Two Scenes - Analysis

A public we trying to catch itself in the act

In Two Scenes, Ashbery stages a kind of communal self-portrait that keeps slipping out of focus: the poem wants to say we see us clearly, yet every claim of clarity arrives wrapped in noise, fumes, and riddling remarks. The first scene begins with confidence—We see us as we truly behave—but the evidence it offers is oddly indirect: distinctive offering, a train that comes bearing joy, sparks that illuminate the table. It’s as if the group can only recognize itself by what passes through it, briefly lighting it up, rather than by any stable inner truth.

The train’s joy and the problem of illumination

Scene I has the warm, slightly ceremonial feeling of an arrival. The train brings joy, and its sparks illuminate the table—a domestic image, but lit by industrial friction. That detail matters: the light isn’t steady, it’s struck. The poem’s confidence in vision is therefore dependent on accidents and motion. Even the line From every corner suggests a room where attention can’t settle; everything is coming in at once. And when the poem says Destiny guides the water-pilot, it doubles down—and it is destiny—as if repetition could pin meaning in place. But the insistence feels anxious, like an attempt to silence doubt by declaring authority.

Good weather, too much news, and a strange compliment

The tone in the first scene blends ease with overload. We get a postcard sentence—The day was warm and pleasant—yet just before it, the group has endured so much news, such noise. That pairing makes the pleasantness feel earned, or perhaps merely cosmetic: weather can be calm while the mind remains loud. The quoted address—We see you in your hair—is intimate but also peculiar, as though the speaker can only locate the person in surface details. The next line, Air resting around mountain tips, expands that intimacy into landscape; it’s beautiful, but it also displaces the human into scenery. Seeing becomes a kind of aestheticizing: the person is perceived as a texture (hair), then as a horizon-line.

Scene II: general honesty under rain, fumes, and poverty

The second scene changes the atmosphere decisively. Instead of sparks and warm air, A fine rain anoints the canal machinery. The verb anoints makes the industrial sacred for a moment, but the sanctification is immediately undermined by talk of fumes that are dry as poverty. The poem proposes a day of general honesty, even Without example in history—a huge claim—yet it’s lodged in a setting of machinery, paint cans, and exhaust. Honesty here isn’t pure confession; it’s a kind of bleak visibility, like rain making surfaces show what they are, while the air remains contaminated and authority remains scattered: the fumes are not of a singular authority.

The old man, the cadets, and the schedule you can’t quite find

The human figures in Scene II arrive as fragments of a social order. Terrific units are on an old man—a phrase that could mean pressure, uniforms, measurements, or simply the weight of systems on a body. He stands in the blue shadow of paint cans, surrounded by the stuff of maintenance and covering-over, as if the world is always repainting itself rather than revealing itself. Then laughing cadets announce, Everything has a schedule, adding a brittle cheerfulness. Their punchline—if you can find out—turns order into a scavenger hunt. The poem’s second honesty is not clarity; it’s the admission that the plan exists somewhere, but not where ordinary people can reach it.

A tension the poem refuses to solve: destiny versus knowability

Put together, the two scenes argue with each other about what governs a shared life. Scene I declares Destiny twice, as if fate is readable; Scene II replaces fate with procedure and bureaucracy, a schedule that may be real but remains hidden. The contradiction is sharp: are we guided, or merely managed? Even the poem’s opening confidence—We see us—is challenged by the later world of fumes and obscured instructions. Ashbery lets both stand, creating a portrait of a community that alternates between moments of radiant arrival and a more typical condition: damp machinery, compromised air, and people laughing because they don’t know what else to do.