He - Analysis

A portrait that refuses to settle into one face

The poem’s central move is to build a character out of contradictions until the pronoun itself becomes the subject: He is not one man so much as a shape that keeps getting recast—provider, liar, celebrity, menace, savior, nuisance. Ashbery makes him through a chain of assertions that sound confident but don’t add up to a stable identity. That instability is the point. By the end, the poem feels less like a biography than like a study of how we manufacture figures of authority and fascination—how we keep saying he is in order to explain what’s happening to us.

Domestic oddity: power in the pantry and the music

Early on, the poem places this power in the most ordinary spaces, then makes those spaces behave strangely. He turns up the music and takes down the vaseline from a pantry shelf: small actions, vaguely comic, yet presented with the same certainty as the more impossible claim that he cuts down the lakes so they look straight. That blend of household detail and reality-bending authority suggests a figure who controls both mood and environment—someone who can adjust your inner volume and your outer landscape with equal ease. The tone here is amused but edged: the speaker’s calm certainty about nonsense feels like the calm that comes from long practice in accommodating someone else’s distortions.

Public monument, private trick: cliffs, bottles, and hedges

The poem keeps inflating him into symbols, then undermining them. He is grand enough to be the White Cliffs of Dover, but also reduced to a grin: the capricious smile behind colored bottles. Those bottles suggest display—shop windows, bars, pharmacies—places where desire is packaged and lit. Immediately after, he becomes the liar behind the hedge, a suburban hiding place that turns the monumental back into the furtive. The tension is sharp: he can be landmark and concealment at once. The poem implies that what looks like solidity—cliffs, straightened lakes, cultural references—is often just another kind of cover for manipulation.

Charity that feels like control

Even his apparent virtues arrive twisted. He eats not so the poor won’t go without, a saintly gesture that also carries a whiff of theatrical self-denial, as though scarcity were his stage. Likewise, he will grow you back to your childhood, which sounds like tenderness or rescue—until you hear how invasive it is. Childhood isn’t a gift you can hand someone; to be returned there is to be stripped of adult agency. Ashbery makes the benevolent claims feel coercive, as if help were another way of deciding what you are allowed to be.

The poem’s hinge: from amusing distance to intimate damage

Midway, the poem stops being merely a cabinet of odd traits and turns toward what living near him feels like. He is never near, the speaker says, and when you need something, He cancels it with the air of making a salad—casual, clean, almost pleased with his own efficiency. That’s the emotional core: his power expresses itself as indifference. Earlier lines treat him like a spectacle; here he becomes a daily force that denies needs while maintaining an elegant demeanor. The tone darkens into a weary clarity: this isn’t just an eccentric He; it’s someone who repeatedly withdraws the thing you’re reaching for and makes you feel silly for reaching.

Celebrity clutter and the comedy of labels

Ashbery then floods him with public tags—appeared in Carmen, called Liverlips, last seen flying to New York—like a scrapbook of headlines and gossip. The effect is not to make him vivid, but to show how identity can be built from detachable associations. Even his self-presentation is outsourced: he tries to pretend his pressagent is a temptress. The contradiction here is almost comic: he is supposedly powerful, yet dependent on publicity machinery and petty mythmaking. He becomes a composite of roles the culture recognizes—opera cameo, tabloid nickname, jet-setting—so that knowing him means consuming stories rather than meeting a person.

A sharper question hidden in the pronoun

If he is always the last to know, why does everyone else keep organizing their lives around him? The poem keeps granting him sweeping claims—He is after us—while also making him ridiculous (pretty for a rat, terrible on the stairs). That tension starts to look like a diagnosis: the power of He may come less from his competence than from our readiness to treat him as the explanation for everything, even when the evidence shows a stumbling, self-cutting, half-asleep figure.

The closing warning: intimacy becomes surveillance

The last section arrives as a set of quoted warnings, as if the poem turns into a notice posted by someone who has seen the pattern before. Suddenly the traits become procedural: He wears a question in his left eye; dislikes the police but associates with them; demand something off-menu. These are the habits of someone who lives by exception—refusing ordinary rules, yet using institutions when convenient. The culminating danger is phrased with chilling practicality: if you see he is following you, forget him immediately. It’s not just that he’s bad; it’s that attention itself is the trap. The poem’s final contradiction lands hard: he is asleep and unarmed, yet dangerous. In other words, harm can be inadvertent, habitual, even passive—built into the way he moves through the world and into your life.

What the poem insists on

By the end, the poem has made a persuasive case that the most menacing figures are often the ones who remain undefined. The repeated He is doesn’t clarify; it multiplies masks until the reader feels what the speaker feels: a shifting target that can’t be confronted directly because it keeps becoming something else—cliff, liar, savior, celebrity, sleepwalker. Ashbery’s achievement here is to make that slipperiness feel emotionally exact. The poem doesn’t ask us to identify him; it warns us about the cost of letting a pronoun—an idea of someone—take up so much space that it starts rearranging lakes, needs, and childhood itself.