Paradoxes And Oxymorons - Analysis

The poem that won’t sit still in your hands

Ashbery’s central claim is as slippery as it is intimate: a poem is not an object you possess but a relationship you keep failing to synchronize with. Right away, the speaker insists on a very plain level, then immediately complicates it—What’s a plain level? The poem announces itself as simple and then performs the opposite, like someone saying they’re fine while their voice gives them away. That mismatch is the heart of the poem’s paradoxes: language tries to reach you, but the moment you try to “have” it, it becomes something else.

“Look at it talking to you”: a tense, comic intimacy

The poem treats reading as a face-to-face encounter: Look at it talking to you. The tone is conversational, even lightly bossy, but it carries a low ache. The reader is pictured doing ordinary evasions—looking out a window, pretend to fidget—as if intimacy makes us restless. Then come the clipped contradictions: You have it but you don’t have it; You miss it, it misses you. The repetition makes the “missing” feel mutual and almost physical, like two people passing each other in a hallway without stopping. The poem wants closeness, but the reader’s attention keeps slipping, and the poem’s meaning slips with it.

The sadness of wanting to belong to someone

The speaker states it bluntly: The poem is sad because it wants to be yours and cannot. That sadness is not just about difficulty; it’s about ownership. The poem desires a kind of private adoption—being your poem—yet language, once written, can’t truly commit to one reader. Even the phrase concerned with language sounds clinical, but it’s immediately undermined by need: the poem is a thing with longing, and the reader is a person who may or may not reciprocate. The tension here is sharp: the poem asks for personal belonging while admitting it must stay public and unstable.

Play as “deeper outside”: the door to a larger reality

When the poem pauses at Play? and answers actually, yes, it pivots from the “plain” to something stranger. Play becomes a deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern. This suggests that reading is not idle entertainment but a rehearsal of selves—roles we try on in the open air of imagination. The phrase division of grace set in these long August days brings in a hazy, late-summer suspended time: grace is present but parceled out, not guaranteed, and occurring Without proof. That last phrase matters: the poem is asking you to trust an experience you can’t verify. The “plain level” keeps turning into a spiritual and psychological experiment.

Steam, chatter, and the poem vanishing into modern noise

Just as the poem opens toward the dreamy and open-ended, it gets swallowed by the everyday machinery of writing: lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. The image is both comic and mournful—the poem dispersing into office-like clatter, inspiration dissolving into production. The tone shifts here into resignation: the poem’s openness is real, but so is the world that interrupts it. That’s another contradiction the poem won’t resolve: language promises a “deeper outside,” yet it’s made amid noise, tools, and distraction.

The late turn: from “it” to “you” to “The poem is you”

The closing movement tightens into a charged second-person confrontation. The speaker claims: I think you exist only To tease me into doing it—writing? reading? connecting?—on your level. Then the reader disappears: you aren’t there or you’ve adopted a different attitude. The poem’s tone becomes flirtatious and wounded at once, like someone accusing another of mixed signals. And then the strangest tenderness arrives: Has set me softly down beside you. It’s as if the poem, which started as an “it,” becomes a mediator laying the speaker next to the reader—close, but not merged. The final line, The poem is you, is both invitation and trap: if the poem is you, then you can’t “have” it as property; it’s your shifting presence, your changing attention, your vanishing act and return.

A sharper question the poem forces

If the reader keeps adopted a different attitude, is that a failure to read well—or the whole point? The poem seems to need your inconsistency, because only a moving target could make the poem keep trying, keep talking to you, keep missing and being missed.