Sons Of The Desert - Analysis

A world built out of found sentences

The poem reads like a roomful of talk cut loose from its original occasions: a catalog of dog-related items, a brisk history of printing on tin and copper and silver, a biographical aside about helping promote the Indians, and finally an almost whispered report about a big old lake that might be flooded now. My central claim is that Ashbery is staging a mind trying to make meaning from cultural leftovers—advertising language, museum labels, family anecdotes—only to find that each new fact both promises coherence and blocks it.

The tone is confidently chatty at first—Really major, I’d say—as if the speaker is giving a tour. But that confidence is slippery: the speaker keeps asserting knowledge while revealing that knowledge is secondhand, oddly specific, and not quite connected.

Dogs, metals, and the hunger to collect

The opening lines sound like an appraisal of taste: there is tremendous interest in dog paintings, and once printing on various metals is solved, you have all the written equipment. That phrase is telling: it treats language and inscription as a kind of gear, not a living exchange. The world becomes manageable when it can be printed, labeled, stored—dog art on metal, a horn stamped onto something, the aura of authenticity reduced to a mark.

Then the poem snaps a gate shut: The lucky trees signed on. Then there was no room for latecomers. The oddness of lucky trees makes the moment feel fable-like, but the social fact is clear. Systems of belonging harden quickly; access becomes arbitrary. The tension here is between an expanding marketplace of objects and a shrinking space for actual arrival—more things to admire, fewer places to stand.

A heroic biography that sounds like paperwork

The second stanza pivots to a human subject: He was a very mobile person, instrumental in promoting a people. Yet the diction—mobile, instrumental, promote—makes the life feel like a résumé, not a relationship. Even the phrase the Indians arrives with the bluntness of an institutional category. The poem lets the sentence exist while quietly exposing its shallowness: the language of advocacy can easily become the language of management.

That unease intensifies with Those escapements, they would use in their luaus. The line is funny in a strained way, because it yokes a technical word like escapements (suggesting mechanisms, clocks, devices) to luaus, a loaded shorthand for a culture turned into entertainment. The contradiction is sharp: what claims to honor or promote is indistinguishable from repackaging.

The child portrait: intimacy that turns unsettling

Suddenly the poem becomes domestic and tactile: It was my first ¾ length child. (Fumed oak.) The parenthetical—Fumed oak—sounds like a note from a furniture catalog or an art description, as though even the child is being framed as an object in a room. ¾ length suggests a portrait format, not a person. The speaker appears to be remembering (or describing) an image, but the memory is already mediated by display language.

Then comes a jolt of direct looking: Look how funny her little arm is. The intimacy of her little arm collides with the casual cruelty of funny. Whether it means comical, strange, or damaged, the word refuses to settle. The poem’s key tension tightens here: the speaker wants closeness—wants to point, share, include the listener—yet what emerges is objectification again, now at the level of the body.

The flooded lake: the ending that undoes the tour

The last stanza strips the earlier bustle down to uncertainty: I think repeats, and knowledge collapses into guesswork. The big old lake feels like a backdrop for everything that came before—an emotional basin where all these cultural fragments might have been sitting. But now the speaker suspects the whole thing might be flooded, and the causes are not fully understood. The tone shifts from brisk commentary to subdued bewilderment, as if the accumulation of objects and statements cannot withstand a larger, vaguer force.

What if the flood is the poem’s real subject?

If the poem begins with the dream of recording—printing on metals, having written equipment, signing on—it ends with the possibility that the record is underwater. The flood doesn’t only threaten a place; it threatens the premise that cataloging equals knowing. In that light, the poem’s stray facts and mismatched registers start to feel like salvage: pieces floating up after meaning has already gone under.