Late Echo
Late Echo - meaning Summary
Repetition Keeps Love Alive
Late Echo presents repetition as the means by which love and self-knowledge endure. Ashbery argues that continually returning to ordinary things — bees, ants, the daily color — lets sameness become gradual difference. By slowing into a ritual pace, habitual inattention becomes a conciliatory cloak that shelters perception and lets the everyday engines disclose unexpected insights. The poem treats persistence and routine as conditions for emotional continuity and revelation.
Read Complete AnalysesAlone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally And the color of the day put in Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.