Elephant Visitors - Analysis

A conversation that keeps dodging its own seriousness

The poem’s central move is to stage anxiety as a kind of slippery banter: it begins like a skit between Sweet Young Thing and Testy Gent, but the “jokes” keep backing into real dread. When the young voice asks, Why are you all down in the mouth?, the answer is not a neat complaint but a fog of warning: We’re all in the business of getting older. From there the speaker’s mind behaves like someone trying to comfort a friend while also panicking—offering practical-sounding advice (Sit on this moment) and then immediately undercutting it with catastrophe (What if the earth fell on you?). The poem doesn’t so much progress as it swerves, as if the only honest way to talk about mortality and public violence is to keep changing the subject before it hardens into certainty.

Getting older, but also bracing for impact

Aging is framed as an “industry” everyone is enrolled in—the business of getting older—yet the poem keeps mixing that slow, ordinary erosion with sudden threat. The phrase The daytime approach / can fail you suggests that normal, rational daylight thinking doesn’t protect you; it’s a weak umbrella. Then the poem jumps to assassination, not as a specific news event but as a contaminant: a dirty salad of lies that is approaching. That word makes dread spatial and inevitable, like weather rolling in. Even the blunt sentence Something has not been found feels less like a clue in a mystery than like the permanent condition of modern fear: the missing fact, the missing reassurance, the missing explanation.

Comfort offered in a “gloom in this room”

The poem’s tone turns briefly managerial, almost hospitable, as if the speaker can arrange a safer interior: Here, try the gloom in this room. It’s a weird invitation—gloom as a comfort object—followed by a shaky relief: now that the assassins have gone away. / Or got away. The self-correction matters. Gone away would mean danger has passed; got away means danger succeeded. The poem can’t decide which is true, so it lives in the compromise of a room where engines are shut off (Take a week and shut off the engines) and the self tries to hover, in place in the mountains. Stability here is not peace; it’s suspension—staying put because movement feels like falling.

Parachute logic: dependence, but no supplies

Midway through, the poem makes its anxiety literal: twist downward tangled in the parachute while the ground is coming to greet us. The “greeting” is darkly comic, but the danger is real. The question On whom do we depend lands with unusual clarity for Ashbery: it’s the poem asking, in plain terms, what help exists when the descent accelerates. The answer is perversely small and civic-minded: That’s when you could use a newspaper—something that reports, explains, wraps, distracts, proves you’re still in a shared world. But the poem instantly removes it: try and find one in the prairie. Dependence is desired, yet the infrastructure of help is missing; you’re stranded in open space with only the idea of “news” as comfort.

Giving the “quadrupeds” what they want

The closing pages of the poem turn from falling to negotiating, but the negotiation is as opaque as the earlier dread. Doctors / never tell you why these four-footed quadrupeds are friends: authority figures can’t explain companionship, loyalty, or even why certain supports show up when they do. The poem then inventories secret containers—envelopes, a hole behind the house—as if life is made of stashed messages and buried evidence, a private archive no one has properly opened. And then comes a blunt ethic that sounds almost political: if we think we’re better, give them something they WANT. The line suggests that survival depends on bargaining with forces you don’t fully respect—animals, people, systems—by meeting their desires rather than insisting on your own superiority. The sudden gift-word Tasseled trees feels like an absurd offering, yet it matches the poem’s logic: when meaning won’t stabilize, you trade in talismans.

The lotus speaks: a cheap label on a sacred symbol

The final turn sharpens the poem’s central contradiction: it ends with a lotus—an emblem that typically promises purity or transcendence—interrupting to announce, it’s MADE IN JAPAN. The capital letters make it sound like packaging, a tag sewn into the spiritual. After assassination rumors, parachute freefall, and the desperate wish to “hover,” the poem leaves us with a sacred object reduced to global manufacture. But it isn’t merely a cynical joke. It’s also a confession about what the poem can offer: not revelation, not rescue, but a real object in the hand—mass-produced, imperfect, still something. In a world where Something has not been found, even a labeled lotus is a kind of found thing, and the poem’s uneasy comfort is that we go on living among substitutes.