Commotion Of The Birds - Analysis

A lecture on progress that keeps slipping into doubt

At first the poem sounds like a brisk tour guide escorting us right along through the seventeenth century, ranking eras by how modern they feel. But Ashbery’s central move is to show how shaky that ranking is: the poem keeps undoing its own confidence about cultural progress until modern becomes less a historical achievement than a lonely condition the speaker wakes up inside. The voice begins in a chatty, professorial mode—naming Restoration Comedy, Webster and Shakespeare and Corneille—yet the talk has an anxious undertow, as if the speaker is trying to reassure himself that history is going somewhere.

The poem’s early paradox is the first crack in that reassurance: the sixteenth century figures Lassus and Petrus Christus seem more modern than those who come after them. That one reversal makes the whole timeline wobble. If modernity can appear in the past more vividly than in the present, then the march forward is already suspect.

Seeming versus being: the poem’s main fight

The poem names its own key tension outright: Often it’s a question of seeming rather than being modern. The speaker tries to treat this as a manageable distinction—Seeming is almost as good as being, occasionally just as good—but the insistence gives away uncertainty. Even the nod to philosophers who know things / in a way others cannot doesn’t settle it, because their special knowledge turns out to be often almost the same as ours. In other words, the authorities who might certify what is truly modern can’t really certify anything; they just rename what everyone already half-knows.

This makes the poem’s tone slyly defensive: it pretends to be a confident survey, but it keeps confessing that the categories (modern/not modern, real/seeming) are unstable and maybe only socially agreed upon.

The Italian loop and the theft that history calls normal

The middle of the poem offers a concrete model for how modern gets manufactured: influence, borrowing, denial. We know how Carissimi influenced Charpentier, and the influence is pictured not as a straight line but as measured propositions with a loop at the end that returns to the beginning, only a little / higher up. That loop is a brilliant image for the poem’s view of history: progress is a recursion with a slight elevation, not a clean break.

Yet the loop is also political: it’s Italian, brought to France, first despised, / then accepted without any acknowledgment. The poem’s offhand jab—as the French are wont to do—turns aesthetic evolution into a story of appropriation and forgetting. And the later prediction that historians will claim it all happened normally sharpens the critique: what looks like natural historical development may actually be a tidy narrative laid over messier acts of taste, power, and denial.

Baroque returning, modernism promised: the hinge where certainty fails

A small parenthesis becomes a major turn in mood. The baroque, supposedly past, has a habit of tumbling out when we thought it was safely stowed away; the classical merely ignores it and moves on to other things of lesser import. What’s funny here is also unsettling: periods don’t stay contained, and what gets labeled as orderly (the classical) may be orderly mainly because it refuses to look at what won’t disappear.

Right after that, the poem tries one more time to believe in a destination: looking forward impatiently to modernism, when / everything will work out for the better, somehow. The word somehow is the tell. It’s a hope without a mechanism, and the poem knows it. Even the advice about indulging taste—this shoe, / that strap—imagines present choices being redeemed later, when modernism is installed / all around. Modernism arrives not as revelation but like the remnants of a construction project: an environment made by work crews, leftover materials, and dust.

Modern as weather: wet, abandoned, and strangely inevitable

The final shift is the poem’s most personal and bleakly tender. After all the centuries and categories, It’s good to be modern if you can stand it turns modernity into an ordeal of endurance. The simile is pointedly undignified: being left out in the rain. To be modern is to be exposed and uncomfortable—and then, worse, to realize you were always this way: modern, / wet, abandoned. That realization contains a grim consolation: the speaker’s special intuition is that he weren’t meant to be / somebody else. Modernity isn’t achieved by joining a movement; it is recognized as one’s condition.

And the poem’s last twist is that even the makers / of modernism are not permanent heroes. They stand inspection only as they wither and fade in today’s glare. So modernism, promised earlier as the era when things will work out, is already pictured as aging under scrutiny—another style becoming historical, another loop returning, only a little higher up.

A harder question the poem won’t let go of

If modernity feels like rain and abandonment, why does the speaker still chase it so eagerly—ranking centuries, awaiting installation, rehearsing who counts as modern enough? The poem seems to answer: because the story of progress is one of the few stories that can make being wet feel chosen rather than accidental, even if that story is built from seeming and later rewritten as history.