John Ashbery

This Room

memory free verse haunting dreamlike

This Room - meaning Summary

A Dreamlike Domestic Memory

The poem presents a speaker entering a room that already feels like a dream-version of itself, where memories, identity, and objects blur. Brief domestic details—furniture, an oval portrait, daily macaroni and an occasional quail—anchor oddly specific but unreliable recollections. The voice both confesses and questions why these things are told to an absent addressee, producing intimacy mixed with estrangement. The result is a compact reflection on memory's instability and the oddity of familiar places.

Read Complete Analyses

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

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