Redeemed Area - Analysis

A hometown quiz that turns accusatory

The poem opens with a question that sounds friendly but lands like a challenge: Do you know where you live? What follows is less an answer than a proof that the place is no longer fully knowable. The speaker describes Abner driving to buy cough drops they don’t make anymore, only to find the old drugstore swallowed by a half-empty mall, surrounded by three more malls. The scene keeps substituting copies for originals: new brand, new location, repeated malls, and houses owned by the same guy rented to students until they are virtually uninhabitable. The central claim the poem presses is that modern life offers a relentless, shabby kind of replacement—everything is still here, technically, but in a form that can’t be lived in, trusted, or even properly remembered.

The tone is comic on the surface, but it’s a comedy with a chemical burn. Even the air is wrong: a smell of vitriol and socks hangs like an open sewer. That mix—corrosive vitriol and mere laundry—captures the poem’s peculiar dread: not grand tragedy, but a daily-world spoilage that feels at once humiliating and toxic.

Abner’s cough drops: nostalgia that tastes like something else

Abner’s errand is small, almost sweet, but it exposes the poem’s first key tension: the desire for the old world versus the fact that the old world returns only as parody. He won’t admit he’s too old to drive, and his goal is a candy-like medicine that no longer exists. When he gets the replacement, the speaker concedes it tasted pretty good—but the similes for that taste are destabilizing: like catnip and like an orange slice that has lain on a girl’s behind. Pleasure and embarrassment fuse. The new cough drop is enjoyable, yet it arrives with a faintly animal, faintly pornographic aftertaste, as if the present can only be savored through a stain. The poem won’t let nostalgia stay pure, but it also won’t let the new be simply bad; it insists on a compromised sweetness.

Electricity restored, danger invited back in

The poem’s first major turn comes with the phone call: That’s the electrician. Suddenly we’re indoors, in a private space where basic utilities have failed. The speaker sounds practical—Now we’ll have some electricity—yet the first planned use is reckless: plugging in the Christmas tree lights, the very thing that made everything go up in sparks last time. That choice makes the domestic scene feel like a rehearsal of disaster. Even the seemingly sensible next step—light by the dictionary stand to look some words up—suggests a deeper uncertainty: the speaker needs language shored up, definitions rechecked, as if reality has drifted and words can no longer be relied on without verification.

Then comes the toaster and the craving for A nice slice of toast, a tiny longing for normal comfort. But Ashbery snaps the comfort line in the very next breath: I’m afraid it’s all over / between us. The poem keeps yoking necessity to rupture: electricity, light, toast—then the announcement of emotional ending. The speaker wants to repair the house while admitting the relationship can’t be repaired in the same straightforward way.

Make nice, dance like dogs: tenderness as performance

When the speaker proposes reconciliation—Make nice—it arrives as staged behavior rather than authentic feeling. Changing a chemise and dancing like demented dogs suggests a kind of frantic domestic theater: two people acting out care, hoping the motions will summon the emotion. The image of dogs eager for a handout is both funny and bleak; it reduces intimacy to pleading, trained gestures, the hope of being tossed something. Yet the speaker also promises, insistently, everything will return to normal. That promise is the poem’s most exposed nerve: it sounds like reassurance given to someone else, but also like self-hypnosis.

The future the speaker describes is oddly transactional and split among recipients: things for you to write in a diary, a fur coat for the speaker, and a lavish shoe tree for that other. Even the imagined restoration parcels out comfort and identity into separate objects and separate people. The tension here is sharp: the speaker longs for normality, but their version of normal is already crowded with substitutes, accessories, and a shadowy third party.

Two slices and a fogged-out vision

The craving for toast returns with a small escalation—Make that two slices—and immediately the poem shifts into a stranger register. The speaker can see the addressee only through a vegetal murk, compared to coral, or a transparent milkshake. The metaphors are vivid but slippery: vegetal suggests growth and rot, coral suggests living stone, and milkshake suggests sweetness made eerie by transparency. The addressee is present but obscured, as if intimacy is now filtered through a medium that is organic, half-liquid, and hard to name. The desire for nourishment (toast) sits beside perceptual failure (murk), as though appetite persists even when recognition doesn’t.

Morning at seven: the private room becomes a national emergency

Another turn arrives with clipped, declarative lines: I have adjusted the lamp, morning’s at seven. These sound like someone trying to set the world correctly—lamp, time, morning—by sheer statement. But the next images collapse the room: the walls have fallen. The poem widens abruptly from household management to a collective crisis: the country’s pulse is racing, Parents are weeping, the schools have closed. What’s unnerving is how seamlessly the poem moves from toaster and dictionary to civic breakdown, as if the two were always adjacent. The earlier sparks from the Christmas lights now feel like a miniature of the larger failure: systems overload, structures fail, and what was decorative becomes dangerous.

Yet even here, Ashbery won’t give us a clean apocalypse. The tarnish falling from metallic embroidery suggests a false brightening, a cheap ornament suddenly cleared; it’s not sunrise, it’s shine. The poem keeps implying that catastrophe might be partly a matter of perception and language—what happens when you can’t tell whether you’ve cleaned the embroidery or lost the walls.

A sharp question the poem refuses to answer

If everything will return to normal, why does the poem keep staging restoration through the very objects that caused damage—electricity, lights, frantic motion, the insistence on morning’s at seven? The speaker seems to treat normal as something you can plug in, adjust, toast, and declare into being. But the surrounding world—malls multiplying, houses uninhabitable, schools closed—suggests normal may be the most unrealistic fantasy in the poem.

“All the fuss” and the final, baffling cheer

The ending swerves into a tone that is either serene, deranged, or both: All the fuss has put me in a good mood, addressed to O great sun. This is the poem’s final contradiction. After rot-smell streets, emotional endings, fallen walls, weeping parents, the speaker reports a good mood. One way to read this is as manic defense: the mind, overwhelmed, flips into praise. Another is more unsettling: the speaker is genuinely energized by crisis, as if disorder finally matches the internal weather and therefore feels clarifying. In either case, the last address lifts the poem into something like prayer, but it’s prayer without certainty—less gratitude for salvation than an attempt to stand in the light and pretend the light means stability.