Thoughts Of A Young Girl - Analysis

A condolence letter that refuses to sound like one

The poem’s central move is to stage grief as a kind of comic performance, as if direct sorrow would be a betrayal of the relationship it’s mourning. The opening is a letter written from the tower, immediately both fairy-tale and institutional, and its writer insists I’m not mad even as the explanation veers into impossible physics: cake of soap made of the air, a bathtub of the world. Ashbery makes bereavement talk like a fable that keeps slipping out of the mourner’s control. The absurdity isn’t there to cancel feeling; it’s there because feeling can’t quite be said straight.

The Dwarf’s death: a pratfall that turns fatal

Inside the letter, dying is narrated as a slapstick accident—I only slipped—but it ends with drowned, a blunt word that collapses the whimsy. The image of the world as a bathtub makes death look both intimate and embarrassingly domestic: not a battlefield, not a grand tragedy, but something you could do by accident. That’s why the speaker’s insistence on sanity matters: the language is trying to keep death from becoming melodrama, even as it admits how arbitrary it was.

A strange compliment: You were too good to mourn

The line You were too good to cry much over me is tender and barbed at once. It flatters the addressee’s strength while also confessing a fear of being forgettable. Then comes the poem’s most decisive (and least believable) release: now I let you go. The signature, Signed, The Dwarf, turns the speaker into a character—someone self-miniaturized, already labeling himself as lesser, possibly to make his disappearance easier to accept. The tension is sharp: he claims to be relinquishing her, but the very act of writing is a last attempt to stay in her world.

The turn: from private letter to public, timeless tableau

After the quotation ends, the poem steps sideways into a different voice and scene: I passed by in the late in the afternoon, and the girl’s smile still played on her lips as it has for centuries. That time-slip is the hinge of the poem. What felt like a single death suddenly looks like a ritual repeating across eras, as if the girl is less a person than an emblem—an eternal figure of charm who outlasts every speaker. The mood shifts from frantic, defensive confession to a hushed awe that borders on worship.

Princess and employee: devotion with a power imbalance

The second speaker piles up titles—my daughter, my sweetheart, princess—and then quietly reveals a social fact that complicates all that intimacy: she is the daughter of my late employer. The affection is real, but it’s also spoken from below, from someone whose access depends on another household’s hierarchy. That helps explain the earlier self-naming as The Dwarf: not only small in stature or spirit, but socially diminished. Even the blessing—May you not be long—carries a double edge, sounding like a wish for her swift arrival and, more darkly, a wish to hurry her toward whatever reunion the dead can imagine.

If she has smiled for centuries, what becomes of the mourner?

The poem’s hardest implication is that the girl’s delightfulness is a kind of immortality that erases the people who adore her. If her smile lasts for centuries, then the Dwarf’s drowning and the passerby’s yearning are brief, replaceable episodes. The poem doesn’t resolve whether this timelessness is comforting (she endures) or cruel (she does not have to change, or grieve, or remember). In that unresolved space, Ashbery lets devotion keep talking even after it claims to have let go.