The Tomb Of Stuart Merrill - Analysis

Plants Removed: an Elegy That Starts Like Gossip

The poem’s central claim, delivered by sideways implication, is that memory and art are rebuilt the way a conservatory is rebuilt: not in a clean, continuous narrative, but by removals and returns, by taste and embarrassment, by quotations that don’t quite belong yet somehow become the only honest record. It begins with a season-marker that feels objective—the first soir of March—and immediately swerves into absence: They have taken the plants away. That small administrative sentence becomes an emotional weather report. Whatever the poem is mourning (a person, a style, a world), it’s introduced as something that used to be lush, scented, and public, and is now temporarily stripped.

Then the voice plunges into party-detail—Martha Hoople, a card party, petits fours, perfume (Jicky)—as if grief can only be approached through trivia. The joke about the basement that couldn’t / Hold up all that wildness is funny, but it’s also a physical metaphor: the structure underneath cannot bear the weight of the life staged above it.

Perfume, Hydrangea, and the Problem of “Wildness”

The hydrangea described as a big gnossienne (a title that suggests music rather than botany) turns the desired plant into a performance: fragrance, aesthetic reference, social display. But that “wildness” is immediately followed by disappearance—The petits fours have left—as though the poem is showing how quickly the little props of culture vanish. The tone here is bright and arch, yet it keeps bumping into collapse and removal: the party cannot be held up; the sweets have exited; the plants are gone. Even the liveliest surfaces are provisional.

The Major’s Warning: Conservatism Sitting Beside You

The poem’s first hard turn toward ideology arrives like a mock-epic pronouncement: Then up and spake the Major. What he says is chilling precisely because it’s domestic: The new conservatism is / Sitting down beside you. Conservatism isn’t a platform here; it’s a presence, a body next to yours, something that infiltrates intimacy. The bus scene near Place Pereire makes the threat optical and accidental: the speaker catches a lens-cover reflection, and an impersonal voice announces lilacs / Won’t make much difference. Lilacs—traditional tokens of spring and elegy—are declared useless. Beauty doesn’t “fix” what’s happening; even the poem’s own floral resources are demoted.

This is where Ashbery’s comedy starts to feel like anxiety. The poem wavers between a desire for remedies and a suspicion that remedies are silly. The speaker recalls offering a palliative for piles and being refused—an absurd detail that nonetheless sharpens the sting of rejection: the other person wouldn’t try anything else, wouldn’t even admit to trying. It’s a miniature model of larger rigidity: a refusal of change that echoes the new conservatism.

Living “Both Shut Up and Open”: Intimacy as a Conundrum

The poem then states its emotional predicament with unusual directness: Now we live without—then corrects itself—or rather we get along without / Each other. The distinction matters. “Live without” sounds stoic; “get along without” sounds like daily improvisation, a smaller kind of survival. The speaker calls this arrangement a conundrum and adds the bleakest phrase in the piece: We don’t call living. Yet the condition is doubled, not settled: Both shut up and open. The contradiction becomes the poem’s engine. To be “open” is to be available to meaning, to grief, to contact; to be “shut up” is to be sealed off, defensive, hermetic. The poem refuses to choose, because the speaker can’t.

That refusal spills into legal language: Can knowledge ever be harmful? then How about a mandate? and finally throwing myself on the mercy of the court. The mind is trying on frameworks—ethics, politics, law—to contain a private loss. Nothing fits for long, but the very trying suggests desperation: if love and art can’t guarantee mercy, maybe procedure can.

Plants Return—and the Poem Admits It Wants to Be Understood

Against that strain, the plants come back with near-religious staging: They are bringing the plants back / One by one, not simply into a room, but In the interstices of heaven, earth and today. The phrasing turns moving potted greenery into metaphysics. Restoration is possible, but it happens in “interstices”—gaps, seams, in-between zones—rather than in a grand, healed whole. Immediately after, the poem inserts a long reader’s letter praising the poet’s total freedom of expression and imagery and confessing bafflement: my inexperience / holds me back. This is not just a joke about Ashbery’s reputation. It becomes evidence inside the poem that misunderstanding is part of the poem’s social reality: the speaker’s world includes readers who return, magnetized, still puzzled.

Placed here, the letter also reframes the returning plants. What’s coming back “one by one” might be meaning itself—partial, delayed, and dependent on rereading. The poem lets the desire for clarity speak, but only as a quotation, as something slightly external. It’s a way of admitting the need without surrendering to it.

Canons Falling: Culture as Withdrawal Symptom

Then the poem flips the restoration image into its opposite: The canons are falling / One by one. Not “cannons,” but “canons”—the sanctioned works, the approved continuities. Even beloved pieces are included: Pachelbel, Franck’s sonata. The poem imagines a world where the old cultural order drops away piece by piece, and asks, with a mix of dread and provocation: How about a new kind of hermetic conservatism?

This is a sharp paradox. Hermeticism is usually associated with difficulty, privacy, sealed meanings—while conservatism implies preservation of the familiar. The poem suggests a future where what gets preserved is not shared tradition, but sealed-off language; and the result feels bodily, addictive: suffering withdrawal symptoms. Culture becomes a dependency. When the canon falls, you don’t just lose references—you go into withdrawal.

Fragments and the Temple: Watching Meaning Get Assembled

The poem urges action—Let’s get on with it—but is immediately snagged by time: But what about the past. The answer is neither nostalgic nor dismissive: it only builds up out of fragments. That line becomes the governing method of the final section. Each evening, we walk out to see / How they are coming along with the temple. The temple is a counter-image to the fallen canon: a structure being built rather than an authority collapsing. Yet it’s still fragmentary, incremental, dependent on watching One piece being added to another. Meaning, like architecture, is procedural and slow.

The speaker’s relief is telling: At least it isn’t horrible like / Being inside a hospital. The hospital stands for knowledge that is too complete—too intimate, too involuntary. The temple-building is safer because it can be observed from the outside. That’s another version of Both shut up and open: the poem wants contact with what hurts, but only at a survivable distance.

When Meaning “Coagulates,” the Poem Turns to a Sudden Drama

Near the end, the speaker admits to the temptation to omit: one is tempted not to include this page—not include what, exactly? Perhaps the hospital-thought, perhaps the whole messy record. But the poem insists that its meaning is about to coagulate—a word that makes understanding feel like blood thickening in air, not a clean illumination. Right then comes the strangest, most naked scene: “Father!” “Son!” with the father thought lost In the blue and buff planes of the Aegean, now returning Only for a while. After so much chatter, doctrine, and quotation, the poem produces a primal reunion—and immediately limits it.

The final line, We can go inside now, lands like a quiet permission. “Inside” could be the temple, the tomb, the poem itself, or the difficult intimacy the speaker has been circling. The father’s temporary return doesn’t solve anything; it simply grants entry. In a poem where plants are removed and restored, canons fall, and the past builds from fragments, that may be the only mercy available: not permanence, but a brief opening, long enough to step in.