My Erotic Double - Analysis

A day off as a portal into the private self

The poem’s central move is to turn laziness into a kind of intimacy: when he doesn't feel like working, the speaker treats it as just as well, because idleness creates a hidden room where the self can be sorted. The setting matters: in the shade / Behind the house, protected from street noises, the world is muffled enough that the speaker can go over all kinds of old feeling, even Throw some away. That sounds practical, almost domestic, but it’s also eerie: emotions are treated like objects you can discard. The poem’s “erotic double” begins to look less like a sexual partner and more like an inner companion who appears when public obligations are suspended.

When feelings thin out, language heats up

Ashbery puts a strange pressure on the relation between emotion and speech. The speaker claims The wordplay / Between us gets very intense precisely when there are Fewer feelings around to confuse things. The tension here is sharp: the poem suggests that feelings aren’t clarity but interference, and that the most electric connection happens in a cleaner, colder space where language can spar without being pinned down by sincerity. That makes the intimacy feel both real and evasive—two people (or two selves) getting close by becoming harder to grasp.

Charming last words versus the night’s rescue

The poem briefly turns toward vulnerability: the last things / You always find to say are charming, and they rescue me / Before the night does. This is a telling contradiction. Night is usually what threatens, but here it is another rescuer—suggesting that darkness, sleep, or mere ending can provide relief the way a person can. The speaker seems caught between being saved by conversation and being saved by oblivion. Even the casual phrase Another go-round? No carries the weariness of repetition: they keep returning to talk, yet they also know it won’t finally solve anything.

The ice-barge of dreaming: intimacy on a fragile surface

The poem’s most vivid image makes their shared mindscape both buoyant and perilous: afloat / On our dreams like a barge made of ice. A barge implies mass and slow drift, but ice implies melting and collapse; their closeness is sustained by something that cannot last. The barge is Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight, as if doubt and beauty are the same cracks. They stay awake, watching the dreams / As they are happening, which turns dreaming into a self-conscious performance. Instead of surrendering to the dream, they monitor it—another version of wordplay: the mind narrating itself in real time.

Polite dialogue as the mask of confession

The final exchange looks almost comically civil—Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.—but it lands like a defense mechanism. Just before it, the speaker admits a crucial split: I said it, then immediately, I can hide it, and then, I choose not to. The poem ends by dressing that choice in manners, as though politeness could safely contain exposure. The “double” here may be the partner who repeats and confirms—You said it. / I said it—or the speaker’s own mirrored voice, capable of both concealment and candor. The tone, throughout, is coolly playful, yet the coolness keeps brushing against an urgent need: to be rescued, to be heard, and to decide—at least for a moment—not to hide.