The Evening Of Greuze - Analysis

A watchtower for smallness

The poem’s central pressure is this: the speaker is trying to think his way out of vulnerability, but the world keeps answering with images of triviality and sealed-up refusal. He begins by admitting a collective weakness: As a group we were somewhat vulnerable, a line that sounds almost sociological, as if naming the problem could manage it. Yet the very next move is retreat into a literal vantage point: a tower in the mill, an oriel that suggests safety, distance, and a framed view. From there he watches bluebottles that nag heaven / with their unimportance. That phrase is both funny and grim: the insects’ insignificance becomes a kind of complaint addressed to the highest possible authority.

The poem keeps asking what such small creatures are expected to do, then offers mock-earnest options: Raise families, Become deacons. The joke is barbed, because it imports human moral expectations into a scene where they don’t fit, and the speaker knows it. The moment he entertains those expectations, his inner systems fail: my calculations / collapse into bric-a-brac, my equations / are undone. What breaks isn’t only logic; it’s the fantasy that order can protect him.

The cement house that won’t answer

Across the road, the new building is the poem’s bluntest emblem of non-communication: a cement house that will seemingly have no windows. It’s shelter without exchange, interior without view. Calling it A columbarium / for cement pigeons turns architecture into funerary storage: even the birds are imagined as ash and niches. The poem’s dread is not simply of death, but of a world becoming unresponsive matter—cement, sealed surfaces, rooms that don’t open.

That unresponsiveness is immediately tied to the most personal uncertainty in the poem: as I talked to you / down the decades in my letters, one thing was unsure: / your reply. The tower and the windowless house now read like externalizations of a long correspondence where speech is possible but return speech is not guaranteed. The speaker’s vulnerability is not only physical; it’s the exposure of sending words into time and not knowing if they will be met.

From wry observation to shared endangerment

The poem turns sharply when the speaker stops describing and starts insisting: Now we are again endangered. The earlier we of the first line comes back, but this time it’s intimate—we meaning speaker and addressee, bound by that uncertain exchange. The simile like dead birds is startling because it collapses the difference between living danger and completed death; the threat is so total it’s described as already finished.

Then the sky fills with something both gorgeous and disgusting: autumn’s ruby spittle that mounts / in the sky like a tornado. Ruby makes the season seductive, jewel-like; spittle makes it bodily, involuntary, faintly contemptuous. A tornado suggests the violence of weather, but also a kind of spinning, unreadable message written in air. The poem’s tone here is elegiac and panicked at once: beauty arrives as a contaminant, and the natural world offers not comfort but a force that rises and coils.

Instructions for surviving a bare room

In the final movement, the speaker gives advice that sounds almost like a survival manual, but it’s emotionally perverse: Try to keep / cold and empty in this bare room. Coldness and emptiness are posed as discipline, maybe even as protection—if you don’t warm to the world, it can’t burn you; if you don’t fill yourself with expectation, you can’t be disappointed by your reply not arriving. Yet the phrase bare room also echoes the windowless cement house: safety threatens to become a tomb.

And still the poem refuses to end in pure austerity. Two sensuous details enter like quiet intruders: The lizard’s glint, the horse’s velvet blanket. These are not grand consolations; they are textures and flashes, small pleasures that don’t solve anything. Yet they carry a promise of being surprise[d] into something like belief: veiled hope. The hope is not clean or triumphant; it’s covered, half-hidden, arriving through the senses rather than through answers.

Greuze’s shadow: moral expectations versus modern sealedness

The title’s nod toward Greuze, a painter associated with staged domestic feeling and moral instruction, sharpens the poem’s irony about social roles: Raise families? Become deacons? Those sound like the kinds of tidy outcomes a moralizing scene might reward. But Ashbery’s landscape keeps producing the opposite: insects that matterlessly nag heaven, a house with no windows, letters that may never be answered. If Greuze suggests a world where emotions are legible and lessons can be drawn, this poem keeps finding surfaces that won’t yield meaning.

The poem’s hardest contradiction

What makes the ending ache is the contradiction between the command to remain cold and empty and the inevitability of being moved. The speaker can recommend numbness, but the poem itself keeps registering color (bluebottles, ruby), touch (velvet blanket), and sparkle (glint). Even the bleak images are vivid. The mind that wants to defend itself by subtraction can’t stop noticing, and noticing is already a form of attachment.

If the addressee’s reply has been the long uncertainty, the poem’s last lines propose a different kind of answer: not a letter, not a doctrine, but an ambush of feeling—some lizard-light, some animal warmth—that arrives one day without permission. The danger remains, but so does the possibility that what saves you won’t be sense or closure; it will be the sudden, veiled insistence of the world on being felt.