Revisionist Horn Concerto - Analysis

The poem’s central insistence: meaning fails, yet we keep living inside its debris

Ashbery’s poem keeps arriving at the same blunt paradox: the world doesn’t add up, and still it doesn’t destroy us. The opening asks, almost impatiently, What more clouds can be said, and then swaps the lofty for the trivial: Buttons, strings, bits of fluff. That inventory feels like the real substance of experience here: not grand symbols, but small leftovers, the pocket-lint of perception. The speaker calls this pile a vocabulary of displaced images, which sounds like an explanation for why the poem can’t produce a stable message. If the message doesn’t add up, the poem shrugs: whose fault is it? The question isn’t rhetorical so much as weary: the speaker wants accountability, but the world gives only fragments.

“Casting the answer correctly”: a mind that wants clarity and keeps missing it

The speaker admits he can imagine casting the answer correctly, as if meaning were a spell or a fishing line, a technique you could master. But immediately: it doesn’t work. What blocks him is striking: there’s no question implied. Usually we think answers fail because questions are too hard; here answers fail because the universe hasn’t even agreed to be interrogated. Yet the poem doesn’t present that failure as ugly. The obstructing material is gorgeous, made of plaited ravellings: braided tangles, deliberate mess. The mind is both irritated and seduced by the same thing. That double attitude is the poem’s emotional motor: the speaker is always half-critic, half-enraptured spectator.

Silence as a practiced art, not a void

When the poem claims Only a little / is known about these ravellings, and nothing about their hometowns, it borrows the language of biography and sociology, as if the images were people whose backgrounds might explain them. But the refusal of background is the point: these things have no origin story we can verify. Instead, the poem redefines what the images are for: a masterful / way of dealing with silence, of leaving it there, then going off on some expedition. Silence isn’t overcome; it’s staged, managed, left intact like a room you don’t enter. The poem suggests an ethics of non-resolution: you don’t have to fill every blank. And the first major turn lands with a startling reassurance after all the failure-talk: there is nothing there that can harm us. Emptiness is recast as safety.

Second turn: permission to be hurt, and the strange choreography of history and shoelaces

Right after insisting nothing can harm us, the poem pivots: Don’t be afraid to let it hurt you. The contradiction is deliberate and bracing. The speaker distinguishes between harm and hurt: hurt is allowed, even necessary, because it keeps you responsive. The next command is equally odd: dance it / under morning’s wire. Morning becomes a place of constraint, a wired space, yet the response is dance, not escape. Then comes one of the poem’s sharpest collisions: the time bomb of the Nile set beside today’s shoelaces. The ancient river is turned into a device with a countdown; the present is reduced to something you tie and re-tie. The poem asks the reader to ponder anew the shuffle between those scales, as if daily life and deep history constantly exchange masks. This is where Ashbery’s tenderness shows up: the poem isn’t mocking shoelaces. It’s saying our smallness is the only place we actually stand.

The healing process, the missing object, and the social world’s dumb authority

The poem then grows openly skeptical about closure: these periods / have a way of elapsing, along with the so-called healing process. Time passes; healing is suspect. The speaker asks, Does anybody care where it went or whose sleep it interrupted with a unique dissonance. The missing it could be love, youth, meaning, a whole era; its vagueness makes it more accurate to lived experience, where what vanishes is often hard to name. The poem’s social scenes are comically ominous: They were always photographing / the cash register, while some men came in and decreed it should be this way. Money, documentation, authority: the world insists on procedures. The phrase proverbial fix captures a feeling of being trapped in clichés that still have real consequences. Yet the poem also insists on a strange accounting justice: what was promised / was equal to what was subtracted. Even loss is balanced, at least on paper, while periods of socializing / in the yard try to compensate emotionally. It’s an almost cruel comedy: the heart gets “made up for” the way a budget line does.

The “bald, comic error”: origins founded on a mistake

Years later someone notices the bald, / comic error that was hidden from the start, and the poem makes an audacious leap: the error is used to equate it with life’s beginning. That suggests a bleakly funny origin myth: our lives begin in a misreading, a wrong equation everyone agrees not to see until it’s too late. But by the time the mistake is recognized, it was in full sail—already moving, already a life. The poem’s image of being in the railroad car, leaning out, swaying, singing, catches that sensation: life is risky, noisy, and half-unstable, but also musical. Even the poem’s nastiness becomes part of the spectacle. The foul mouth ought to be caked with mud and weeds by now—shamed, silenced, buried—yet it persists, and the speaker breezily refuses to let it ruin this birthday surprise. Celebration here is not innocence; it’s stubbornness in the presence of what should have disqualified joy.

A sharp question the poem forces: is comfort just another “masterful” way of leaving silence there?

If nothing there can harm us but we should still let it hurt you, what exactly is being protected: the self, or the story we keep telling the self? When the poem chooses the birthday surprise over moral cleanup, is that resilience, denial, or simply the only workable bargain with time?

The final wheel: dreaming machinery that dips into mud and rises as reassurance

The ending returns to motion, but now it’s dream-motion: the pole / still turns, like the enormous wheel / of a rickshaw seen from up close. Up close, you don’t get a grand panorama; you get mud, spokes, labor, repetition. The wheel alternates between dipping into the mud and chaos and rising like a sigh, a lark / on the mend. That last phrase is crucial: the poem doesn’t claim we are healed, only mending—repair as a continuous, imperfect action. And then Ashbery offers a cautious benediction: all is well, or should be, or will be shortly. The three-step ladder of reassurance keeps weakening its own certainty even as it tries to comfort. What finally sustains that comfort is not proof but attention: the poem cites interest in its shadow. We may not grasp the thing itself—meaning, time, history, the missing it—but we can watch what it casts. In this poem, that shadow is made of buttons and shoelaces, cash registers and gates, mud and singing. The consolation is modest and hard-earned: we don’t get a clean answer, but we do get a lived, turning world.