The Task - Analysis

Beginning again, but not cleanly

John Ashbery’s The Task treats starting over as something we announce with confidence and then immediately discover we cannot do without dragging the past behind us. The poem opens with a brisk, almost procedural mood: They are preparing to begin again. Yet the very next phrases—Problems, a new pennant, and a predicated romance—suggest that the restart is already compromised. The beginning is staged like a public gesture (a pennant up a flagpole), but it’s also conditional, already predicated on something that came before. The task, then, isn’t simply to start; it’s to start while carrying the residue of earlier attempts.

Sunlight sliding sideways into aftermath

The poem’s central atmosphere forms at a particular hour: About the time the sun begins to cut laterally. That sideways light matters because it’s not the clean brightness of morning; it’s a slanting illumination that makes shadows and conjures carnival echoes—sound after music, fun after fun. This is the poem’s emotional setting: not the party, but what follows it. The striking line It is the blankness that follows gaiety names the crash after celebration as a kind of landscape, an emptiness we have to walk into. Ashbery makes that emptiness feel social and historical too: The fugitive lands crowd under separate names, as if places, identities, and eras jostle to be recognized even while they’re slipping away.

Everyman’s destiny: returning unfruitful

From that slant-lit hour, the poem widens into an almost allegorical statement: Everyman must depart into stranded night. The language of destiny arrives—yet what destiny delivers is grimly anticlimactic: he is to return unfruitful. That word unfruitful quietly cancels the usual promise that journeys produce harvest, wisdom, or reward. Time, in this poem, doesn’t guarantee growth; it can simply evoke a lightness that turns out to be weightless, not nourishing. The tension here is sharp: the speaker describes a life-script that sounds inevitable and heroic (depart, destiny), but what comes of it is failure-to-bear-fruit, a return with empty hands.

Cloud-castles and the hurting kind of possession

The poem then corrects itself—almost with a sigh—about what all that earlier brightness was: It was only Cloud-castles. Those castles feel like the mind’s constructions: romance, plans, memories turned into architecture. Yet the poem refuses to make nostalgia gentle. These castles are adept to seize the past and possess it through hurting. That final phrase is crucial: possession doesn’t happen through love or careful attention, but through pain, as if suffering is a crude tool for keeping what would otherwise vanish. The contradiction is almost unbearable: we tell ourselves we’re holding on because something mattered, but the poem hints we’re holding on because pain makes the past feel real.

The way is clear—into a corrosive time

After cloud-castles, the poem offers a new kind of clarity: the way is clear for linear acting into a time with a corrosive mass. Even clarity is not reassuring here; the clear way leads straight into corrosion. Time is not a neutral medium but a substance that eats away, and yet it is also where the speaker claims he first discovered how to breathe. This is one of Ashbery’s most telling double-bind moments: the same time that corrodes is the time that grants breath. The poem won’t let us decide whether damage is merely damage or whether it is also the condition of becoming fully alive.

The poem’s turn: accusation in the middle of dusk

Then comes a sudden change in voice and pressure: Just look at the filth you’ve made, See what you’ve done. The poem shifts from panoramic, abstract meditation into a blunt second-person address. It reads like conscience, like an external judge, or like the speaker attacking himself. That word filth is startling because it’s so tactile compared to cloud-castles and hemispheres. It drags the poem down from the sky to the ground—down to mess, consequence, and the unromantic residue of living. And yet the poem refuses to stay in pure self-reproach.

Regret that only lightly stirs the children

The accusatory lines are immediately tempered: Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly The children playing after supper. This is one of the poem’s most human and disorienting gestures. The world keeps going; children keep playing. The scale of guilt collapses against domestic continuity: Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come. The tension here is moral and temporal at once: the speaker feels the gravity of what’s been done, but ordinary life refuses to confirm that gravity. Regret exists, but it doesn’t necessarily reorganize the evening. It becomes a faint draft moving through a room where other, simpler currents—sleep, play, routine—are stronger.

Choosing to stay: insight as a brief shelter

When the speaker says, I play to stay here a little while, the verb play echoes the children, suggesting a deliberate attempt to borrow their lightness—not by forgetting, but by temporarily inhabiting a different posture toward time. The speaker names what these offers are: moments only, moments of insight. Insight is not presented as a permanent solution, but as a short-lived clearing, a place to stand before moving again. This makes the poem’s title feel quietly ironic: the task isn’t one grand duty; it’s the repeated, modest labor of enduring the swing between accusation and continuation.

Last level of anxiety: melting into becoming

The ending refuses both despair and easy comfort. There are reaches to be attained, and even a last level of anxiety—as if anxiety has floors, and we keep descending until we hit bedrock. But then that anxiety melts In becoming, compared to miles under the pilgrim’s feet. The pilgrim image changes the earlier Everyman departure into something less fatalistic: not a doomed exit into stranded night, but a long, wearing movement where distance itself transforms feeling. What dissolves anxiety isn’t victory; it’s motion, time, and the slow reshaping of the self by travel.

A harder question the poem won’t let go

If the past is something we possess through hurting, what would it mean to possess it without pain—would it evaporate, become truly blankness? The poem seems to suspect that some of our suffering is not just endured but recruited, because it keeps the world sharp-edged enough to feel. In that sense, the task may be learning how to keep breathing in the corrosive time without needing the corrosion to prove that the past mattered.