Chateau Hardware
Chateau Hardware - meaning Summary
Alienation in November Landscape
John Ashbery's Chateau Hardware places a speaker in an always-November rural precinct where cultivated order and surveillance coexist. The poem records small, concrete details—farms, birds along a fence, and police patrols—alongside the speaker's bodily needs and muted desires. An as though
mood frames a tension between external control and internal sensation, ending with an ambivalent self-presentation as the speaker turns outward to address an unspecified other.
It was always November there. The farms Were a kind of precinct; a certain control Had been exercised. The little birds Used to collect along the fence. It was the great “as though,” the how the day went, The excursions of the police As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting Neither fire nor water, Vibrating to the distant pinch And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.
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