How To Continue - Analysis

A fable about a paradise that can’t be kept

John Ashbery’s central claim feels both simple and unsettling: the most enchanting communities are often built on temporary conditions, and when those conditions vanish, people discover that love is not a place you can live in forever, only something you can look back on. The poem begins like a singsong story—Oh there once was a woman—but it isn’t really about the shopkeeper’s trinkets. It’s about a whole social atmosphere, a small world that forms around a dock, tourists, and the appetite to see what life could be somewhere else. That longing creates the island’s glittering party-life, and it also plants the seed of its disappearance: if everyone arrives seeking possibility, then everyone is also, secretly, passing through.

The store as a magnet for desire and reinvention

The woman’s shop sells trinkets to tourists not far from a dock, and those details matter because they anchor the poem’s dream in commerce and transit. A dock implies arrivals and departures; trinkets imply portable meaning—small objects that stand in for an experience you can’t hold onto. Around this modest setup, the poem inflates into a social miracle: always a party, always different but very nice. Advice, romance, and novelty circulate as if the island is a machine designed to keep desire busy. Even the line it was a marvel of poetry / and irony suggests the speaker knows this happiness is partly performance—beautiful, yes, but also self-aware, already half-turned into art.

Safety and dirt: the poem’s bright, uneasy undertow

A key tension runs through the middle: the place is openly described as unsafe, scary and dirty, yet no one seemed to mind. The parties move from house to house as if motion itself wards off consequence. Ashbery piles up seasonal sparkles—moonshine in winter and starshine in summer—to give the island a year-round enchantment, but the language also hints at intoxication and distance from reality. Everyone is happy to have discovered / what they discovered, a strangely circular phrasing that makes the discovery feel less like a specific truth and more like the pleasure of discovery as such. The joy is real, but it floats; it doesn’t attach to anything durable.

The hinge: when the ship leaves and the dream’s vocabulary changes

The poem turns hard at And then one day the ship sailed away. That single departure drains the island of its animating type of person: No more dreamers just sleepers. The shift in tone is immediate—bright sociability collapses into heaviness, into bodies on the dock with heavy attitudes, moving as if they knew how, as though living has become procedural. The island’s objects also modernize and deaden: instead of trinkets charged with story, we get random shops of modern furniture, a phrase that feels intentionally bland, like the replacement of memory with inventory. Then nature enters not as romantic scenery but as an agent of eviction: a gale came and said / it is time to take all of you away. The wind becomes a messenger that doesn’t argue; it announces that the conditions that allowed the parties to feel endless are over.

Unity as resistance—and as a last illusion

When it became time to go, the people insist, they none of them would leave without the other. On one level, it’s touching: a community refusing abandonment, declaring we are all one here. But Ashbery makes this solidarity feel fragile, even desperate, because it’s framed as a bargaining stance against an impersonal force. The line if one of us goes the other will not go tries to turn leaving into a moral impossibility, as though devotion could veto time, weather, economics—whatever the ship’s departure really stands for. Yet the poem quietly undermines them: the wind doesn’t debate; it whispered it to the stars, passing the human vow upward into a vast, indifferent system.

Love as the backward glance, not the destination

The final movement is both communal and solitary: the people all got up to go, and then they looked back on love. That last phrase is devastating because it converts love from something lived into something seen, like scenery receding. It also echoes the trinkets from the beginning: love becomes the souvenir you carry in your mind, not the party you can re-enter. The poem doesn’t sneer at the island’s happiness; it honors how luminous it felt. But it insists that the very intensity of that discovery—friends, lovers, advice, starshine—may be what makes the ending inevitable: the moment you believe you’ve found the place where life could be, you’ve also created the sharpest possible contrast with the day it can’t be that way anymore.