Caravaggio And His Followers - Analysis

Admiration That Admits Its Own Ignorance

The poem begins with a confession that sounds simple but immediately destabilizes itself: You are my most favorite artist followed by Though I know / very little about your work. That tension—devotion without knowledge—sets the poem’s central claim in motion: what we call love of art (or love in general) is often a way of orbiting a mystery we can’t really enter, yet can’t stop circling. Ashbery keeps the address intimate (a direct you) while the content slips away from certainty. Even the named followers, Mattia Preti and Luca Giordano, arrive as half-grasped figures: Preti toiled so hard to so little / effect—then the speaker adds the gentle, shrugging mercy of (though it was enough).

The Foxgloves: A Secret That “Won’t Ever Go Away”

Luca Giordano is described through color—darkest reds, lucent greens—as if painting were a kind of botanical alchemy. He thinks he has found the secret of the foxgloves, but it was too late: the flowers have already disappeared because they were planted in some other place. The poem treats knowledge as something both sensory and displaced: you can see the reds and greens, but the secret itself has been relocated, replanted beyond reach. The offered comfort—bread and a flask of wine—is touching and inadequate, because the real hunger here is for meaning. And that meaning behaves like a haunting: never / to be divined, it nonetheless won’t ever go away. The contradiction is sharp: the secret can’t be known, but it also can’t be dismissed.

Italy, Iowa, and the Eyelid’s “Untrained Reaches”

The poem then veers into a deliberately comic, baffled attempt to locate Italian-ness: toting hay up the side of a stack / of it might be Italian. Or then again, not. The speaker’s uncertainty is not a flaw but a method. Italy (the expected home of Caravaggio and his heirs) blurs with Iowa, and both blur with the body: the untrained reaches of the eyelid / hung out, at evening, over next to nothing. This is one of the poem’s most telling moves: the search for art history dissolves into the unstable, private theater of perception. The eyelid suggests a threshold between seeing and not seeing, training and untraining, expertise and ordinary looking. The poem keeps asking: what does it mean to look at art, or at life, without the credentials that promise certainty?

Flowers as Missiles, Indifference as Weather

A remembered voice interrupts—What was it she had said—and we get a miniature domestic prophecy: The flowers / of the lady next door are beginning to take flight, / and what will poor Robin do then? The surreal becomes bluntly modern: the flowers were blasting off / every two seconds like missiles and nobody wept, or even cared. Here the poem’s tenderness meets its bleakness. Beauty doesn’t merely fade; it weaponizes or industrializes into spectacle. And the neighborhood (the lady next door, poor Robin) fails to provide moral shelter, because the default public response is a shrug. Yet the speaker insists on a quieter, harder-to-prove consolation: Look out of the window and you’ll see where the difference has been made. Whatever changes us may not be headline-worthy; it may be small, incremental, seen only by someone willing to keep looking.

The Avenue, the Light, and the Risk of Participating

The poem’s long middle sentence becomes a model of how a mind wanders through experience: first interested by one thing and then another until it reaches a wide avenue with a median crowded with trees whose bark is madly peeling, colored like a roan or an Irish setter. The comparisons are oddly homely; they bring the grand avenue down to animal warmth, as if the world insists on being both strange and familiar. Then comes the choice: One can wait on the curb for the rest / of one’s life or one can cross / when the light changes to green. This isn’t framed as heroic; it’s framed as what anyone cares to notice—which is to say, hardly anyone. The poem links the act of crossing to art again, not through Caravaggio directly but through Giordano’s imagined craft: the green light becomes the sapphire folds / of a shot-silk bodice he might have bothered with. Art is not a separate realm here; it’s a vocabulary that briefly makes action vivid enough to choose.

A Children’s Rhyme Turns into a Threat

The poem delivers a blunt hinge—Now it’s life.—and immediately undercuts it with nursery-rhyme dread: as Henny Penny said to Turkey Lurkey, something / is hovering over us, wanting to destroy us. The childish names make the fear feel more, not less, plausible: catastrophe is the story we learn early, the script that keeps returning. Yet the threat is peculiar in its patience: it is waiting, and for what, nobody knows. The poem’s earlier secret of the foxgloves reappears in a new register: not a secret of color or plants, but a secret of fate—an approaching end that cannot be predicted, only felt as atmosphere.

Night Museum: Paintings That Whisper Like Stars

In the final section, the poem shifts into the museum’s after-hours, when the guards have gone home and artworks talk freely to one another. The whisper is compared to stars, making the museum a kind of night sky: distant, glittering, alive with communications we can’t normally hear. Then the poem offers an uncanny monologue from an artwork (or a figure within one): Why did that man stare, and stare? The viewer obviously saw nothing, only a fragment of a vision / of a lost love, next to a pool. This is the poem’s most direct statement about looking: spectatorship can be a kind of blindness, because the viewer is really watching his own grief projected onto the canvas. The speaker-painting can’t deal with it much longer, and yet the ending is strangely calm: The experience / is ending. The museum encounter is finite; the pressure of being looked at will lift. But the last line—The time for standing to one side is near now, very near—echoes the earlier curbside choice. Something is about to change: for the viewer, for the artwork, or for the boundary between them.

A Hard Question the Poem Won’t Let You Dodge

If the man staring saw nothing, and the painting felt relieved when the experience is ending, what does that imply about us as viewers? The poem seems to suggest that we often approach art not to meet it, but to use it—pressing our lost love against its surface until it becomes a mirror. And yet the poem keeps insisting that something real remains: the foxgloves’ secret, the difference seen from the window, the green light that can still change.

What “Followers” Finally Means

By the end, followers no longer means only painters after Caravaggio; it also names the rest of us—people trailing after impressions, colors, half-heard sayings, childhood warnings, trying to decide whether to wait on the curb or cross. The poem’s tone is characteristically mixed: fond and teasing about expertise, startled by beauty, suddenly grim about hovering destruction, then hushed and cosmic in the museum night. Its deepest contradiction holds: meaning can be undivinable and still exert force. The foxgloves have vanished into some other place, but their secret keeps working on the mind—like a painting in the dark, whispering after we’ve stopped pretending we understand it.