Scheherazade - Analysis

A world where description becomes destiny

This poem treats Scheherazade less as a character from One Thousand and One Nights than as a name for a force: the power of storytelling to keep reality alive by endlessly re-describing it. The opening landscape is already a parable of that power. Unsupported by reason’s enigma announces a place where explanation is missing, yet things still gather and persist: Water collects in squared stone basins; the land is dry but under it moves / The water; Fish live in the wells. The poem’s central claim, implied rather than declared, is that life is held together not by reason or moral accounting, but by the ongoing act of telling: language keeps refitting the world, even when the world refuses to resolve into a clear plot.

Grammar as love: the hunger for particularity

The poem’s tenderness shows up in an unexpectedly technical place: she loved the particles that turn general categories into singular beings. Those particles are the small hinges of grammar and attention that make objects become particular ones, each distinct. That line quietly reframes Scheherazade’s famous survival tactic. The point is not simply that stories distract a tyrant, but that language can make a livable world by differentiating it, giving it edges, giving it names. Even the weeds cooperate with this selective reality: Bindweed and ragweed forget to flourish. The tone here is bright, alert, almost enchanted, as if the poem is savoring how description can act like weather: a pleasant wavering in which all things seemed present, whether just past or soon to come.

The invitation that won’t stay ornamental

Early on, the poem imagines a preface that should politely step aside: These were meant to be read as a Salutation before getting down to business. But the salutation refuses to vanish. It stuck to their guns, and that obstinacy becomes part of the poem’s ethics: the decorative, the atmospheric, the merely lyrical will not consent to being reduced to mere throat-clearing. Ashbery makes that resistance visible in a strange, vivid image: white birds that refuse to die / When day does. Day should end; the birds should go dark with it; but the poem insists on afterglow, on continuance. What looks like a digression, a drift of detail, is renamed a major movement: a firm / Digression that turns into geography, a plain becoming a mountain. The tone shifts here from airy invitation to a more forceful insistence: the world of side-notes is going to take over the main road.

The hinge: from wardrobe to net

The poem’s key turn arrives when the freedom of endless costume changes hardens into entrapment. Earlier, An inexhaustible wardrobe is placed at the disposal of each new occurrence, so that whatever happens can be itself now. Storytelling feels like generosity: every event gets fitted with the right garments, the right adjectives, the right angle of light. But then: So each found himself caught in a net As a fashion. The metaphor is devastating because it keeps the language of style while changing its consequences. A fashion is supposed to be optional; a net is not. And the trap tightens by the very effort to escape it: attempts to wriggle free only involve the person further, inexorably. The earlier delight in colored verbs and adjectives now looks suspicious too: their bank was shrinking, retreating to shade to nurse a want of a method. The poem holds a tense contradiction: language is both the tool that makes life particular and the web that makes life inescapably narrated.

Memory’s rooms and time watching itself

Once the net is in place, the poem pours in a rush of content that sounds like an autobiography rendered as rumor: the story / Of the grandparents, the young champion, dinners and assemblies, the light in the old home, and the secret way / The rooms fed into each other. The detail is homely and specific, yet it is framed as something already pre-shaped by narrative exchange: The lines once given to another are Restored to a new speaker, as if identity itself were a set of quotations moving between mouths. Over all of it hovers an anxious, self-reflective clock: time watching itself. That phrase makes time feel like a suspicious audience, policing the story for consistency, for causality, for growth. But the poem denies the usual promise of narrative development: nothing in the complex story grew outside. Even the climactic moment of flowering is paradoxical: the story bursting / Into bloom becomes a static lament. The poem’s pleasure in abundance keeps bumping into a fear that abundance can never truly move forward.

The moral ending that doesn’t add up

The final section stages a familiar story-machine: some tales outlast the dynasty of the builders, and at the end we are told what endings are supposed to do. The poem recites the conventional moral ledger: the kind and good are rewarded; the unjust burn forever around his error, becoming sadder and wiser. Yet the poem’s tone turns dry, almost irritated, when it admits that for most people there is no clean verdict. Between these extremes the rest muddle through Like us, wearing their role as minor characters. That small admission, Like us, is one of the poem’s sharpest: it collapses the ornate, legendary frame into contemporary, ordinary uncertainty. The poem suggests that narrative justice is a special effect we sometimes demand, not a truth we can rely on.

Audience as cage: pleasure that sounds like indifference

In its most unsettling move, the poem implicates the reader in the whole economy of tales. It is we who make this / Jungle and call it space, naming each root and each serpent partly for the mere sound: the name clinks dully against our pleasure. Even more troubling, that pleasure shades into a numbness the poem refuses to distinguish: Indifference that is pleasure. The audience does not simply receive the story; it restricts the innumerable gestures, the passes and swipes, forcing the infinite into a shape that can be consumed. The poem’s earlier hospitality toward each new occurrence now looks like an apparatus that keeps occurrences legible at the cost of their freedom.

A balance restored because it balances

The ending refuses both tragedy and tidy redemption. It openly confesses the math is wrong: Although / The arithmetic is incorrect. And yet it claims a kind of pragmatic equilibrium: The balance is restored because it balances, knowing it prevails. That circular logic is not a mistake; it is the poem’s final verdict on storytelling itself. Stories do not justify themselves by being true in a rational sense; they justify themselves by continuing, by holding the world together for one more night. Even the man who made the same mistake twice is exonerated—not because justice triumphed, but because narrative needs to keep going, needs to keep finding a way to include what would otherwise be discarded. Scheherazade’s real achievement here is not suspense but persistence: the poem makes survival look like the stubborn, sometimes coercive, always mesmerizing act of making the next sentence.