On The Towpath - Analysis

A detour that becomes a mental landscape

The poem begins like a small, almost comic travel anecdote: at the sign Fred Muffin’s Antiques they turned off into a lane of shabby houses. But that ordinary detour quickly opens into something larger: Ashbery treats the turn off the road as a turn away from shared, stable reality and into a roaming inner weather of perception. The central claim the poem keeps testing is that meaning feels briefly reachable—like thirst subsiding just for awhile—but the moment you try to settle it, the world turns provisional again, and you’re left with motion, not arrival.

That’s why the voice sounds both intimate and slippery. It speaks as if reporting what had happened, yet it also keeps revising what counts as happening at all. The poem’s calm is not reassurance; it’s the hush that arrives when the usual measures stop working.

Thirst, seconds, and an ancient silence that never stopped

The first shift is from bodily need to time itself. The wish is modest—if the thirst would subside, It would be a little bit, enough—and then the poem claims that this relief had happened. But the relief isn’t described as pleasure; it’s described as a change in the sound of time: The insipid chiming of the seconds gives way to an arc of silence that is so old it had never ceased to exist. That paradox matters: silence is presented not as absence but as something continuous, already there On the roofs of buildings, in the sky. The poem suggests that what we call ordinary life is a layer of noise laid over a deeper, older quiet—and sometimes the layer slips.

This creates a tension that will keep returning: the poem wants relief (water, clarity, an enough), but what it finds instead is a vast, impersonal condition—silence as a kind of eternity that doesn’t particularly care about the speaker’s thirst.

The tentative ground and the barrier of fact

Once the seconds stop chiming, the world loses firmness. The ground is tentative, and even yesterday’s details return diminished: The pygmies and jacaranda are back only less so. It’s a wonderfully unsettling phrase: the objects aren’t gone, yet their reality has been thinned, as if the mind can’t fully reattach them to certainty. Then comes an even stranger claim: It is a barrier of fact / Shielding the sky from the earth. Fact, usually what anchors us, becomes a barrier—something that blocks connection rather than securing it.

So the poem stages a contradiction: facts are real, but they don’t feel true in the sense of being livable or integrating. The sky and earth—big, basic coordinates—are kept apart by the very thing that should join them. The speaker seems to be discovering that naming and knowing can also isolate.

The tower of longing: spectacle funded by ads

Against that barrier, desire surges upward: On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises. The phrase is lush and sincere, but Ashbery immediately undercuts it with a shrug of modern reality: There are many ads (to help pay for all this). Longing becomes a kind of public construction project—ornate, crowded, and sponsored. The poem’s tone here is wry, not cruel: it recognizes how the most private human ache gets staged through spectacle, commerce, and borrowed imagery.

The tower is full of scenes: Something interesting on every landing, and women dressed in Second Empire fashion as Perrault characters—Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty—silhouetted against stained-glass windows. These are not just fairy tales; they are fairy tales as costume, as museum display, as decorative longing. The poem is building a world where even archetypal hope (rescue, transformation, awakening) appears as curated pageantry.

Walking sideways and the secret that stays secret

In the middle of that pageant, a fleeting figure tries to do something like what we expect of a hero: A white figure runs to the edge of a rampart only to observe the distance. The urgency ends in mere looking, and then the figure drops back into the mass of clock-faces, spires, and stalactite machicolations. Time (the clock-faces) and architecture (the spires, ramparts) swallow the person again. The poem makes the attempt at decisive action feel almost impossible; even the hurry is repurposed into observation.

Then comes one of the poem’s most telling lines: It was the walking sideways, visible from far away, that told what it was to be known / And kept, like a secret. Sideways walking suggests indirectness—approaching truth obliquely, refusing a straight line. And the secret is not something revealed; it’s known and kept. The poem implies that some kinds of knowledge are defined by their containment: to truly know them is to understand why they can’t be made into a public, forward-marching story.

A warning against easy solutions, and the chatter that won’t stop

The next turn darkens the color. The sun fades like the spreading / Of a peacock’s tail, beautiful but also performative, and twilight is imagined as a warning to those desperate / For easy solutions. The poem sounds almost stern here, as if it’s chastising the wish for a simple key that will decode the whole strange tower. Even night is described as a physical remnant, a scalp of night, something peeled over the world.

Yet this night doesn’t solve the problem; it doesn’t even interrupt it. It Doesn’t continue or break off the vacuous chatter that went on all day: talk that there could be rain, that it could be like lines scored across violet cabbages, that things might stay on / Longer before other commensals replace them. The chatter is full of conditional language—could, might—like a mind endlessly proposing scenarios without committing to one. The details are oddly gorgeous (ruled rain, violet cabbages) but the poem calls the talk vacuous because it never lands; it keeps life at the level of hypotheticals.

The hinge: No and the refusal to mean the old way

The poem’s clearest pivot is blunt: No, followed by We aren’t meaning that any more. After so much drifting, that sounds like a decision—but it’s a strange one. The speaker doesn’t say the chatter was wrong, exactly; the speaker says the way of meaning it has changed. It’s as if the poem recognizes that it has been producing explanations, atmospheres, and near-stories, and now it refuses to let those count as conclusions.

There’s a quiet drama in the sudden We: the voice gathers a collective, as if to say this isn’t one person’s eccentricity but a shared condition. The earlier images—ads funding longing, fairy tales as costumes, observation replacing action—prepare us for this: the poem is diagnosing a culture and a mind that can’t honestly return to straightforward, comforting sense-making.

The natural bridge and the ellipse that loops back

Even after the refusal, the poem doesn’t give us firm ground; it gives us a new metaphor for how questions behave. The question has been asked as though an immense natural bridge were Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted. That fantasy—ask the right question and you can go anywhere—gets replaced by the ellipse: as aimless as that, stretching invisibly into the future and then reappearing in the present. The poem ends with motion that is both supple and frightening: Its flexing is its account, and it returns us to the point of no return.

That final phrase carries the poem’s deepest tension. An ellipse returns, but the point of no return says return has consequences. You can circle back to the present and find it altered—because the act of looping through longing, spectacle, chatter, and refusal has changed what the present can mean.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If walking sideways is what allows something to be known and kept, what would it mean to try to walk straight—to demand the easy solutions the twilight warns against? The poem seems to suggest that the straight path doesn’t lead to truth; it leads back into the mass / Of clock-faces, where time swallows intention. The real risk isn’t confusion; it’s mistaking sponsored spectacle and nonstop conditional talk for a bridge that can take you to any point you wanted.