Farm Implements And Rutabagas In A Landscape - Analysis

Cartoon furniture, apocalyptic weather

John Ashbery builds this poem on a deliberately unstable contradiction: it speaks in the familiar voices of Popeye characters, but it keeps slipping toward a language of exile, prophecy, and metaphysical dread. The central claim the poem keeps testing is that home (the shoebox apartment) and country (a promised elsewhere) are not places you can securely occupy; they are shifting mental maps, like the tangram that becomes a country. Even the opening frames the whole scene as an undecoded message, suggesting that what follows is less a story than an encrypted report from inside a psyche: comics and catastrophe sharing the same room.

The apartment that shrinks into a worldview

Early on, the poem turns the apartment into a pressure chamber. Popeye is unthought of in thunder, and the room is defined by smallness: a shoebox, a livid curtain. The Sea Hag’s lounging and grooming (she scratched her chin hair) makes the space comic and intimate, but Wimpy’s grand talk swells it into something like a nation-state: For this is my country. That line is funny because it’s pompous in context, but it’s also unsettlingly sincere: the apartment is not just a setting, it’s an identity claim. The room even begins to behave like an idea under stress: The apartment / Seemed to grow smaller. It’s as if mere thinking about stars, inspiration, and nationhood compresses the domestic scene, forcing the characters into a tighter and tighter symbolic box.

Pleasant as a charm against dread

One word keeps getting rubbed like a worry stone: pleasant. The Sea Hag says, How pleasant to spend one’s vacation; Swee’pea echoes How pleasant!; later she insists, Actually it’s quite pleasant here. The repetition sounds like tourist-speak, but in the poem it functions more like an incantation used to keep panic at bay. Each time pleasant appears, it’s pressed up against thunder, exile, or the shrinking apartment. The poem’s humor comes partly from that mismatch: weather and fate are roaring, while the characters keep reaching for the language of comfort. Ashbery makes that comfort feel both necessary and flimsy, like a curtain trying to stop a storm.

The note on Swee’pea: the poem’s turn into verdict

The hinge of the poem is the moment Swee’pea arrives morose, with a message pinned to his bib: Thunder and tears are unavailing. This is a stark tonal drop, like a judge interrupting a sitcom. The note doesn’t just announce bad news; it declares that ordinary responses (crying, enduring, making noise back) won’t work. Then it redefines the apartment as memory and contamination: remembered space, toxic or salubrious. Suddenly the poem’s recurring actions—especially scratched—look less like comic business and more like damage: the apartment can be whole or scratched, healthful or poisonous, depending on how it’s held in the mind. The poem doesn’t say who wrote the note; that anonymity deepens the sense that the threat is impersonal, like weather, or history, or time.

Olive’s eruption: exile rewritten as family plot

Olive’s entrance is pure violent slapstick—she comes hurtling through the window and gets scratched by geraniums—but her speech is the poem’s longest and most fevered passage. It turns the earlier vague thunder into a melodramatic causality: Popeye was forced ... to flee the country by the schemes of a wizened, duplicate father jealous of the apartment and its contents, myself and spinach / In particular. The specificity is absurd (spinach as a political motive), yet the emotional logic is recognizable: a father figure duplicates and displaces the son, envy poisons the home, and the result is exile. Olive’s prophecy escalates the stakes: immaculate darkness and thunder, no more pleasant / Rays of the sun, only scratched / Tree-trunks. It’s a vision of aging and loss disguised as cartoon lore, as if the poem needs the safety of a comic-book mask to say something harsh about time: the end of the arpeggio of our years, that lyrical phrase for life’s ordinary unfolding.

Spinach: sustenance, threat, and color

Spinach threads through the poem as both joke and substance. Wimpy is cutting open / a number 2 can of spinach, grounding the surreal talk of countries and stars in a tinny domestic ritual. Yet spinach is also named as what Popeye’s father is jealous of, and later the Sea Hag tries to reason with fear by bargaining: If this is all we need fear from spinach. By the end, the weather itself takes its tint: domestic thunder, / The color of spinach. That line fuses nourishment with menace. What should strengthen Popeye becomes indistinguishable from the storm filling his home. Ashbery makes the everyday object absorb the poem’s dread, as though domestic life generates its own thunder and then tries to eat it to survive.

A hard question: who is comfort for?

When Popeye finally chuckled at the thunder, is he resilient, or numb? The poem’s last claim—it sure was pleasant—lands after the apartment has been filled, crowded out, by sound. If the storm is domestic, then maybe the real danger isn’t outside at all; maybe the home produces the weather, and calling it pleasant is the only way to keep living in it.

The closing gag that won’t stay a gag

The final image is deliberately crude—Popeye scratched / His balls—and it matters because it yanks the poem back to the body at the exact moment it has become most cosmic. Thunder that started as an undecoded message now occupies the room, and Popeye responds not with heroism but with a reflex. The poem ends by collapsing the grand oppositions it has been playing with: apartment and country, apocalypse and vacation, prophecy and canned spinach. The last sentence claims a pastoral day in the country, but we have just watched the country appear as a tangram, an idea, a bargain, and an escape route Olive uses to snatch Swee’pea away. The poem’s final tension remains unresolved on purpose: is the country freedom, or just another name for the same thunder—only reimagined, made pleasant, and therefore bearable?