The Problem Of Anxiety - Analysis

Anxiety as a lifelong failure of orientation

Ashbery frames anxiety not as panic but as a slow, stubborn inability to locate yourself in the world. The speaker begins with a huge temporal claim—Fifty years have passed—and then undercuts any expectation of progress: not much has changed. The most telling symptom is almost comically small: he still can’t work out how to get from the post office to the park swings. That miniature navigation problem becomes a model for everything else: the adult mind can’t reliably reach a place of play, ease, or innocence, even when it’s supposedly nearby. The tone here is dry and conversational, but the joke lands with a thud because the confusion has lasted half a century.

The details around him make the world feel faintly miswired. Apple trees blossom in the cold, and not from conviction, as if even nature is going through the motions without belief. Meanwhile his hair is dandelion fluff—a soft, dispersing image of age, fragility, and things that won’t stay put. Anxiety, in this poem, is the feeling that the environment keeps offering signs and routes, but none of them add up to a stable map.

The turn: from remembered towns to the reader’s “you”

The hinge arrives with a sly challenge: Suppose this poem were about you. Suddenly the poem becomes self-conscious about what it’s doing and what it refuses to do. The speaker asks whether you would insert what he has carefully left out: the expected confessional inventory of pain and sex, plus the social diagnosis of how shiftily people treat each other. That word carefully matters: this isn’t forgetfulness; it’s an anxious management of attention, a decision to control what enters the frame because the usual material might be too easy, too loud, or too rehearsed.

Refusing the “important” book in favor of sandwiches

The speaker’s Naw is breezy, almost flippant, yet it carries an exhausted wisdom: that’s all in some book, he says, as if the standard narratives of suffering and desire have been standardized into literature’s expected product. What he offers instead is startlingly plain: chicken sandwiches. This isn’t just quirky; it’s a claim that anxiety doesn’t always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it hides in the mundane, in what you can hold and chew, in the small comforts that feel real precisely because they don’t pretend to explain anything. Yet even this “saved” material isn’t purely comforting; it’s odd and slightly airless, like a lunch eaten under fluorescent light.

The unappeasable glass eye

The poem’s most unsettling object is the glass eye staring in amazement from a bronze mantel. A glass eye is both vision and its failure: a symbol of looking that cannot truly see, and also of being looked at without warmth. The mantel suggests a household shrine to something inert and heavy; the eye’s amazement feels permanent, frozen into the object. The last line—will never be appeased—is where the anxiety concentrates. No confession will satisfy that stare, and no amount of ordinary detail will soothe it either. The speaker can curate the poem’s contents, but he cannot quiet the judgment or wonder that seems to watch him from inside his own room.

The poem’s core tension: what’s omitted still stares back

Ashbery sets up a contradiction and lets it hum. The speaker claims he has left out pain and sex, as if omission can simplify the self. But the ending suggests the opposite: what you don’t tell can become an object that stares harder, an unappeasable witness. Even the earlier images cooperate with that unease: blossoms without conviction, hair like fluff ready to blow away, a lifelong failure to reach the swings. The tone stays talky and casual, yet the casualness feels like a defense—an attempt to keep the poem from becoming some book while still admitting that something in him remains unsatisfied.

If the poem is about you, the question becomes sharper: are the “left out” things truly absent, or have they simply changed costumes into sandwiches and household ornaments? The glass eye’s amazement could be the very pain and desire the speaker claims to avoid—only now they’re impersonal, externalized, impossible to argue with. In that sense, the poem doesn’t solve anxiety; it shows how expertly anxiety can rearrange the room so that the most ordinary objects become the ones that won’t let you off the hook.