As Umbrellas Follow Rain - Analysis

Gossip, regret, and the way the poem starts midstream

The poem’s central move is to make lived time feel like a chain of overheard remarks, public scenes, and half-remembered crises, so that history itself becomes something you drift through rather than master. It begins with a shrugging regret—Too bad he never tried it——and immediately turns that regret into social consequence: She saw us make eye contact. The speaker’s world is one where meaning is manufactured by small observations and quickly cancelled by the next moment. Even the grammar breaks open—when I / am—as if the self can’t stay intact long enough to complete a thought. From the start, the tone is casually comic but also brittle: there’s a sense that whatever mattered has already slipped past (it’d / already be too late), and the poem will keep reenacting that lateness.

Animals out of season: swans swarming, spring going under

Early on, Ashbery gives a deceptively clear emblem for the poem’s unease: Some of the swans are swarming. Swans aren’t supposed to swarm; they’re supposed to glide. Likewise, The spring has gone under turns a season into something that can drown. The line it wasn’t / supposed to be like this is one of the poem’s plainest admissions of disappointment, and it casts a long shadow: the later leaps and jokes feel like ways of not looking straight at that wrongness for too long. Right after, the poem asks Who are they? Who is he?—a sudden existential question that fits the animal scene. It’s not only nature that has slipped its category; identity has too. People watch, cringe, and can’t name what’s happening, as if recognition itself has become unreliable.

From fog bombs to burned libraries: the “we” that can’t stay innocent

The poem’s group voice—we—keeps surfacing as if to claim solidarity, but it’s a slippery solidarity, capable of pettiness and catastrophe in the same breath. One moment it’s sitcom-flat—We decided to fly Chinese.—and the next it’s security-state oddness: they bend the security rules, another fog bomb. Then the scale balloons into myth and atrocity: We slew many giants, burned many libraries. The tonal jump is funny in its audacity, but it’s also accusatory: the same voice that complains about bad food can casually confess to cultural destruction. That contradiction is one of the poem’s engines. The speaker wants the looseness of anecdote, yet history keeps intruding, turning the chatty “we” into a collective that can’t fully plead innocence.

The bridge that makes you “wiser,” and the shore that arrives sideways

Midway, the poem stages a brief attempt at meaning-making: Out of that longing we built a paean. A paean is praise, a formal answer to longing; and the poem even claims an effect: everyone who crosses this bridge is wiser. But Ashbery immediately undercuts the grandeur with weirdly modest engineering: It doesn’t tilt much. Wisdom here is not a revelation; it’s a slightly steadier crossing. Even the shore behaves wrong: arriving laterally. The image suggests a life where outcomes don’t come head-on; they slide in from the side while you’re looking elsewhere. That sideways arrival also fits the poem’s method: it advances by interruption—cafés, cops, passports, geese—so that whatever “lesson” exists can only be felt obliquely, as a changed angle rather than a stated moral.

Domestic bleakness as afterimage of catastrophe

The poem’s strangest tenderness arrives in the kitchen, where the bleakness is rendered through a heap of oddly specific objects: The couple sat in the dish drainer, two chinchillas near the stove, a beaker / of mulled claret, and shaving soap that smells like smoke, almost. These details don’t “solve” anything; they sit there like evidence. The dish drainer is where you put things to dry, not where a couple belongs—so the image makes people into washed utensils, set aside and draining. Yet the sensory richness (claret, soap, smoke) hints at comfort still trying to exist. The tension here is sharp: the poem keeps toggling between the desire for newness, for a renewing—picnics in the individual cells—and the fact that renewal is being imagined inside confinement. Even the dream of becoming a viola, an instrument of care, sounds like a wish to be useful and soothing in a world that won’t settle down enough to be soothed.

Time speeds up: wars, depressions, lemonade, and the king stolen by rain

Near the end, time suddenly stretches into official history: two world wars and a major depression. That blunt summary makes the earlier scenes of cops, passports, and security rules feel less random; they’re aftershocks of a century that trained people to live under pressure. But the poem refuses the dignity of “after all we endured.” Instead it asks a devastating, tired question: who had the get up and go? Then it snaps into a child’s-party brightness—painted paper hats, bowlfuls of lemonade, the stand that sold out—as if cheerfulness can be produced by commerce and costume. The ending keeps the poem’s key contradiction intact: We have to hurry in now, / hurry away, it’s the same thing. Motion no longer guarantees direction; escape and arrival blur. And then the final line lands like a nursery-rhyme coup: rain came and stole the king. It’s funny, eerie, and fatalistic. Rain is ordinary, democratic weather—yet here it topples sovereignty. The title’s suggestion—umbrellas dutifully following rain—becomes a portrait of human response: we don’t prevent the loss; we trail it, trying to stay dry while something essential is taken.

One hard question the poem won’t answer

If everyone who crosses this bridge is wiser, what kind of wisdom is it—wisdom that builds songs of praise out of longing, or wisdom that learns to accept that the shore is arriving laterally and you won’t meet your life head-on? The poem seems to suggest a third option: a wisdom made of scraps—gossip, geese, passports, chinchillas—because scraps are what remain when spring has gone under and even the king can be stolen by weather.