Street Musicians - Analysis

A split self in a city that won’t stop repeating

The poem’s central claim is that identity is something we wear to survive repetition, but it costs us a deeper intimacy with ourselves and with other people. It begins with a violent division: One died, and the other has its soul…wrenched out while still alive. That surviving figure wanders a city where sameness becomes oppressive: the same corners, shadows / Under trees. Even the word volumetrics makes the streets feel measured and impersonal, as though life has been reduced to data and surfaces. The tone here is bleakly lucid: the speaker can name what’s happening, but naming doesn’t restore what was lost.

The coat called identity, and what it hides

The image that explains the emotional logic is the survivor Wrapped in an identity like a coat. A coat is protection, social presentation, a way to move through weather and through other people’s eyes. But a coat also covers the body; it can conceal injury, hunger, or absence. This is the poem’s key tension: identity protects you while also making you less reachable. The walker keeps going on and on, and the phrase implies both endurance and a kind of deadened momentum. The poem suggests that once the soul has been torn out, the remaining self becomes an urban commuter of experience, moving through familiar coordinates without the inner heat that would make them meaningful.

Autumn, eviction, and the world becoming an inventory

As the walker is drawn through increasingly suburban airs, the city gives way to a different emptiness: not the crowded sameness of corners but the diluted sprawl of ways. Over it all, autumn falling turns the world into something already in the process of dying down. Ashbery’s autumn isn’t romantic; it’s administrative and sad. The details feel like the contents of a forced move: plush leaves beside chattels in barrels, an obscure family being evicted. Nature and human dispossession blur into one scene of removal. The phrase Into the way it was, and is suggests that eviction isn’t an exception; it’s a repeating condition, history looping back into the present. The tone becomes more impersonal here, as though the speaker is watching a world where everything, including people, can be boxed and carried out.

Revelation that doesn’t heal

The poem briefly promises knowledge: Revelations at last. But these revelations arrive in a strange, stranded form: The other beached / Glimpses. Beached makes the glimpses feel like sea-creatures washed onto shore, exposed, dying, unable to return to the element where they belonged. Whatever the two halves of the self might learn about each other comes too late, and it is too partial. The cruel turn is immediate: So they grew to hate and forget. Hatred and forgetting are paired as if they were the same survival tactic, two ways of refusing dependence. The contradiction is sharp: the poem admits the hunger for revelation, then insists revelation doesn’t necessarily reconcile. It may even accelerate the break, because what you learn may be unbearable or simply unusable.

The hinge: from the other to I, and the violin as a compromised voice

The poem’s most meaningful shift happens when the speaker steps forward: So I cradle. After a long stretch of the other, this I feels like a decision to inhabit what remains. But what the speaker cradles is not a pure instrument of expression; it’s an average violin that knows only forgotten showtunes. That phrase is both comic and devastating: the music available to the self is secondhand, stale, part of cultural furniture. And yet the violin argues / The possibility of free declamation. The verb argues matters: art here isn’t a miracle, it’s a stubborn case being made against limitation. Still, that freedom is anchored / To a dull refrain. The poem refuses a clean romanticism about creativity; it insists that improvisation, if it happens at all, happens tied to repetition and to inherited junk.

November realism: time loosens, the body shows through

Once the speaker is holding the violin, time becomes physical and unflattering. The year turns In November, and the poem describes a chilling clarity: spaces among the days / More literal, the meat more visible on the bone. The tone turns stark, almost anatomical. The comforting blur of continuity breaks, and what’s left is separation, gaps, and exposed substance. This is another contradiction the poem presses: clarity is not relief; clarity is a kind of bareness. When the days separate, you see what life is made of, and it isn’t pretty. The violin’s dull refrain matches this season: art can accompany the exposure, but it can’t fully soften it.

Origin as smoke, and the confession of what we leave behind

The poem ends by turning the question of selfhood into a question of origin: Our question of a place of origin hangs Like smoke. Smoke is visible but impossible to grasp; it disperses as you reach for it. The poem then offers memories that are not innocent: picnicked in pine forests, coves where water is seeping up. Even the landscape feels compromised, damp, leaking. And then the poem delivers its ugliest inventory: trash, sperm and excrement left everywhere, smeared / On the landscape. This isn’t shock for its own sake; it’s the poem’s final insistence that what we call origin is tangled with what we discard. The self doesn’t emerge from a pristine birthplace; it emerges from appetite, waste, and consequences. The closing phrase, to make of us what we could, sounds both resigned and grimly tender: we are formed not only by what we choose, but by what we leak, drop, and leave behind.

A harder thought the poem won’t let go of

If identity is a coat and origin is smoke, then what counts as a true revelation here? The poem seems to suggest that revelation might simply be the moment you notice your own residue on the world: the trash, the bodily facts, the irreversible marks. In that light, the violin’s forgotten showtunes aren’t just sad; they’re accurate, because they are what a culture hums while it keeps walking past its own mess.

What the street musicians finally play

The title points toward performance in public, music made while people pass by. In the poem, that public scene becomes a metaphor for the self trying to speak while life keeps moving. The first half shows two selves severed into died and walking; the second half shows an I who can only make music through an average violin, trying to push toward free declamation without denying the dull refrain of time and habit. The final tone is neither purely despairing nor purely hopeful. It is bracingly honest: the best we can do may be to keep playing, not to erase what we’ve done, but to recognize the stains and still attempt a voice that is, however imperfectly, our own.