Song - Analysis

A song that can’t keep time

Ashbery’s central claim feels almost like a confession: the stories we tell about the past—especially the comforting ones—don’t move forward in a clean line. They stutter, reverse, speed up, and finally go quiet. The poem begins with the promise of a simple narrative, The song tells us of our old way of living, but it quickly shows that memory is not a museum exhibit; it’s a mechanism that slips. What looks like recollection becomes a kind of malfunctioning clock, and what looks like progress becomes a return to the same reluctance not wanting to grow.

Nostalgia, but with an off taste

The opening gestures toward an older world made of sensory ease: Fragrance of flowers, and an idea of endings that were self-contained, How things merely ended when they ended. Yet the comfort is immediately destabilized by the strange phrase beginning again into a sigh. Even restart comes pre-loaded with fatigue. The tone here is tender, but already resigned—nostalgia isn’t presented as a paradise, but as a habit of softening what was difficult.

When the poem’s machinery jerks into panic

The poem turns sharply with Later, as if time itself has been bumped. Now movement is reversed, and the present looks masked, urgent, and out of control: urgent masks / Speed toward a totally unexpected end / Like clocks out of control. What used to be a gentle ending becomes an onrushing crash. The speaker asks, Is this the gesture / That was meant, as though trying to decode an old intention inside a new chaos. The question makes the panic more intimate: it isn’t only that events are random; it’s that the speaker suspects a pattern but can’t prove it.

Denials that grow like foliage, sweetness that suffocates

The poem’s most revealing contradiction arrives in the dense image of refusal: frustrated denials, like jungle foliage. Denial isn’t empty; it’s overgrown, living, obstructive. Then the poem pairs release with claustrophobia: the ending all to be let go / In quick, suffocating sweetness. That sweetness is not romantic reassurance—it’s the kind that steals your breath. Ashbery makes letting go sound like both relief and threat, as though the mind can only relinquish its defenses in a way that nearly overwhelms it.

A brick face pushed toward sky-nothingness

The landscape becomes oddly architectural: The day / Puts toward a nothingness of sky / Its face of rusticated brick. Daylight is personified as a building presenting its façade to emptiness. The image carries a quiet bleakness: solidity (brick) facing blankness (sky). Around it, modern life murmurs like a Greek chorus, except it’s mechanical: The cars lament, and someone predicts collapse—the whole business will be hurled down. Against this, the speaker and companion become almost fetal in their restraint: we sit, scarcely daring to speak, To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life. Intimacy is not a refuge; it’s a high price, a fragile state where even breath feels like a risk.

The seduction of “progress” and the innocence of a new book

After that hushed intensity, the poem offers a different register—cooler, almost institutional. The past’s pretentions will be converted into progress, into a growing up. The simile is telling: progress is as beautiful as a new history book / With uncut pages. A new book is pristine, unopened—beautiful precisely because it hasn’t been handled, argued with, or dirtied by living. The poem’s skepticism is subtle here: calling the past’s claims pretentions doesn’t guarantee the future’s story will be truer; it may simply be better bound, with unseen illustrations that promise meaning without delivering it yet.

Stops and starts that “will be made clear”—and then aren’t

The poem briefly flirts with explanation: the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear. But the clarity it offers is a backward motion: Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow. This is the poem’s most human admission. Even when life seems to organize itself into lessons, the self backs away from the demand those lessons make. The ending completes the retreat in dreamlike transformations: the night, which becomes a house, then a parting of the ways, carrying the speaker far into sleep. The final phrase, A dumb love, refuses eloquence. Love persists, but it cannot fully justify itself in language—especially not in the tidy language of history books or songs that claim to remember properly.

The hardest question the poem leaves us with

If closeness can feel like it cost us life, what exactly is being spent—freedom, safety, the ability to keep up the urgent masks? The poem seems to suggest that growing up isn’t simply forward motion; it is also the courage to stop performing, to let the sweetness be sweet without letting it suffocate.