Unctuous Platitudes - Analysis

A poem that talks like a memo while feeling like a haunting

The central trick of Unctuous Platitudes is that it speaks in the voice of reassurance and etiquette while quietly describing a world that doesn’t hold together. The opening line, There is no reason for something to bother you, sounds like customer-service calm—especially with the oddly specific surcharge. But almost immediately the poem slips into the unsettled: city life makes one nonplussed by inhabitants, and the weather itself has grown gray with age, as if the atmosphere is tired. The tone becomes a blend of managerial composure and low-grade dread: the poem keeps telling you everything is fine while showing you signs that it isn’t.

The ordinary city, lightly populated by poltergeists

A key tension runs between banal civic language and supernatural intrusion. The poem treats Poltergeists as just another kind of worker—go about their business—and their demands are bureaucratic rather than demonic: a sweeping revision. That phrase could describe editing a document, changing policy, or rewriting one’s life. Even the air is described with an anxious literalism: The breath of the air / Is invisible. Of course it is—yet the poem insists on pointing it out, as if reality needs to be re-proven line by line.

Waiting at the edges: hope that produces an answer and then withdraws it

The scene widens from the city to the margins of rural space: edges of fields where people stand hoping that out of nothing / Something will come. The poem grants the wish—and it does—but immediately undercuts it with but what? That tiny question is the poem’s emotional center: arrival happens, but meaning doesn’t. The result is a kind of disappointed miracle, the feeling of being visited by something that refuses to identify itself.

Dirty light: embers of rain against a darkness with no source

Ashbery’s images here are deliberately mismatched: Embers / Of the rain is an impossible combination—fire remnants attached to water—yet it captures a sensation of weak, leftover warmth trying to press down on something vile. The phrase shitty darkness is startlingly blunt amid the poem’s smooth, official manner. And that darkness issues / From nowhere, which is another contradiction: something pours forth, but from no place you can point to. The poem keeps staging causes without origins, effects without explanations—a haunting that behaves like weather, and weather that behaves like aging.

Pronouns slip: A man in her room, you say

Midway through, the poem jolts into a mini-drama: A man in her room. It arrives as reported speech—you say—which makes it feel like gossip, accusation, or a sudden confession. Yet the poem doesn’t follow the story; it drifts into praise: I like the really wonderful way you express things. The compliment sounds generous, but it also feels like deflection, even manipulation—the title’s unctuous flattery made explicit. The poem’s mind seems to protect itself by converting a potentially raw fact (a man, a room, a her) into commentary on how it was said.

The compliment that erases what it admires

The poem then tries to name a mood—a particular mental climate—and offers a color: gray-violet, with a thin white irregular line descending at the sides. It resembles a remembered painting, a bordered screen, or even a room framed by curtains; whatever it is, it’s more controllable than the earlier darkness. Yet the poem admits that these ways of emphasizing can also unsay things—specifically, an infinite number of pauses in the ceramic day. That phrase makes time feel glazed over, hardened into a decorative surface. The tension is sharp: language is praised for expression, then revealed as a tool that can cancel silence, erase hesitation, and smooth over what should have remained difficult.

A sharp question inside the poem’s logic

If poltergeists demand a sweeping revision, is the revision meant to fix the world—or to rewrite away the evidence that anything happened? When the speaker admires the way you express things, it sounds like kindness, but it may also be a method of making the disturbing content socially presentable, turning a man in her room into mere phrasing.

Station invitations: the final social gesture that feels like a trap

The ending tightens the poem’s social anxiety into a ritual: Every invitation / To every stranger is met at the station. A station is a place of arrival and departure, meetings and missed connections—exactly the poem’s problem with Something that comes but won’t clarify what it is. The line sounds hospitable on the surface—inviting strangers—yet its totalizing every makes it feel compulsive, even fated. The poem closes not with resolution but with an image of endless encounters: a world where you keep greeting what comes to you, while the deeper darkness continues to issue / From nowhere, politely unaccounted for.