To Redoute - Analysis

Painting Flowers While the Day Turns Sick

The poem reads like an address to a flower-painter who cannot keep the world’s rot out of the bouquet. It begins with true roses and morning-glories, but they rise on a bilious tide of evening, a phrase that stains the scene with nausea. Ashbery’s central move is to make beauty feel both exact and untrustworthy: the flowers are named with a botanist’s clarity, yet the atmosphere they float in is queasy, unstable. If this is to Redouté, the famous botanical illustrator, the dedication matters mainly as pressure: a demand for faithful depiction runs up against a speaker who keeps finding illness, penalty, and grief in the act of seeing.

The Oval shape That Answers in Riddles

The poem quickly shifts from description to something like a quiz, as The oval shape responds. Instead of giving a clean emblem (leaf, petal, cameo), it offers a split self: My first is a haunting face in hanging-down hair, then My second is water, concluding I am a sieve. The riddle’s logic is emotional rather than solvable. A sieve is made to let things pass through; it can’t hold water, and it can’t hold a face either, except as a fleeting impression. The speaker’s consciousness is like that: it can register the roses and morning-glories, but it cannot keep them. The tension here is between the painter’s urge to preserve (to fix a flower on paper) and the poem’s insistence that perception leaks—memory and meaning drain away even as you try to contain them.

The penalty of light: Seeing as a Sentence

Midway, the poem names what’s at stake: My only new thing: followed by The penalty of light forever. Light, usually the condition for painting and for life, becomes punitive—an endless exposure. It hangs Over the heads of those who were there, as if witnesses are condemned to keep seeing what they saw. Then the poem drops back into the night with the cough of the finishing petal. A petal doesn’t literally cough; the word makes the flower briefly animal, vulnerable, near death. This is a tonal turn: from lush naming to a terminal sound, a small bodily failure that ends the bloom. Light reveals, but what it reveals is finishing.

Magenta as Obligation, Not Choice

The line Once approved the magenta must continue makes color feel bureaucratic, like a decision stamped and enforced. In a poem to an artist, that’s quietly brutal: beauty is no longer discovery but compliance. And yet the poem doesn’t let that order stand unchallenged. The next image, the bark island, is strange and physical at once—something driftwood-like, self-contained, afloat. It sees / Into the light, implying a stubborn consciousness, but also an isolation: an island can’t rejoin the shore. The poem’s emotional pitch tightens here; vision becomes endurance, and endurance becomes mourning.

Grief That Comes From Giving

The closing lines make the poem’s most pointed contradiction explicit: It grieves for what it gives. The bark island (or the artwork, or the self) produces Tears that streak the dusty firmament. Even the sky is not clean; it’s dusty, like a studio surface, like pigment, like old varnish. The act of giving—making flowers visible, offering color, offering an image—creates grief because it proves loss. To paint a rose is to admit it will fall; to approve magenta is to keep repeating a life-like brightness that can’t prevent the finishing petal. The final tears don’t wash the sky; they mark it, turning the whole firmament into something that can be stained, like paper.

A Hard Question the Poem Won’t Let Go

If the self is a sieve, what exactly is the art for: to catch what can’t be held, or to witness the leaking more beautifully? The poem keeps returning to light—as penalty, as the thing the bark island peers into—as if illumination is inseparable from harm. In that sense, the dedication to a flower painter reads less like praise than like a dare: can you render true roses without also rendering the sickness in the air around them?