Instead Of Losing - Analysis

A childhood that refuses to stay put

The poem’s central claim is that growing up is less a clean narrative than a stubborn, drifting accumulation of scenes—and that what looks like instead of losing is often just the mind changing the channel fast enough to avoid admitting what’s gone. The opening imagines a kid who would naturally head straight into the channel, breaking into the family’s bickering and swerving away from sickly melodrama. The tone is brisk, almost conspiratorial, as if the speaker is waving off sentimentality while also admitting it’s right there, crackling: those times / crackled. Even the doubled ending—confusion...confusion—suggests memory’s static: you can name the feeling, but you can’t clear it.

That double movement—dodging feeling while being full of it—drives the whole poem. It keeps promising clarity (you understand it all) and then immediately dissolving it into odd specifics and historical costume changes.

Perforating the city limits: escape that leaves a mark

When the speaker says, I thought of it then, / and in the mountains, the poem widens into a travel-memory that feels both literal and dreamlike. They perforated the city limits—an unusually violent verb for leaving town, as if departure makes holes in the map rather than simply crossing a line. The social pressure is there too: No one knew all about us / but some knew plenty. That sentence holds the poem’s key tension: the self wants to be private and unaccountable, but rumor and partial knowledge cling. Leaving becomes a way to shed the town’s half-knowledge, yet the poem immediately replaces the town with an image of storage and disappearance: an empty drawer / into which they sailed. An escape route turns into a container.

The ship you can’t stop

The drawer becomes a ship, and suddenly the poem is in the mode of legend and panic. The absurdly specific eleven thousand / virgins (a number that sounds like a saint’s story) start getting queasy, and the speaker’s exclamation—stop the ship!—is met with No can do. That refusal matters: the poem treats time like a vessel with no brakes, even when the passengers feel sick with it. Then authority arrives as farce: bald arbiters with eyes on chains, like glasses. Judgment is both menacing and ridiculous, an impersonal bureaucracy of fate rendered as slapstick costume.

The tonal shift here is sharp: from reflective reminiscence to a pressured, stagey scene where commands fail. It’s as if the speaker’s memory, unable to hold a stable story, flips into allegory to say what plain confession can’t: you can’t choose when to stop becoming someone else.

Medieval gold and the muskrat: grandeur collapses into the ordinary

Just when the poem seems to be building a mythic pageant—virgins, arbiters, chained eyes—it undercuts itself: Heck, it's only a muskrat that’s seen better years. The muskrat is comically small next to medieval gold, yet the speaker links them: when things were medieval / and gold.... That trailing ellipsis makes the nostalgia feel both alluring and unserious, like a cheap costume that still glints. The contradiction is deliberate: the poem both longs for a time when meaning felt weighted (medieval, gold) and insists that what we actually have is a battered animal, aging in the present tense.

This is Ashbery’s particular kind of honesty: not grand revelation, but the way the mind keeps swapping in mismatched props—history, childhood, animals, bureaucracy—to cover the same raw fact of passing time.

Addressing you people in the front: the false gift of understanding

The final section turns outward and almost bossy: So you people in the front, / leave. It sounds like a tour guide dismissing a crowd, or a director clearing a set. The poem claims comprehension—You see them. And you understand it all—but immediately denies closure: It doesn't end, even with night's sorcery trying to make it feel finished. The central question arrives: would you rather have been a grownup in earlier times, in a past too large for the child to contain or imagine? Or is right now the answer, with its small technologies and small consolations—the radio bringing news late at night, and checkered fortunes made so pretty by distance?

Plumes and records: consolation as a kind of surrender

The poem ends by handing out prizes that feel both generous and faintly mocking: your ton of plumes, your Red Seal Records, The whole embrace. Plumes suggest costumes, celebration, maybe even empty display; Red Seal Records point to curated culture, an old-world richness you can buy and replay. These gifts don’t fix the earlier queasiness or stop the ship. They’re what you get instead of losing: not recovery of the past, but substitutes—beautiful, portable, a little dusty—that let you feel held for a moment.

And the poem leaves a sting inside that comfort: if the whole embrace is offered at the end like a product, does that mean the only complete embrace available is the one you can package, collect, and play back—while the real, crackling times keep drifting out of reach?