The Other Tradition - Analysis

A party that turns into a history

What this poem insists on is that tradition isn’t a stable inheritance so much as a crowd’s pressure to make something count—to declare an end of something—and that an individual’s baffled inwardness can both disrupt and strangely complete that pressure. The opening looks almost comically social: people arrive in T-shirts with slogans about the lateness / Of the hour, and the scene is stocked with domestic trivia—endless games of Scrabble, boosters, an omelette au Cantal. But Ashbery keeps letting a bigger force leak through the everyday. The sun slants through a Norfolk Island pine like it’s Politely clearing its throat, as if nature itself is about to announce something. The poem’s title, The Other Tradition, starts to feel like an argument: there’s the official version of events (the meeting, the order, the proclaimed “end”), and there’s another tradition made of misreadings, drift, forgetting, and private attention.

Time as a loud machine beneath polite conversation

The tone’s first trick is how gently it smuggles in dread. The afternoon drizzle makes all ideas settle In a fizz of dust—a strange, self-canceling image where thought both sparkles and collapses. Then the poem abruptly reveals what has been roaring under the Scrabble and omelette: the roar of time, plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days. Time isn’t a river here; it’s a managed flood system gone out of control, dragging every sexual moment Past the lenses, as if a camera is involuntarily recording and judging. This is one of the poem’s key tensions: the gathering performs coziness and community, but the speaker hears an impersonal current hauling everything—especially intimacy—toward documentation, pastness, and loss. The phrase the end of something lands like a verdict nobody quite agreed to, but everyone is forced to live under.

The poem’s turn: you look up too late

The hinge comes when you finally looks up from a book: Only then did you glance up, Unable to comprehend what has been happening, unable even to say what you were reading. The comedy is sharp but not cruel: this person is not merely distracted; they’re out of sync with the social script that claims a major event has occurred. Immediately, the room tries to compensate—More chairs / Were brought, and lamps were lit—as if adding furniture and light could restore meaning. Yet the narrator undercuts the whole enterprise: it tells / Nothing of how things proceeded to materialize. That word, materialize, matters: the “event” is less discovered than conjured, made real by procedure and repetition.

How crowds manufacture significance

The poem widens from room to street: people waiting outside and in the next / Street, repeating its name over and over. Whatever it is, it’s sustained like a chant; naming becomes a technology for producing reality. And then comes a wonderfully eerie quiet: silence / Moved halfway up the darkened trunks. Silence is given body and direction, as if the surrounding trees are a vertical gauge of human expectancy cooling into night. The final bureaucratic phrase—the meeting was called to order—lands with deadpan authority, but the poem has already implied that order is a performance layered over confusion. The “tradition” being formed is procedural: chairs, lamps, a call to order, repeated names. It’s communal, but also faintly coercive.

Finding the addressee: miniature, dreamlike, out of place

Midway, the voice becomes more personal: I still remember. The speaker remembers not a speech or resolution, but an image: they found you, after a dream, in a thimble hat, Studious as a butterfly in a parking lot. The simile is both tender and devastating. A butterfly suggests delicacy and attention, but a parking lot is a landscape built for cars, transit, forgetting—an anti-garden. Calling the person studious makes their inwardness feel like a vocation, yet they’re also comically undersized by the thimble detail, as if their presence can’t match the scale of the crowd’s ceremony. This is the poem’s emotional center: the addressee doesn’t quite belong to the “event,” and that misfit quality becomes a kind of purity—an alternate way of being present that isn’t captured by the meeting’s narrative.

Troubadours, charity, and the weird victory of an event

After the meeting comes dispersal, and with it a parody of cultural authority: Troubadours offer commentary on how charity / Had run its race and won, leaving the addressee as the ex-president / Of the event. The language is hilariously mismatched—medieval singers mixed with modern nonprofit bureaucracy—and that mismatch clarifies Ashbery’s point: public meaning is often stitched together from borrowed costumes. The crowd wished something to come of it, even just a distant / Wisp of smoke—a sign, a relic, proof that the gathering produced consequence. Yet the poem notes that none was so deceived as to long for that cool non-being from a few minutes before. Here’s the contradiction: they want an outcome, but they also refuse the blankness that would make any outcome look arbitrary. Once the group has named and staged the “event,” they can’t ethically—or psychologically—return to the earlier emptiness.

When the forest clamps down: the scene gets overwritten

The most striking metaphor for how tradition forms is spatial: the idea of a forest clamped itself Over the minutiae of the scene. The “forest” isn’t just trees; it’s a totalizing concept that shuts like a trap over details, replacing lived particulars with a single explanatory atmosphere. The omelette, the Scrabble, the drizzle—these become irrelevant once the bigger story (the forest, the meeting, the end) has covered them. The addressee finds this Charming, but turns away, fully toward night, speaking into it like a megaphone. That image is both comic and haunting: they speak loudly into darkness, yet not hearing / Or caring. The poem suggests that once the crowd’s “forest” has taken hold, the only real freedom left is to address what doesn’t answer back.

A sharp question the poem won’t resolve

If the crowd’s story is a kind of enclosure—a stockade—is the addressee’s forgetting an escape, or just another form of disappearance? When the poem says their forgetting Rescues them at last, it sounds merciful; but mercy here looks a lot like being absorbed, like being made small enough to fit into someone else’s night.

Forgetting as mercy: the star that absorbs

The ending turns unexpectedly generous. The people, for all their pomp and confusion, still live and are generous, allowed to come and go within the stockade / They have so much trouble remembering. That stockade is a chilling figure for tradition: it confines, but it also grants permission, a regulated freedom. Then the poem offers its strangest consolation: your forgetting / Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night. The simile reverses what we expect; normally night absorbs stars, not the other way around. Here, the addressee’s blankness is luminous and consuming, a power that can swallow the crowd’s anxious need to remember and formalize. The “other tradition,” then, may be the one that refuses to preserve the event as a monument. It lets the crowd’s performance dissolve—not into meaninglessness, but into a larger, quieter field where the pressure to make everything legible finally lifts.