A Suit - Analysis

An outfit for a life that won’t hold still

The poem keeps circling one plain, stubborn fact: our lives don’t fit the stories we try to dress them in. The title points us toward clothing as a metaphor for identity and explanation, but Ashbery’s speaker keeps finding that the garment is off—rumpled, mis-sized, provisional. Even the opening concession, Maybe it only looks bedraggled, sets the tone: a defensive optimism that already suspects it’s a cover story. The epigraph—The audience was scattered forever, and the story left untold—hangs over everything that follows, suggesting that whatever happened can’t be gathered into a single, shared narrative. The poem becomes a tour through attempted meanings that keep slipping out of their seams.

The fifth floor: seeing more doesn’t clarify

Let’s take it up to the fifth floor and see sounds practical, almost comforting, as if elevation and better light will solve the problem. And for a moment it does: One can look quite far in that light, into corners / of experiences we never knew we had. But the discovery is double-edged. The speaker admits that these unknown experiences are most of them, which turns the bright prospect into a quiet panic: if most of what shapes us is unknown to us, then any suit—any stable presentation of self—will be an approximation at best.

A new city that already feels like a trap

The poem’s world resets—the city is new—yet the newness is instantly undermined. The new apartment building, oddly now vacant, circles like a moth that doesn’t know it’s trapped in a spider’s web. That image is a whole psychology: busy, fluttering movement that is actually confinement; bright attraction that ends in capture. The phrase the indelible / will soon come to pass makes the threat feel both fated and permanent, as if some stain or verdict is on its way. Against that looming inevitability, the poem offers small pockets of gentility—drink tea, talk about a famous doll collection—but the comfort reads like distraction, a civilized ritual performed inside the web.

Mr. Cheeseworth and the failure of reliable calculation

When Shadows on the tent alert us that Breathing isn’t going to be as easy anymore, the poem sharpens from dreamy to bodily. The danger is no longer abstract; it’s in the air. Enter Mr. Cheeseworth, comically named yet treated as an authority: he’s always so right / in his calculations. But the moment the speaker leans on him—when one comes to believe him—he vanishes: where is he? This is one of the poem’s core contradictions: the desire for a figure (or method) that can make sense of things versus the experience that certainty itself is evasive. The poem wants a dependable tailor; the tailor keeps stepping out of the room.

Qualification, delay, and the frantic patchwork of explanation

The most explicit self-assessment arrives as a turn: It has been a life of qualification and delay. That line drains the earlier scenes of their whimsy and frames them as symptoms of a lifelong habit—always revising, postponing, adding footnotes to one’s own intentions. Even when the speaker claims confidence—we were on the right track—something inside surged and telling us otherwise. The examples are tellingly ordinary and specific: arriving too early at the airport, noticing drips on the taxi in the dusk. These are not grand tragedies; they are the small glitches that make you feel out of sync with the world, like you’ve misread the schedule of your own life. The response is improvisational: We doctored it all up, as if meaning were a wound to be covered.

Manna that tastes like coconut: sweetness without an account

The speaker tries one more time to be the person with the answer: I think I have an explanation for the manna that falls softly as pollen and tastes like coconut or some other / unaccountable sherbet. The biblical word manna promises providence, but the sensory details turn it into something frivolous, almost synthetic—dessert drifting down from nowhere. The key word is unaccountable: the poem can describe the sweetness perfectly, yet it can’t justify it. And then the conclusion lands with quiet brutality: It seems clothes never do fit. All the explanations, calculations, teas, museums, and new apartments are forms of dressing the self; the final claim is that the mismatch isn’t a temporary tailoring problem but the permanent condition.

A last line that sounds like comfort and feels like resignation

Yes, I could have told you that some time ago has the tone of a shrug, even a soft joke, but it also implies waste: years spent searching for an explanation the speaker already possessed. The poem’s emotional intelligence is in that mixed aftertaste—wryness covering fatigue. If the story is left untold, it’s not because nothing happened; it’s because the telling itself never quite fits what happened. The suit is always slightly wrong, and the speaker—half host, half witness—keeps inviting us up to better light anyway.

If clothes never fit, what does it mean that we keep dressing? The poem’s tea and dolls, its airports and taxis, its careful calculations—all of them suggest a stubborn faith that the right outfit, the right story, the right timing will make breathing easy again. But the moth already circles inside the web, and the sweetness that falls is still unaccountable. The effort to appear prepared may be the very proof that we aren’t.