El Dorado - Analysis

The poem’s central move: turning confusion into a kind of hospitality

Ashbery’s El Dorado reads like a mind trying to stay generous while it can’t quite stabilize what it knows or where it stands. The speaker keeps offering reassurance—So drink up, Feel good for two—but those invitations sit on top of anxious, sideways logic: issues are waved at, slogans like No rest for the weary appear half-mocked, half-believed, and the future is pictured as a thing that bites. The central claim the poem seems to make is that our ways of coping (comfort, irony, affection, weather reports, slogans) are themselves the only “golden city” we reliably reach: not a destination, but a momentary mood we construct with other people.

The title’s promise of a legendary place matters because the poem keeps undercutting it. This El Dorado is Subfusc—dim, drab, half-visible—more like a compromised haven than a radiant prize. Yet the speaker still insists on toasting it, as if the act of toasting is what makes it briefly real.

The retired sophomore and the fear of getting it like that

The opening is socially intimate and emotionally strange: We have a friend in common, identified as the retired sophomore, a phrase that makes maturity feel like a costume someone quit wearing. That friend’s concern is that the speaker will get it like that—a vague phrase that suggests either enlightenment or breakdown. The poem refuses to specify which, and that refusal is a key tension: is the speaker approaching clarity, or losing grip?

The future arrives as an image that’s both comic and predatory: a green bush chomping on future considerations. Instead of planning as a rational act, planning becomes something being eaten. Even reassurance is outsourced: In the ghostly / dreams of others the speaker appear[s] fine. “Appears” is doing a lot of work—well-being is a projection other people have, not a certainty the speaker possesses.

Affection versus disagreement: the poem’s warm knife-edge

The tone keeps swiveling between tenderness and refusal. I disagree / with you completely lands hard, but it’s immediately paired with couldn't be prouder and fonder. That pairing isn’t a neat reconciliation; it’s more like emotional multitasking, where love doesn’t solve conflict but coexists with it. The speaker’s warmth has a slightly pressured feel, as though affection is being used to keep the room intact while the ground shifts.

One of the poem’s sharpest contradictions is in the lines about obligation and arrival: Feeling under orders becomes a way of showing up, yet stepping on Earth—she's not going to. “Under orders” suggests discipline, attendance, maybe adulthood; “she’s not going to” suggests refusal or disappearance, a person (or the Earth itself) declining to cooperate. The poem won’t tell us who she is, and that vagueness makes the refusal feel bigger—like reality itself might opt out.

Hitting the second gear: I do it in a lot of places and the many El Dorados

The second stanza pivots into repetition: I do it in a lot of places appears twice, like the speaker is trying to convince himself of mobility or resilience. What is it? The poem doesn’t pin it down—living, coping, performing confidence, making meaning. El Dorado becomes not one place but one instance among many: only one that I know something about. That admission is telling: even the place he’s naming is only partially knowable.

Then come recently lost cities / where we used to live. The “lost” here isn’t ancient myth; it’s recent, almost domestic—places you can lose without leaving the world, by changing, forgetting, outgrowing, or being outgrown. They keep the names / we knew, sometimes, which makes memory feel unreliable in a particularly human way: not total amnesia, but partial retention, like a label on an empty jar.

Comfort talk as weather: advice, luck, and a meatloaf sandwich

Outside voices intrude as social noise: Brash brats offer laughing advice, assuming anything the speaker values must still be difficult / or complicated. The speaker’s retort—That's the rub—suggests the opposite: maybe nothing is difficult now because difficulty has been replaced by numbness, or because the stakes have changed. This is where the poem’s tone turns wryly bleak, and the coming storm feels like an emotional forecast: Gusts up to forty-five miles an hour will arrive later / on tonight. The specificity mimics practical preparedness while also sounding like a borrowed script for inner turbulence.

Against that, the poem offers a few blunt consolations: No reason not to, point at the luck. And then the startling simplification: Living is a meatloaf sandwich. It’s funny, but it’s also an anti-romantic thesis: life is ordinary, filling, maybe a little depressing, still something you eat because you’re here. The closing line—I had a good time up there—feels both sincere and evasive, as if “up there” could be a trip, a mood, a former self, or one of those “lost cities.”

The unsettling question the poem leaves open

If El Dorado is subfusc, and if the speaker can only know something about it, then what exactly is being celebrated when he says So drink up? The poem seems to suggest that the toast isn’t to certainty or arrival, but to the fragile act of staying fond while everything—future, place, even “Earth”—keeps slipping out of definition.