Heartache - Analysis

A heartache that arrives like slapstick

Ashbery’s central move is to treat heartache not as a private, noble sorrow but as a bizarre civic weather system: something that happens to a whole town, with authorities, routines, and a local bar offering consolation. The poem begins with a jolt of cartoon danger, stepping off a board-game into a frantic lagoon, and from there it keeps mixing comedy with menace. That mixture matters, because the heartache here isn’t clean; it’s the kind that makes you laugh a little and then feel implicated for laughing.

The tone starts wry and improvisational, but it gradually chills into something winter-hard and deserted. By the end, the only warmth left is the tavern’s neon promise—comforting, yes, but also small and oddly gendered, like a brittle social script that survives after everything else has gone.

Truth hiding in the bathroom

The poem’s first key image is truth as something that hides: it’s in the bathroom, as if it’s embarrassed, or as if it knows it will be used against someone. When the dangerous moment drags the truth out, truth doesn’t sound enlightening; it sounds like a professional trying to end an awkward appointment. Do whatever you like, it says, adding good luck—a phrase that pretends to help while quietly admitting it won’t.

Ashbery sharpens that betrayal through the barber comparison: truth is like an extra plop of lather added to a stupefied customer. The customer can’t see; his face is covered; he has to trust the person holding the razor. The tension is immediate: we expect truth to clarify, but here it obscures and patronizes. Heartache, then, isn’t ignorance—it’s being addressed by something that claims authority while leaving you helpless.

When they let you out: the threat of being managed

Truth’s next line deepens the poem’s sense of institutional pressure: When they let you out. Out of where? The poem doesn’t say, which is exactly the point: heartache is presented as a condition that makes other people imagine you belong somewhere enclosed. The speaker’s bitterness answers in the same register—places for people like you—but then undercuts itself: I don’t know of any. That contradiction is one of the poem’s engines. The speaker can feel the world’s categories tightening around him, yet those categories are also slippery, hard to locate, almost imaginary until they snap shut.

The origin story that follows—a girl with braids teasing about getting too short—sounds trivial, even childish, but the poem treats it like a long-lasting curse. A small humiliation becomes a lifelong sentence. In this way, heartache begins as embarrassment and ends as a whole social reality: the private wound grows into a public arrangement.

The upward spiral toward a ghastly ascendency

The poem’s time-lapse is brutally quick: The years whirled quickly by, and what should be progress becomes an upward spiral toward a ghastly ascendency. Even success—ascendency—turns grotesque. The speaker’s uncertainty, He didn’t know, is followed by the plainest emotional fact in the poem: He cried. After all the sly voices and odd metaphors, that short sentence lands like a bare room.

This is a crucial tonal turn. The poem has been joking with danger, making truth sound like a barber, but here it admits the cost directly. Heartache is not only confusion; it is the exhaustion of trying to understand what kind of life you’re ascending into, and realizing the climb itself may be the trap.

The police chief’s bag of bright kids

The most nightmarish image arrives dressed as a folktale: the police chief has been collecting all the bright kids and popping them into a big bag. The authority figure isn’t protecting the vulnerable; he’s quietly removing the gifted. This makes the poem’s earlier talk of being let out feel retroactively ominous: the town has systems for containment, and they can be turned on anyone—especially those who don’t fit.

Yet the poem refuses a simple rescue narrative. No one was too sure what happened, and the kids themselves are past caring. They even have the run of the house, a detail that makes captivity blur into a strange domestic freedom. The question—Was it so much better outside?—isn’t rhetorical comfort; it’s the poem’s bleak logic. If the outside world is a town that doesn’t miss you, then a bag and a house might feel, disturbingly, like a kind of shelter.

When being seen through becomes a punishable property

Winter arrives like judgment: Snow lashed the windowpanes, punishing them for being seen through. The poem turns transparency into guilt. To be a window is to let others look in or out; to be bright is to be noticed; to be legible is to be targetable. The town grew quieter, and then comes one of the cruelest lines: No one missed the kids. The reason is even crueler because it’s twisted: They had been too bright. Brightness, which should attract care, instead repels it—either from jealousy, fear, or simple relief that the unsettling people are gone.

Night then becomes an animal that both is and isn’t what it claims: an infuriated ocelot protecting a cub, or so it pretended. Even nature is performing. The poem’s world is full of false assurances and staged roles—truth pretending to advise, night pretending to be righteous. Heartache, in this climate, is the feeling of living among performances that still have real teeth.

Pink chalk v’s and the neon that remains

By the end, the public space is narrowed: no longer any room on the sidewalk for anything but v’s in pink chalk, like a child’s seagull. It’s a startling reduction of language and movement into a repeated, simplified mark—almost like the town can only manage a faint symbol of flight. The kids are gone; the sidewalks can’t hold complex life; what remains is a childlike sign that suggests birds but cannot actually lift off.

Against that thinning world, the tavern’s neon offers the poem’s last warmth: All beer on tap, Booths for Ladies. The red glow is comforting precisely because it’s predictable, but it’s also a small, commercial comfort, and one that preserves old categories. After the town’s bright kids disappear and everyone speeds away, what survives is consumption and signage—an adult lullaby that doesn’t answer any of the poem’s earlier questions about truth, confinement, or loss.

The hardest question the poem leaves behind

If the police chief can remove all the bright kids and No one missed them, then what exactly is heartache mourning: the missing children, or the town’s willingness not to notice? The poem keeps offering substitutes—truth’s good luck, the house with the run of it, the tavern’s red neon—but each comfort looks like a way of practicing indifference. In that sense, the deepest heartache here may be the discovery that abandonment can feel normal, even cozy, once the signs are lit.