More Pleasant Adventures - Analysis

Frosting, then crumb: the end of the honeymoon

The poem opens with a blunt, domestic metaphor that makes emotional history feel edible: The first year was like icing. That sweetness isn’t denied; it’s just temporary. When the cake started to show through, the speaker insists Which was fine, too—but the concession carries a warning: the real trouble is not that the pleasure fades, but that orientation does. You forget the direction you’re taking. Ashbery’s central claim, quietly repeated across the poem, is that living doesn’t primarily unravel through catastrophe; it drifts through small shifts of attention until you can’t narrate yourself cleanly anymore.

How language breaks when happiness smokes

The poem’s strangest honesty comes when it ties confusion to joy. The speaker admits there can be confusion / Even out of happiness, and he likens it to a smoke: not a storm, not a wound, but something that blurs edges and makes you squint. That blur moves directly into language: The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others. The mind’s attempt to describe its own experience becomes a kind of clumsy handling of objects—dropping, snapping, losing the outlines that would keep the story coherent. The tension here is sharp: the speaker wants to tell what happened, yet the very medium of telling (words, outlines, direction) fails under the pressure of ordinary feeling.

The turn: from private romance to anybody’s story

A hinge swings on the casual interjection Heck. Suddenly the poem widens: it’s anybody’s story. The sentimental journey is named, even sung—gonna take a sentimental journey—but that familiar cultural script is immediately undercut. Instead of a train ride home, you wake up under the table of a dream. The domestic table echoes the earlier cake, but now the sweetness is replaced by a surreal underside: the place you end up is beneath what should support you. The journey turns into a nap in the wrong place, a comic image that still feels faintly desperate.

You are the dream, and it has layers

The poem’s most concentrated claim about identity arrives in a riddle: You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you. Layer-cake returns, but as psyche rather than dessert: selfhood is not a core you reach, but stacked strata you wake up inside. That’s why the poem can say, without contradiction, We haven’t moved an inch and everything has changed. The contradiction is the point. Change happens without travel; transformation can be purely internal, or purely interpretive—the same life, reread. Even the setting is oddly specific and unlocatable: near a tennis court at night, a place defined by proximity and darkness, like memory that knows its neighborhood but not its address.

Lost, yet located: the comfort that feels like a trap

One of the poem’s most unsettling consolations is also its most social: We get lost in life, but life knows where we are. The speaker offers a system that can retrieve you—our associates—as if friendship, work, and routine keep a tag on the wandering self. But that assurance has a double edge: to be found is to be tracked. The closing question of the stanza pushes the human back toward the animal: curl up like a dog, go to sleep like a dog. It’s tender, funny, and a little bleak—rest as giving up on explanation, safety as relinquishing the upright, articulate self that keeps trying to make outlines.

Partings, dyings, and the odd hope of disputing acres

The final stanza names the darker weather directly: partings and dyings, called the new twist—as if grief is both inevitable and somehow a plot development the speaker didn’t ask for. Yet in the same breath there is room for breaking out of living, a phrase that can suggest escape, reinvention, or simply the mind’s refusal to stay inside the obvious script. The poem makes a wary promise: Whatever happens will be quite ingenious. It doesn’t say it will be kind or fair, only clever—life as an inventively cruel author. And then Ashbery ends with two stubborn continuities: No acre will stop being disputed, and paintings are something we never seem to run out of. Property, argument, art: the world keeps generating claims and images even when people disappear.

A hard question the poem won’t settle

If life knows where we are, is that knowledge merciful, or indifferent—like a map that doesn’t care who’s using it? The poem’s ingenuity may be exactly this: it offers comfort (you can be found, there are paintings) in the same motion that it removes the old guarantees (direction, outlines, a stable self).