Days Of 1948 - Analysis

Grief as a bad signal you still try to tune

This poem feels like someone trying to talk about a death without letting the usual language of mourning take over. The central tension is that the speaker is surrounded by the social machinery of grief—Friends of the deceased advancing, memories arriving, people saying nice things—yet he can’t trust any of it to be real, or even safe. Instead, the mind flips channels: from an almost comic image (pole-vault toward us) to a blunt verdict (That’s creepy) to pastoral vastness (his pastures / stretch to the moon). The dead person’s afterlife in the speaker’s mind is not solemn; it’s intrusive, strange, and oddly theatrical.

The “nice we were” consolation that doesn’t console

Ashbery plants a small, almost embarrassing comfort at the center: the deceased kept telling us how nice we were, and that / was something. The phrase is both grateful and dissatisfied. Calling it something admits it’s thin currency, especially against the sheer scale of the dead person’s “pastures” and “old place.” The poem keeps asking where, exactly, the past is located: Was it in the old house / on the wires? That odd placement—house plus wires—makes memory feel like an electrical grid: you can be connected, but also shocked; you can receive a message, but it might be static.

Thanksgiving and the problem of shared memory

Midway through the first stanza, the poem tries on a recognizable scene—Thanksgiving earlier, all the folks you’ve loved for years—and then immediately muddies it with vagabond days and nights of mystery. The comfort of tradition is there, but it won’t stay put; it slides into drifting, into noir-ish obscurity. Even the line that sounds most grounded—Yes boys, that’s where my money goes—lands as both affectionate and unsettling. Who is speaking—an older voice addressing boys, the deceased, the speaker ventriloquizing? Money here sounds like investment in a story of family and belonging, but also like payment to keep the performance going.

The turn: from recollection to interrogation at the tide line

The second stanza pivots sharply into questions and commands: Do you solemnly participate now, where the tide is? The tide suggests the edge between states—land and water, past and present, the living and the dead. The poem asks for solemnity, then sabotages it with a childish sound effect: Boink, followed by the too-easy declaration I love you. The tone turns flirtatious and absurd, but the absurdity isn’t a joke; it’s the speaker’s way of showing how hard it is to mean what you say when death has made language unreliable.

Opera-house identity and the scream that ends the poem

In the final lines, the poem frames mourning as a kind of audience experience: distinguish between us / in the old opera house. The opera house implies roles, costumes, rehearsed emotion—public feeling. The speaker asks whether what you heard about him is what allows you to sort people into the right boxes: friend, mourner, survivor, rival. But the ending refuses dignified clarity: you wake up screaming Arriba! That last cry—Spanish for up or above—can sound like a cheer, a command, or a panic-word that bursts out before sense arrives. It’s as if the only honest response to the dead person’s “pastures” reaching the moon is not a eulogy, but an involuntary shout.

A harder question the poem won’t answer

If the deceased’s friends pole-vault toward us, are they bringing comfort—or enforcing a version of the dead person that everyone must accept? The poem keeps staging offers of belonging—how nice we were, Thanksgiving, an opera house full of listeners—and then undercutting them with creepiness, noise, and screams, as though shared mourning can become another kind of infiltration.