Glazunoviana - Analysis

A catalog of is that here too?

This poem feels like a mind trying to reassemble a world from scattered, half-recognized pieces—and failing in a way that becomes suddenly catastrophic. The speaker’s repeated question, is he here too? and Is that here too?, doesn’t just ask about location; it tests whether memory, comfort, and even language can still attach to anything solid. The early lines behave like a checklist for reality: the man with the red hat, the polar bear, The window giving on shade. Each item is vivid, but the insistence on here makes the scene unstable, as though the speaker suspects these images may be props that won’t materialize when called.

The window: looking out, looking into blankness

The window giving on shade is a deceptively simple object with an unsettling destination. A window usually offers view, light, or a way out; this one gives on shade, as if the outside world is not landscape but dimming. That detail turns the speaker’s questioning into something more urgent: if even the window opens onto darkness, then confirmation—yes, it’s here—wouldn’t be reassuring anyway. The poem’s logic starts to suggest that presence is not the same as safety.

Little helps and my initials in the sky: private comfort made enormous

After the objects and figures, the speaker reaches for smaller, tenderer supports: all the little helps. The phrase is modest, almost domestic, but it sits beside something grand and strange: My initials in the sky. Initials are a pared-down self—identity reduced to letters—yet placed in the sky they become cosmic graffiti, a wish for permanence. The poem holds a tight tension here: the speaker wants both the tiny, everyday scaffolding that keeps one going and a huge guarantee that the self has been written into the world. Even the most sensory comfort in the stanza, The hay of an arctic summer night, mixes warmth and extremity: hay suggests barn-sweet familiarity, while arctic pushes the setting toward the uninhabitable.

The hinge: the bear’s death in plain view

The poem’s turn is blunt: The bear / Drops dead, and it happens in sight of the window, as though the earlier act of looking has led directly to a witnessing. The polar bear, introduced almost playfully—is he here too?—becomes a sudden emblem of what cannot be helped. There’s no explanation, no cause, no mourning ritual; the line is nearly reportorial. That tonal snap—from inquisitive, searching inventory to stark fact—makes the earlier questions feel tragically misplaced, as if the speaker has been asking the wrong kind of question (where are things?) when the real problem is that things can vanish, abruptly, even when fully seen.

Migration and multiplication: beauty that crowds into dread

After the bear’s collapse, the poem widens its lens: Lovely tribes have just moved to the north. The word Lovely tries to keep faith with beauty, but the movement to the north echoes the arctic setting and suggests displacement—people (or cultures, or species) shifting under pressure. Then the air fills: the martins grow denser, until they become Rivers of wings. This is gorgeous and menacing at once: a river is continuous, forceful, hard to stop, and wings are both freedom and swarm. The poem ends in vast tribulation, a phrase so broad it could feel abstract, except that Ashbery has earned it by crowding the scene with bodies—bear, tribes, martins—so that tribulation is not a concept but a weather system rolling in.

A sharper possibility: are the little helps part of the catastrophe?

The most unsettling thing may be how the poem places consolation right next to omen. My initials in the sky can read as a childlike claim on the world—but also as an attempt to brand the ungraspable, to force meaning onto what won’t hold it. When the bear dies in sight of the window, it’s hard not to wonder if the poem is accusing the speaker’s desire for reassurance: the need to keep asking is that here too? might be the very habit that makes vast tribulation feel inescapable, because it keeps the speaker watching for proof instead of living with uncertainty.