For John Clare - Analysis

A mind that can see everything, and therefore can’t hold anything

The poem’s central drama is a consciousness overwhelmed by the world’s abundance: it keeps noticing, but it can’t keep what it notices. Right away the speaker describes perception as strangely hollow: Kind of empty in the way it sees everything. That phrase catches Ashbery’s paradox—total attention produces a vacancy, as if seeing too much flattens meaning. Even the earth is personified as if trying to make sense of its own existence, getting up to salute the sky, but the salute feels like a rehearsal that’s only more of a success than usual, never quite definitive. The poem keeps returning to the same ache: there is so much to be seen everywhere, yet it never feels new. The world is inexhaustible, but the self is not.

The stalled sidewalk scene: other people as gates to time

That overload becomes most vivid in the ordinary moment of standing outside a building: you cannot take it all in; details are already hazy; the mind boggles. The speaker then turns the problem into a problem of time and memory—how will you know later what you saw now? The question about whether there were boards between the grass and the street is comically specific, but it’s also devastating: it shows how the truth of a place will later hang on scraps. Even worse, the present is blocked by a couple at a window: we cannot go. The speaker attributes to them a kind of authority—they have to tell us we can pass—yet they never look over. They are suddenly gone, not just physically but temporally, vanishing into the night of time. Other people become like moving doors that shut before we can ask what’s happening.

The photograph fantasy and the poem’s blunt confession

In response, the speaker imagines the consolation of a photograph: you could point and say there they are, pinning the couple to a fixed proof. But even this is admitted as a cheat: they never really stopped, and the picture would only create the illusion of stillness. The poem then delivers one of its starkest self-diagnoses: There is so much to be said, yet very little gets said. That isn’t modesty; it’s a statement about the failure of language to match experience. The tone here is both rueful and precise, like someone watching their own mind fall behind reality in real time.

Wanting the world to live in the bloodstream—and finding it treated like props

The second section shifts into a wish for a different relationship to things: There ought to be room for more, for a spreading out. The speaker longs to be immersed in rock and field and slope, and especially for those details to come forward with confidence, taking pride in being in one's blood. It’s a beautiful fantasy of belonging, where the external world is not an assault but a participant. But the poem quickly breaks that hope with Alas: we tend to perceive things as items meant to be put aside, like costumes for supporting actors or a stray voice trilling down a narrow enclosed street. In other words, we treat reality as stage dressing—present, vivid, but not usable. The speaker’s grim joke, Not even offer to pay, makes the alienation economic: these things cannot be purchased, compensated for, or converted into a stable possession. The tension sharpens: the speaker wants intimacy with the world, but the world arrives as surplus, as unredeemable detail.

The almost-arrival: a hillcrest where everything coheres

The third section offers a conditional breakthrough: It is possible that at the end of a barely perceptible rise there is mutual cohesion. The metaphor suggests an ascent so gradual you hardly notice it until you’re suddenly at a vantage point. In that moment, the scene is fixed in your mind, and music becomes almost visible—each note could be seen as well as heard. This is the poem’s clearest image of harmony: perception, memory, and art briefly line up. But it remains only possible, not achieved, and the speaker immediately undercuts it with a present-tense diagnosis: uneasiness in things just now. The mood pivots from tentative wonder to a jittery, watchful anxiety.

Waiting for something to be over: the violence of weather and passing seasons

The uneasiness takes the form of postponement: Waiting for something to be over before you’re forced to notice it. That line captures a modern kind of dread—attention becomes an obligation you keep delaying. Nature mirrors this strain. The pollarded trees are scarcely bucking the wind, yet the wind is keen and knocks you down; the sky is Clabbered, curdled, thick. Meanwhile Seasons pass with a rush, time accelerating like weather. The poem refuses a simple lament, though: After all it's their time too. Even seasons, even trees, are granted a claim to agency—nothing says they can’t make something of it. That’s a startlingly democratic thought, and it complicates the speaker’s loneliness: perhaps the world is not inert, just uninterested in translating itself into human terms.

A sharp question the poem won’t let us evade

If nature and others have their time too, what exactly are we asking for when we ask them to speak? The poem’s longing for things to take pride in being in one's blood starts to look like a demand that the world justify itself to us. The bitterness of No comment isn’t only silence; it is the refusal of the world to become a witness for our inner life.

Jenny Wren, the “dumb bird,” and the terror of acting

The poem stages its final tension through birds. Jenny Wren seems to care, hopping on her twig as if trying to tell us somethin', but she can’t: dumb bird. The phrase is cruelly affectionate; it admits how badly the speaker wants a message and how petty it feels to demand one. Then the speaker widens the frame to the others, who must know too, but would never even want to communicate. Why? Because to want to speak would mean beginning the terrible journey toward feeling that somebody should act, and that journey ends in utter confusion and hopelessness. Here the poem makes its most unsettling claim: articulation is not a gift but a burden that produces moral pressure and then collapse. So the birds’ verdict becomes a bleak parody of public discourse: No comment.

The last image: probability coming to life like a sail

In the closing line, the poem swerves into an image that feels both bureaucratic and oceanic: the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail. That upper-left detail evokes a page, a chart, a ledger—an impersonal system for tracking what might happen. Yet the sail suggests motion, wind, departure: the abstract becomes suddenly physical. The ending doesn’t resolve the speaker’s hunger for cohesion; it replaces certainty with a kind of animated chance. If the world won’t speak, and the mind can’t hold everything it sees, then what remains is this strange, living drift of likelihoods—something that moves us forward without ever quite explaining where it’s taking us.