These Lacustrine Cities - Analysis

From cities to a mind: the poem’s central move

John Ashbery’s poem begins by describing lacustrine cities as if they were historical places, but its real subject is how a self gets built out of disgust and then has to live inside what it made. The cities grew out of loathing and become forgetful, although angry with history: that strange pairing is the poem’s engine. It suggests a psyche that can’t bear the past but can’t stop arguing with it either. By the end, the outward architecture has become an inward one: you have built a mountain of something, a private monument made of desire and disappointment. The poem’s central claim is that our most elaborate creations—cities, art, even a self-image—may start as defenses against pain and hatred, and yet they harden into a destiny we’re told to be happy with.

Hate refurbished into “useless love”

The first stanzas treat the cities like a civilization whose founding principle is a bleak theory: They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible. Ashbery undercuts the certainty immediately—Though this is only one example—as if even that harsh belief is just one of many interchangeable explanations we tell ourselves. The cities emerged until a tower / Controlled the sky, a striking image of ambition turning into domination. Yet the poem then describes a backward-looking aesthetic: they dipped back / Into the past for swans and tapering branches. Swans and branches evoke classical beauty and pastoral calm, but here they are retrieved through artifice, not innocence. The burning—Burning, until all that hate was transformed—makes the transformation feel less like healing than like a chemical process: hatred isn’t resolved; it’s converted into useless love, love drained of practical force, perhaps decorative, perhaps safely impotent. The tension is sharp: the poem wants a world after hate, but it doesn’t trust that what replaces hate is real or ethically clean.

The turn: “Then you are left with an idea of yourself”

The poem’s most important pivot happens at Then you are left. The grand external story collapses into a second-person interior: an idea of yourself rather than a self, and the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon rather than a lived day. That phrase ascending emptiness is both airy and claustrophobic: emptiness rises like a tower, like the earlier skyline, suggesting that the city’s architecture has become the architecture of mood. Even the cause is displaced onto other people: the emptiness must be charged to the embarrassment of others. The speaker treats emotion like an invoice, as if shame can be billed elsewhere. Meanwhile others / Who fly by you like beacons appear briefly—bright, fast, guiding—but they don’t guide the you; they pass by, turning other lives into lights you can’t quite follow. The contradiction deepens: the self feels emptied and isolated, yet it still measures itself against a traffic of shining strangers.

“We have all-inclusive plans for you”: care that sounds like control

After that inward turn, a new voice enters, or an old voice reveals itself: we. The night is a sentinel sets a watchful, almost carceral atmosphere. Then comes the chillingly genial sentence: we have all-inclusive plans for you. It resembles hospitality language—resort-brochure comfort—yet it’s also the language of institutions and soft coercion. The poem lists possible destinations like prescribed therapies: the middle of the desert, a violent sea, or making the closeness of the others be air / To you, something you breathe, something that can also suffocate. The image of being pressed back into a startled dream suggests that even rest or unconsciousness is not a refuge; it can be engineered. Still, Ashbery complicates the threat with a tender simile: As sea-breezes greet a child’s face. The pressure could feel like kindness. The poem refuses to settle whether we are benevolent planners, social expectations, inner compulsions, or some mixture of all three. What’s clear is the tension between the self’s autonomy and an enveloping system that claims to know what will happen next.

Past already present; private project already underway

The speaker undercuts the planners with a blunt fact: But the past is already here. The line lands like an argument-ender. No desert or sea will outrun it. And the you isn’t empty after all; you are nursing some private project. Nursing suggests secrecy, patience, and care—something sustained quietly in the body. This private project stands against the earlier collective plans, and it also revises the earlier creative games that occupied much of your time. Games sound frivolous; a private project sounds consequential. The poem’s emotional weather shifts here: it becomes less about being shaped from the outside and more about stubborn inner continuity. Yet even this is not uncomplicated freedom, because the past being already here implies the project may be fed by old materials—old injuries, old hatreds—just rearranged into new forms.

Happiness by “logic,” not by climate

Near the end, the poem makes a promise and immediately makes it suspect: The worst is not over, yet You will be happy here. The reason given is not comfort, love, or community, but the logic / Of your situation, something no climate can outsmart. Climate is the poem’s way of naming external circumstances—place, mood, atmosphere, even history’s weather. Logic, by contrast, is internal necessity: the shape of the trap, or the shape of the life. The phrase implies a bleak determinism: happiness becomes not an earned joy but a conclusion you will arrive at because the premises force it. And the description of the you as Tender and insouciant by turns captures a personality oscillating between vulnerability and breezy detachment—another contradiction the poem refuses to solve. It suggests a person who can’t stay in one emotional register because neither tenderness nor insouciance alone is survivable.

The final monument: desire that stiffens, disappointment that refracts

The poem ends by returning to building, but now the construction is explicitly yours: You have built a mountain of something. The vagueness of something matters; whatever has been built is enormous yet hard to name—like a life’s work, or a defensive identity, or accumulated feeling. You did it Thoughtfully, pouring all your energy into a single monument, which makes the monument sound both admirable and dangerously singular, as if everything else was sacrificed. Then Ashbery gives it two atmospheres. Its wind is desire, and that desire is oddly domestic and coercive: it is starching a petal. A petal should be soft and alive; starch makes it crisp, preserved, slightly fake. Desire here doesn’t merely animate—it stiffens. And then comes the emotional payoff: Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears. Disappointment is not just sadness; it broke, like light through water or glass, turning into color. The rainbow doesn’t cancel grief; it organizes it into something luminous and visible—beauty as a refraction of pain. The poem’s earlier conversion of hate into useless love returns in a new key: even disappointment can become spectacle, but the spectacle doesn’t prove the wound is gone.

A sharper question the poem won’t let you dodge

If the cities grew from loathing and the self ends by pouring all your energy into one monument, what would it mean to stop building—would that be freedom, or simply another kind of emptiness? The poem’s planners offer deserts and seas, but the poem’s real force is the claim that the past is already here, inside the materials. The question becomes whether any new structure can be more than a renovated version of the old impulse that started it.