Pantoum - Analysis

A circular poem about wanting the past, and fearing what it contains

Ashbery’s Pantoum feels like a mind pacing in place: it keeps returning to the same phrases, but each return makes them stranger. The central pressure of the poem is this: the speaker longs to move backward toward the past, yet suspects that what waits there is not revelation but a kind of organized forgetting. The repeated Footprints eager for the past gives the desire a physical trace, but the poem’s world keeps converting that trace into drift, muffling, and courtly ritual—the usual obtuse blanket, connoisseurs of oblivion, a court that is dying. The poem is restless about motion, yet it also implies that motion may be compulsory rather than chosen.

Footprints in snow that isn’t clean: memory as a smeared medium

The opening image looks clear at first—Eyes shining, Footprints, snow—but it immediately denies clarity: the eyes are without mystery, and the snow is vague. That adjective matters. Snow usually sharpens tracks; here it blurs them. The past is not a crisp archive but a soft surface that won’t hold an imprint.

Then the poem complicates the snow with an odd intrusion: many clay pipes. In a literal sense, clay pipes suggest smoking, habit, residue, something handled by mouths and time. In a more dreamlike sense, they make the landscape feel industrial and clogged, as if the very ground of memory is full of conduits and debris. So when the poem asks, And what is in store?, it’s not a hopeful question. It reads like a wary inventory: what, exactly, does the past contain, if the path toward it runs through waste and haze?

The blanket that covers and dulls: comfort turning into obtuseness

The phrase the usual obtuse blanket is one of the poem’s clearest tonal tells. A blanket should warm and protect; this one is obtuse, not merely thick but willfully dull, resistant to understanding. It implies that what covers us is also what keeps us from seeing. The poem keeps placing that blanket near the question of what awaits: And what is in store is followed by the usual obtuse blanket, as if the answer to curiosity is always a cover-up, a standard-issue muffling.

Under the blanket lie legless regrets—a startling phrase that turns remorse into something amputated and immobile. Regret is there, but it cannot walk anywhere; it can’t “go” toward repair or change. Alongside it are amplifications, which sound like elaborations, spin, or official rhetoric. Together, these suggest a psychological and political mechanism: pain that cannot move, plus talk that can multiply. The tension is sharp: the poem insists For they must have motion, yet it also depicts regrets that are literally motionless.

King, court, and connoisseurs: forgetting as a social art

Midway through, the poem’s private haze hardens into public hierarchy: those dearest to the king, then Yes, sirs, then connoisseurs of oblivion. The language suddenly sounds like ceremony—an address, a performance of deference. The word connoisseurs is almost comic in its precision: these are experts, people with taste, but their taste is for oblivion. Forgetting becomes not an accident but a cultivated preference.

This is where the poem’s repetition (as a pantoum) does more than create echo; it starts to resemble a ritual chant. Lines reappear as if the speaker is stuck repeating what the “court” repeats—stock phrases, sanctioned evasions. That gives the poem a slightly claustrophobic tone: you can feel an intelligence testing a phrase, finding it inadequate, then being forced to say it again anyway.

The watchdog’s shyness and the dying court: when protection fails

One of the poem’s strangest causal claims is also one of its most revealing: That is why a watchdog is shy. A watchdog is supposed to be aggressive, alert, outward-facing. Shyness is the wrong trait, which is exactly the point. In this world, even the mechanisms meant to guard truth or safety have withdrawn. The poem doesn’t explain the “why” in logical terms; it offers a dream-logic where corruption or exhaustion has seeped into roles themselves.

Immediately after, the poem widens the failure: the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying. The storm is silver, a color of wealth, polish, and ceremonial surfaces, but also of cold. Being trapped in it suggests a beautiful disaster: a glittering atmosphere that is still lethal. The court’s death feels less like punishment than like inevitable attrition—an institution suffocated by its own weather, its own climate of refinement and denial.

One night only: time as brittle, survival as pretense

The poem then compresses time into a blunt, almost apocalyptic sentence: These days are short, brittle; there is only one night. The tone here turns stark. Brittle suggests something that breaks without bending; time is no longer flowing, it’s snapping. And there is only one night feels like an end-of-history claim: not many nights in sequence, just a single darkness that everything funnels toward.

Yet the poem undercuts even that with a shrugging addendum: And that soon gotten over. That phrase is chilling because it trivializes catastrophe. It sounds like an official trying to soothe panic, or a psyche trying to minimize dread. The contradiction is central: time is fragile and absolute, but the speaker (or the court) insists it’s manageable. That contradiction is echoed in Some blunt pretense to safety we have, a line that admits safety is only a pretense while still clinging to it. The pretense is blunt, not even sophisticated—suggesting that the habit of reassurance has outlasted any ability to make it convincing.

A sharpened question: who is the we that must move?

When the poem says For they must have motion, it refuses to specify who they are, even as it keeps offering a collective we elsewhere: Some blunt pretense to safety we have. Is the poem accusing the “court” of compulsive activity—ceremony as motion for motion’s sake—or is it describing human consciousness itself, unable to stop cycling through the same lines and worries? If motion is required, not chosen, then the eagerness of the Footprints becomes suspect: maybe desire for the past is just another rule of the system.

Ending where it began, but with less innocence

The poem closes by circling back to the opening materials—Eyes shining without mystery and the path Through the vague snow—but now those images are haunted by everything that intervened: kings, courts, oblivion, a shy watchdog, a single night. The return doesn’t feel like resolution; it feels like entrapment. The eyes still shine, but the poem has convinced us that shining is not insight, and that the past the footprints chase is not a treasure trove but a landscape full of muffling blankets and clay-pipe drift.

What finally holds the poem together is its steady refusal to provide a stable “store” of meaning. It keeps offering official-sounding phrases—Yes, sirs, those dearest to the king—alongside damaged, bodily abstractions like legless regrets. In that collision, Ashbery suggests a world where language both preserves and erases: it can “amplify” endlessly, and still leave us walking in snow that won’t keep our prints.