The Tower Of London - Analysis

A tour that keeps correcting itself

The poem’s central move is to treat history as something we only ever reach through mishandled versions of it: the speaker starts with a confident correction—isn’t really a tower—and then proceeds to narrate the Tower of London almost entirely through a 1930s film, casting choices, and half-remembered plot points. What begins as architectural clarity becomes an argument about how memory and culture replace the past with a set of interchangeable images. The Tower becomes less a place than a mental screen where details keep getting swapped in and out.

When “facts” arrive as casting decisions

Ashbery keeps sliding from the historical to the cinematic as if they were the same category. Richard III is described through the actors who played him: Boris Karloff as Mord the executioner, Basil Rathbone as Richard, Ian Hunter as Edward. Even bodily “truth” gets negotiated through performance: the poem notes Richard had no hump but the actor had a club foot, as though the film must supply deformity somewhere to satisfy the story’s expectation of villainy. That line exposes a grim little logic: we don’t just remember history inaccurately; we remember it in the shape our narratives demand.

Atrocity told in an offhand voice

The tone is deliberately chatty, almost conversational—That’s the way I remember it, Wait, I believe—and that casualness rubs harshly against the content: drowning the Duke of Clarence in a tub of malmsey, murdering the princes in the Tower, two little boys. The key tension is moral: the poem names the killings plainly—They didn’t deserve to be killed—yet the surrounding delivery keeps drifting back to trivia and corrections, as if the mind can only approach horror by buffering it with show-business detail. The result isn’t indifference so much as a portrait of how people actually talk when the past is both fascinating and unbearable: they toggle between outrage and distraction.

Confusion as a kind of honesty

The speaker’s constant self-editing—who was whose wife, whether the boys were Henry VI’s sons or maybe someone else’s, whether the escape happened from the Tower, or the Castle—does more than add humor. It stages a real embarrassment: the poem can’t keep its genealogies straight, but it can keep the violence straight. Names blur; the fact of elimination doesn’t. Richard is determined to kill all who stood in his way, and the repetition of that motive becomes more stable than any particular detail. In that sense, the poem suggests that what survives cultural transmission is often not accurate knowledge but a simplified engine—ambition, obstruction, removal—that keeps reappearing in different costumes.

Who gets to be “busy,” who gets to be dead

One of the poem’s sharpest, darkest jokes is the line A busy man Mord. It’s funny in the way office language is funny when applied to torture, and it forces a reckoning: power turns murder into a job description. The boss is demanding, the employee is industrious, and the dead are framed as obstacles—Clarence had stood in his way, the princes are simply in the Tower. The poem keeps returning to the phrase stood in his way, making the victims feel like furniture in a corridor. That’s the contradiction the poem won’t resolve: the speaker insists the boys hadn’t done anything, yet the story-machine treats innocence as irrelevant once the category in the way has been assigned.

A final “fitting end” that doesn’t fit

The closing feels like a moral wrap-up—Mord is thrown off a cliff, a fitting end to a miserable career—but it also exposes how inadequate “fitting ends” are. After Richard killed just about everybody, the poem’s neat punishment lands on the functionary, not the king, and it arrives in the same breezy tone as the earlier casting notes. That mismatch leaves a lingering unease: if our strongest sense of the Tower comes from a movie and our judgments come packaged as plot closure, then even our desire for justice is partly secondhand, shaped by the same imperfect remembering that kept mixing up brides, brothers, and sons.