No Way Of Knowing - Analysis

What the poem keeps reaching for: knowledge that feels like touch

John Ashbery’s No Way of Knowing keeps proposing candidates for what survives experience—Colors and names of colors, Street scenes, a whole song bag of memory—only to show how quickly each one slides into approximation. The central claim the poem quietly insists on is that knowing (especially knowing another person) is not something we achieve by collecting accurate impressions; it is something we keep trying to assemble out of fragments, moods, and bodily nearness. That’s why the poem can swing from a near-comic catalog of impressions (cyclists calling each other strange names) to a naked plea near the end: Why must you go? Knowledge, here, is less like a conclusion than like an embrace—desired, vivid, and always about to disappear.

Waking mid-dream: language as residue, not mastery

The first section frames consciousness as a kind of afterimage. The speaker wakes in the middle of a dream with one’s mouth full / Of unknown words, a strikingly physical picture of language that cannot be translated into clear meaning. Those words take in all of these: both the surface of things and the accidents / Scarring that surface. Yet even that totalizing gesture is immediately limited by the bookish analogy: experience contains reality only the way a book on Sweden contains Sweden—by having pages, not landscapes. The poem’s tone here is brisk, inquisitive, slightly amused by its own brainstorming (Yes, probably), but under that quickness is a grim recognition: the mind can carry “everything” only by shrinking it into something as flat and bounded as paper.

Flood, curtains, and the sealed room: when time turns rancid

A broad, uncaring force enters: a flood / That doesn’t care about anything, which carries off both dank no-places and insubstantial pinnacles. The pairing matters: the worthless and the lofty are equally weightless on that surface. Then the poem narrows into something claustrophobic and domestic—the days in between grow rank, as if time itself spoils when it isn’t punctuated by holidays we could Match up. The air becomes architectural: it stands in curtains and No one can get in or out. This is one of the poem’s key contradictions: the speaker treats memory and sensation as a rushing, indifferent flood, but also describes lived time as a stagnant, sealed chamber. Either way, the self can’t breathe its way to certainty.

The head that’s “necessary” and the head that wanders off

Ashbery sharpens the crisis by naming the body as a set of replaceable and irreplaceable parts: one might live without a finger or elbow, but the head is / Necessary—and it is precisely what is in doubt here. The little comic detail that the head was off taking French lessons this morning, and is now resting and cannot be disturbed, makes the problem feel both absurd and intimate. Thought is not a reliable tool the speaker can pick up; it is a wayward creature with its own schedule. The tone tilts into dry comedy, but the joke lands as dread: if the “head” won’t reliably show up, then any stable account of what happened—or who “you” are—becomes impossible.

The hinge: Yes, but—there are no “yes, buts.”

The poem turns hard on itself with that line. Earlier, the voice kept negotiating—Yes, probably—as if qualification could lead to accuracy. Now even the act of qualifying is refused. The body becomes the only declared subject—what this is all about—but the body immediately disperses / In sheeted fragments. And because there is No common vantage point, no stable point of view / Like the “I” in a novel, the fragments can’t be “read correctly.” The poem’s urgency comes from this double bind: it rejects the consolations of a coherent narrator, yet it still aches for coherence. It wants to say this is what happened, but it also knows that the grammar of “I” is a convenient fiction.

Neighbors or mirages: ethics under the fog of perception

From the shattered body, the poem widens into a landscape of uncertain other people: no way of knowing whether these are / Our neighbors or friendly savages, held at a distance by the red tape of a mirage. The phrase is funny, but it’s also a critique: the barriers between “us” and “them” may be pure optical bureaucracy, yet they still govern behavior. Even a casual greeting—We drawled “hallo”—doesn’t inaugurate a meaningful style or a relationship. Evening brings not changes in color or the quality of a handshake, but an anxious bookkeeping impulse: to get everything all added up, with Flowers arranged and out of sight. The world’s chaos continues as vehicular madness, but the speaker imagines retreating to a balcony to watch the sunset begin. It’s a fragile truce: if knowing is impossible, perhaps looking—quietly, from a railing—can substitute.

Fatality in a hospital corridor, and the blunt account: your money is dead

The third section slides into melodrama and helplessness: Waiting / In vanilla corridors for an austere / Young nurse with snapdragons, and the dangerously slender heroine already steeped in the perfume of fatality. These are stock images, and the poem knows they’re stock; it’s as if narrative itself has reverted to cliché because real control is gone. The surreal stage directions—The passengers / Reappear, The cut driver pushes them to heaven, (Waterford explodes over the flagstones.)—don’t clarify; they intensify the sense of events happening “to” us. Then the poem makes a startlingly plain pronouncement in the middle of trying to spell out / This very simple word: your money is dead. The line feels like a slap of reality amid misty metaphors—another tension the poem keeps alive: we try to order the world with “notes,” with sequence, but the background dead chaos keeps insinuating itself, and sometimes it speaks in bald, unpoetic verdicts.

The most daring proposition: intimacy as a theory of knowledge

Against all this dispersal, the speaker suddenly commits to a tenderness that is almost embarrassing in its directness: Spend the night, here in my bed, my arms wrapped tightly around you. The claim attached to that plea is the poem’s most radical: that such closeness would solve everything by supplying / A theory of knowledge scaled to the gigantic / Bits and pieces we retain. The examples of “retained knowledge” are tellingly mediated: an LP record of friendships, letters from the front. Even memory of love arrives as objects and recordings, not pure presence. Yet the poem doesn’t dismiss the proposal; it admits it may be Too / Fantastic, but also that it made the chimes ring. The ending settles for what it can honestly claim: not certainty, but a lingering resonance—If you listen, the chimes are ringing still as A mood, a Stimmung, accumulating across lengthening days.

A question the poem leaves burning

If there is no common vantage point and even the “I” is rejected, what does it mean that the poem’s most coherent desire is to hold someone tightly? The speaker seems to bet that the body—declared the whole subject—can offer what the mind cannot. But because the body also disperses, the embrace is both a solution and another fleeting surface, one more thing the flood can carry away.