Dido
death
free verse
austere
Dido - meaning Summary
Self-consumption and Frustrated Speech
John Ashbery's Dido reflects on self-consumption and the limits of language. The speaker notes how bodily processes both sustain and destroy life, and how utterances arrive already needless
—their own impulse makes them redundant. This produces a sense of deprivation: the aspiration to flawless expression is thwarted. The poem presents mortality and expressive failure as intertwined facts, leaving the speaker resigned to an imperfect, self-undermining existence.
The body’s products become Fatal to it. Our spit Would kill us, but we Die of our heat. Though I say the things I wish to say They are needless, their own flame conceives it. So I am cheated of perfection.
from The Tennis Court Oath (1962)
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