Episode - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: music is born from discomfort, not from purity

In Episode, Ashbery treats music as a desire that keeps failing and restarting inside ordinary time. The speakers look back to old days when the search for the sweetest melodies wasn’t graceful at all: they fell / on a bed and chewed the pillow, an image of bodily frustration and half-muffled longing. Even the moon is not romantic but abrasive, rankled in the shutter’s crevices. From the beginning, the poem insists that whatever we call sweetness is made out of irritation, awkwardness, and a kind of pressure that can’t find a clean outlet.

1935–1937: nostalgia staged as costume, with pain waiting offstage

The mid-1930s arrive as carefully arranged surfaces: skirts were long, hats shaded part of the face, lipstick fudgy and encouraging. The adverbs and adjectives feel knowingly theatrical, like someone laying props on a table. Yet the poem keeps slipping a blade under the fabric. There was / music in the names of the years, but 1937 is welcoming only because the speaker is already preparing for the pain. That small gesture, one bit one’s lip, holds the contradiction: the era is presented as suitably composed, while the body quietly rehearses hurt. The past is not a refuge; it’s a place where the expectation of harm is part of the melody.

The hinge: That must be awful breaks the spell of period detail

When the poem suddenly quotes an interlocutor—That must be awful.—the tone jolts from curated recollection into a live, slightly tense conversation. The reply, I was hoping you could / imagine it, makes the poem’s real project explicit: not reporting history, but testing whether another mind can be made to feel a distance as if it were present. The speaker then vows to become articulate / again, as though articulation is something one loses and regains, like a radio signal. What follows is almost a manifesto: the lurching moon taught them to go on seeking music even when something dumb is being said. The poem puts beauty and stupidity in the same room, and refuses to let either one leave.

Calm under “turmoil”: a stubborn self-description that doesn’t quite convince

The last movement begins by accepting loneliness as a recurring condition: all alone / at the starting gate. A starting gate suggests competition and forward motion, but also the stalled moment before release—anticipation without arrival. The speakers claim they hadn’t wanted / this fuss and were calm / under an appearance of turmoil, a phrase that can be read two ways at once: either they truly possess inner steadiness, or they are experts at disguising their agitation as mere appearance. The insistence and so we remain / even today sounds like pride, but it also sounds tired, as if the same posture has been maintained too long to be freely chosen.

An unwanted inspiration: time as a relay race no one asked to run

One of the poem’s sharpest tensions is generational: the speakers are an unwanted inspiration to those who come after, and linked as well to those who came before, stretching back into old times of discussion. Inspiration here is not a gift; it’s an obligation that keeps getting handed on. The phrase I told you so adds a sour note of vindication, like the speakers predicted this cycle of repetition and now can’t enjoy being right. Even the community implied by we feels unstable—sometimes it’s intimate, sometimes it’s historical, sometimes it’s a defensive committee trying to justify its own persistence.

Driving into Tomorrow: control, crash, and the “new music” that hides the past

The closing image is both comic and alarming: hand on / the stick shift headed into a billboard / labeled Tomorrow. The stick shift suggests agency and skill—manual control—yet the car is aimed at a flat sign, a future that is literally an advertisement. The poem calls what lies ahead the adventures of new music, but that promise is immediately complicated by melismas shrouding the past. A melisma is ornament, a stretching of a single syllable across many notes; here it becomes a way of prolonging sound until meaning blurs. The future’s new music doesn’t erase the past so much as veil it in elaborate vocal flourishes, turning memory into a sustained, decorative delay.

A question the poem quietly dares you to answer

If they are really calm, why is the motion toward Tomorrow described like an oncoming collision? And if something dumb is being said, is the music a rescue from that dumbness—or a prettier way of letting it continue?

Where the episode ends: endurance as the only dependable melody

By the end, the poem doesn’t resolve its contradictions; it learns to ride them. Sweetness comes from pillow-chewing, welcome years come with bitten lips, articulation returns only to admit how easily language turns dumb. The final effect is a wary, stubborn endurance: the speakers keep shifting gears, keep aiming forward, even as the forward direction looks like a billboard and the past keeps leaking through the ornament. In Ashbery’s hands, the episode is not a neat scene with a lesson; it’s a recurring moment when we try, again, to find music in what we can barely stand to say.