Last Month - Analysis

After they leave, the light stops behaving

The poem’s central claim is that absence doesn’t simply remove people or objects; it rewrites the world’s basic rules of solidity, value, and even daylight. The opening insists on a paradox: No changes of support—nothing structural has shifted—yet what remains is only Patches of gray where sunlight used to fall. That mismatch sets the tone: calm on the surface, quietly unreal underneath. The house is not just empty; it seems heavier, as if weight transfers from what’s gone to what’s left behind.

Ashbery keeps the language matter-of-fact, but the facts are uncanny. The house emptied in record time, a phrase that belongs to moving day and also to disasters. The speed suggests not ordinary leaving but a kind of vanishing, as if time itself helped clear the rooms.

The table, the match, and a memory that backs away

One of the poem’s most destabilizing gestures is how ordinary objects lose their usual function. The flat table that used to result reads like a mistranslation of common life: the table once produced outcomes (meals, meetings, games), but now it’s reduced to an odd grammatical residue. Then A match recedes into night—an image of a small flame, yes, but also of connection or ignition withdrawing rather than catching. Instead of illumination spreading, it retreats, slowly, like a memory refusing to be held.

The future’s academy opens onto fruitless light

The poem turns outward with The academy of the future, a grand institution arriving right when the private house has been stripped. But this future isn’t promising; it’s ceremonial and barren. The sunlight here is fruitless, streaming into domes—architecture built to magnify significance—yet the effect feels like empty grandeur. Even the learning itself is oddly physical and blocked up: chairs piled high with books and papers. Knowledge becomes clutter, stacked where bodies should sit. The tension is sharp: the poem offers the public idea of progress (academy, future, domes) while showing it as another kind of vacancy, a room full of materials but short on lived presence.

When value changes hands, temperament changes too

The second stanza begins with a more explicit time-slip: The sedate one becomes this month's skittish one. Something as intimate as temperament flips on a calendar page, as if identity is a property title. That’s reinforced by the legal phrasing: Confirming the property and has changed hands. The poem’s contradiction tightens here: it calls this property A timeless value—and yet it is precisely what gets transferred. What’s supposed to be permanent turns out to be tradable, and what’s tradable starts to feel like the self.

The miracle-thief and the last image of treason

The poem then dangles a conventional wish list—a new automobile, a Ping pong set, a garage—only to erase it with a startling comparison: the thief / Stole everything like a miracle. Theft is usually a violation; calling it miraculous makes it feel like sudden grace or total cleansing, another version of the house emptying too fast. In that light, the line In his book there was a picture of treason reads less like a plot point than a diagnosis: the record of this event (the book) contains betrayal and nothing else. Yet the poem refuses to end in pure deprivation; it places cries and colors in the garden. Even after everything is taken, the outside world remains loud and vivid—beauty and distress braided together.

If the thief’s act looks like a miracle, what was the ordinary life before it? The poem seems to imply that the real betrayal might not be the stealing, but the way objects and institutions—tables, academies, even timeless value—pretend to guarantee meaning. In the final contrast between treason in the book and cries and colors in the garden, the poem leaves us with a harsh consolation: what’s most alive may be what can’t be owned, stored, or even fully explained.