The Instruction Manual - Analysis

Work as a Cage, Imagination as an Exit

John Ashbery’s poem stages a small rebellion: a man assigned to write the instruction manual for a new metal quietly refuses the mental world his job demands and invents another one. The central claim the poem keeps proving is that imagination is not a decorative escape from labor but a competing reality that briefly restores what bureaucratic language flattens: color, intimacy, chance, and time that feels lived. The speaker begins in a sharply reduced life-space—sit looking out of a window—and immediately names his resentment: he wish[es] he did not have to do this task, and he envies the people below who seem to carry an inner peace. That peace is not presented as deep wisdom; it’s simply the freedom of not being pinned to a deadline: Not one of them has to worry about the manual’s schedule. The poem’s first emotional fact is alienation: he is near the street yet so far away from it.

The First Turn: Dim Guadalajara Arrives

The poem pivots when the speaker does what he calls his habit: as my way is he begins to dream, elbows on the desk, leaning out. Guadalajara enters as a wanted place—City I wanted most to see—and also as a place missed: most did not see. That double status matters. The city is not only vacation; it is the emblem of an unlived life, summoned under pressure: under the press of the manual, he fanc[ies] a public square with an elaborate little bandstand. The irony is gentle but sharp: the mind, squeezed by technical duty, responds by generating a world of sensual surplus. The poem’s colors immediately contradict the grayness of industry: rose-colored flowers, lemon-colored offerings, dresses in rose-and-blue striped shades, drinks served from a large glass crock. The city is made out of pleasure details precisely because the manual’s language would demand the opposite: generalities, uses, efficiency.

A Holiday Square That Still Knows Time Will Pass

What’s striking is that the fantasy is not pure postcard. It includes social observation and an awareness of time’s erasures. The parade contains types—the dapper fellow in deep blue with a white hat and neatly trimmed mustache, the wife with patent leather slippers in the American fashion—but Ashbery lets those types develop into a lived crowd where people don’t become symbols so much as distractions. The wife carries a fan so she won’t show her face too often, yet the speaker undercuts her modest performance: I doubt anyone would notice her because everyone is absorbed in their own attachments. In other words, the fantasy includes a truth the office window didn’t: that attention is local and partial, and that anonymity can be a kind of freedom.

The boys skipping and throwing little things on the gray tile bring a second, subtler tension: the dream refuses to freeze the city in eternal celebration. One boy keeps a toothpick in his teeth and acts silenter, pretending not to see the girls. Then the poem suddenly admits the future: soon all this will cease with the deepening of their years. Even inside escape, the speaker smuggles in the knowledge that adolescence, swagger, jeering, and even flirtation will harden or transform. Guadalajara is not merely an alternative to work; it’s an alternative temporality where life is vivid because it is passing.

The Toothpick Boy: Love as the Dream’s Proof

The poem briefly narrows into a close-up: the boy with the toothpick becomes a focal point, almost like the speaker’s surrogate for unassigned, unmeasured feeling. The speaker loses him and finds him again—Wait—there he is—as if tracking a small truth through a crowd. The boy is now Secluded with a girl Of fourteen or fifteen, and the speaker strains to hear them, but their speech is only mumbling, shy words he can’t quite access. This is one of the poem’s most revealing contradictions: the speaker’s imagination is lavish with visuals—her long fine black hair, her olive cheek, the breeze that ruffles it—yet it cannot give him the lovers’ actual words. The dream can paint surfaces and gestures, but the interior of another person remains, appropriately, private. That limit makes the fantasy feel more real, and it also echoes the speaker’s original envy of strangers’ inner peace: inner life is what he wants, and what he cannot fully see, even when he invents it.

The music, too, is a kind of proof. The band plays Scheherazade, a piece famous for storytelling and survival through narration. That choice quietly mirrors what the speaker is doing: telling a story to outlast the deadening demand of the manual. But then there’s an intermission, and the musicians step down to talk about the weather or kids—another reminder that even beauty breaks for ordinary chatter. The dream is not pure rapture; it includes the mundane, which is exactly what the office world lacks.

Second-Person Tourism and the Wish to Control Experience

Midway, the poem’s voice shifts into a guided tour: Let us take this opportunity, Here you may see, Look—I told you! The speaker becomes both traveler and narrator, pulling the reader into his invented Guadalajara as if writing a different kind of manual: an instruction manual for attention. This is where the poem’s joke becomes pointed. He cannot bear writing instructions for uses of metal, but he happily instructs us in how to move through a side street, a house with green trim, a patio where an old woman in gray fans herself with a palm leaf. The fantasy is organized, sequential, full of directions—yet it feels human because the “product” is not metal but encounter. Even the old woman’s hospitality comes with a small narrative: My son is in Mexico City, his job is with a bank, and here is his photograph in a worn leather frame. The dream insists that people come with attachments and absences, not specifications.

The Tower View: How limited, but how complete

Climbing the faded pink church tower creates the poem’s most explicit meditation on what the imagination can and cannot do. From the top, the city becomes a whole network, divided into rich quarter and poorer quarter, markets where men are swatting flies, a library painted pale green and beige. The view offers a social map, but it is still made of color, still made of looking. And then the poem returns to the square to confirm continuity: fewer promenaders now in the heat, yet the young couple still lurk in the shadows. The old woman is still there, fanning herself. The dream has the satisfying closure of a well-made itinerary, which leads to the speaker’s oddly balanced verdict: How limited, but how complete withal. The contradiction is the poem’s heart. The experience is obviously partial—he has only “seen” what his mind can supply—yet it feels complete because it includes a small arc of human love: young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother. Completeness, the poem suggests, is not the same as totality; it can be achieved by a few charged scenes arranged into meaning.

A Hard Question the Poem Won’t Let Go Of

If Guadalajara can be conjured so fully—down to drinks through straws and creamy white uniforms—then what, exactly, is the instruction manual depriving him of: travel, or the right to notice? The poem almost dares us to admit that the manual is not only a task but a training in a kind of blindness, where the world must be translated into “uses” and deadlines. The speaker’s dream reads like an ethics of attention that his job does not permit.

The Final Return: The Manual Wins, but Not Entirely

The ending seals the poem’s bittersweet tone. After asking What more is there to do, except stay? the speaker answers bluntly: And that we cannot do. The fantasy cannot become life; it must remain a mental trip, a break in the workday. Yet the last image is not defeat so much as a strange causality: he turns his gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made him dream. The manual is both enemy and trigger. Under pressure, the mind produces Guadalajara; under Guadalajara, the manual looks even more impoverished. Ashbery leaves us with the tension unresolved on purpose: imagination offers freedom, but only as long as the window and the desk exist to frame it. The poem’s quiet insistence is that even in the most controlled, technical, scheduled life, the human mind will still manufacture color, music, lovers in shadow, and a breeze at the top of an old tower—and then, painfully, return.