Passive Aggressive - Analysis

Small talk at twenty-five miles an hour

The poem’s title promises a social posture, and the poem delivers it as a mental weather system: polite surfaces with sudden barbs, tenderness with abrupt disgust, coherence with deliberate derailment. The opening sets a scene that should steady us—We were driving along at twenty-five miles an hour—but almost immediately language stops being a tool for reporting and becomes the thing being driven. A word like Desperate is personified as if it were a nosy passenger who wants to know something impossible, how the angle tree has went. The central claim this poem makes—without ever stating it outright—is that everyday life is saturated with half-heard demands and mismatched responses, and our minds cope by sliding into a collage of tones: sincere, mocking, erotic, bored, dutiful, and vaguely alarmed.

Domestic absurdity as emotional cover

Ashbery keeps placing us in situations that resemble ordinary conversation, then letting them glitch into dream logic: can live over a wombat factory; said the woman coming in to see him / about something. That last phrase, about something, feels like the poem’s engine: the social world is always pressuring us to be responsive to unspecified somethings, and the speaker’s mind keeps dodging. Even the self-description—a beautiful little tree, or lake—reads like a passive attempt to become scenery, to be harmless and unaccountable. But the passivity is edged with quiet control: Just the sandwiches now, / we’ll look at the rest later. Postponement becomes a tactic, and the poem’s airy evasions start to look like a way of managing threat.

The poem’s turn into open hostility

The voice swerves from dreamy to combative with a jolt: Oh yeah? Oh, yeah. That’s it. It’s a classic passive-aggressive exchange condensed into two short bursts—challenge and dismissal—followed by a vanishing act: The water has swirled away to a secret hiding place. What disappears isn’t just water; it’s clarity, calm, maybe the possibility of saying what one means. After this, the poem’s address turns harsher and more erratic: Timid thing, get me some peas, You’re going tomorrow, gray drunkard. The commands and insults arrive without context, as if the speaker is both attacking and trying to provoke a response that would finally make the relationship legible.

Everybody has a body, and that’s the problem

The poem keeps yanking us toward physicality—sometimes comic, sometimes crude—because bodies are where civility breaks down. The line Everybody has a body, that’s why they’re called everybody sounds like a joke that has curdled into a grim fact: no one gets to remain purely abstract, purely polite, purely untouchable. That pressure shows up in the sudden sexual brag-flinch—I don’t care how big his cock is—followed immediately by forced cheerfulness: Oh, hullo, Marge. The tone doesn’t just shift; it splits, as if the speaker is trying to patch a tear in decorum in real time. Even the random-seeming queries—Shredded any cumulus yesterday?—feel like a defensive maneuver: if you can make language silly enough, you can keep it from landing on anything that hurts.

Pity scrolls and the strained “tegument”

When the poem says Lost vagrants unfold scrolls of pity, it offers an image of compassion turned performative and portable, like a script people consult rather than a feeling they risk. The diction then becomes almost clinical—The very tegument strained, shuddering—as if the skin of the world (or the skin of the self) is tightening under pressure. The speaker notices ratios—more dribs / than drabs—and seasonal expectations—what summer / is supposedly about—suggesting an anxious measuring against what life is supposed to be. Even love is displaced onto a vague figure who loved the country but is also a demented servitor, caught between devotion and degradation. The poem’s aggression here isn’t only outward; it’s also the inward accusation that one’s own feelings are misshapen, misspelled, never quite correct.

Responsibility arriving like squawking ducks

The final section circles the problem of accountability. What others said isn’t known; the condition of his parade / can’t know. Knowledge is repeatedly blocked, not by mystery but by social noise and self-protection. Then comes a startling, militarized compliance: Roger, sir followed by the shouted echo ROGER, which sounds like obedience edging into mockery. And yet the poem ends by smuggling duty back in: when the ducks came squawking / back, you felt it was your responsibility. The world returns, loud and needy, and the speaker can’t fully shrug it off. Even the landscape seems to judge: The floral canopy dragged reproachfully. The closing detail—you filled up on tea and goat cheese—is both comfort and avoidance: a neat, tasteful lunch standing in for the messier hungers the poem keeps hinting at but refuses to resolve.

A sharper question the poem keeps dodging

If passivity is a way of not choosing, and aggression is a way of forcing contact, the poem asks what happens when neither works. When the water retreats to a secret hiding place, is that relief—or is it the start of drought? The poem’s bravado, its insults, its nonsense questions, even its tidy tea and goat cheese, can be read as one long attempt to keep the underlying Desperate from speaking in a plain sentence.