatience, or simply moving forward while others linger. The blunt follow-up, and that’s what you don’t need, has the sharpness of a reprimand: the speaker rejects something—maybe the list-making, maybe the sentimental goodbye ritual, maybe the need to narrate the self. Yet the rejection is immediately complicated by the oddly formal apology: I’m certainly sorry about scaring your king, if indeed that happened. The apology is both careful and ridiculous. A king appears as if the poem has wandered into a child’s story or a dream, but the speaker’s politeness suggests real guilt or at least real anxiety about offending someone powerful. The phrase if indeed wobbles between sincerity and evasiveness: perhaps the speaker truly doesn’t know what happened, or perhaps not-knowing is a social tactic.

High culture, low culture, and clothing scraps: the world as mismatched hand-me-downs

One of the poem’s richest collisions comes next: You get Peanuts and War and Peace. A newspaper comic and Tolstoy sit side by side like items tossed into the same shopping bag. The poem doesn’t treat the pairing as a witty contrast so much as a normal condition of modern attention: we inherit everything at once, without hierarchy holding. That heap becomes visual and tactile when it turns into clothing: some in rags, some in jags, velvet gown. The speaker’s world arrives as a costume rack of uneven materials, suggesting that identity and culture are worn in patchwork. Even the desire in this section is industrial and oddly impersonal: They want the other side of the printing plant. The printing plant points back to mass production—of texts, images, opinions—so the wish for the other side can feel like a longing to step behind the surface of what’s printed, or to escape the factory of constant messaging. But it’s also vague enough to be a pure longing for elsewhere, the way boredom creates a fantasy of any place that isn’t here.

The late avalanche of diagnoses: concerns dressed as comedy

The poem then declares, flatly, There were concerns, and the next lines turn those concerns into a surreal roll call: jock itch, leadership principles, urinary incompetence. The tonal effect is daring: it forces the embarrassing and the managerial into the same moral universe. It’s funny, but the humor has teeth. These are the kinds of things institutions and bodies generate—policies and symptoms—and the poem suggests that modern worry is often a mix of both, equally difficult to dignify. The command Take that, perfect pitch reads like a tiny rebellion against standards: even something as prized as musical accuracy is treated as another tyrant to be swatted. Here the poem’s contradiction tightens: it mocks the world’s categories and expertise, but it can’t stop naming them. The speaker wants freedom from the list, yet keeps producing lists, as if language itself is the compulsion.

The president and the papers: attention as a civic obligation

When the poem adds say a word for the president, it widens the field from private anxieties to public life. The phrase is almost ceremonial, like a toast or a prayer, but it’s immediately followed by the bland infrastructure of knowledge and media: scholar magazines, papers, a streaming. That last noun, a streaming, feels intentionally awkward, as if the flow of content has become a thing you’re simply supposed to acknowledge. The poem’s world is crowded with demanded attentions: the president, the journals, the stream, the rules of leadership, the rules of the body. Underneath the jokiness, the speaker seems pressed by the sense that citizenship, professionalism, and even health have become continuous performances.

A sharper question the poem dares: is poetry an interest, or a symptom?

The ending lands with a cool, almost accusatory simplicity: Then you are interested in poetry. After all the clutter, the line sounds like a diagnosis rather than a compliment. Is interest in poetry what happens when your mind can’t tolerate the official channels—presidents, principles, scholarly papers—and starts making its own associative logic? Or is it what happens when you’ve absorbed so much Peanuts and War and Peace that the only honest response is a language that can hold both without pretending they belong to separate worlds?

Closing insight: the poem’s goodbye keeps asking because the world won’t stop arriving

By the end, the poem has performed what it named at the start: a goodbye that keeps inquiring. It never gives us a single stable scene; instead it gives us pressures—social sharing, apologizing to a vague authority, being handed culture in rags and velvet, being told to care about the president and the stream. The tone moves from playful invocation to prickly impatience to deadpan catalog, and that movement matters: it shows a mind trying different strategies to survive overload. The central claim the poem seems to make is that poetry isn’t an escape from the muddle; it’s one of the few honest ways to admit the muddle’s true shape, where whispers and printing plants, bodily humiliations and grand novels, all occupy the same crowded room.