Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Ashbery's "Meaningful Love" paints a picture of an environment marked by an unsettling blend of ordinary life, anxiety, and fleeting joy. The opening lines, "What the bad news was / became apparent too late / for us to do anything good about it," immediately ground the poem in an atmosphere of regret and inevitability. It's a reminder that realization often follows too late on the heels of action, leaving one powerless and mired in a present that's no longer modifiable.

The poem traverses a multitude of landscapes, each fraught with its own anxieties and intricacies. "In the medium-size city of my awareness / voles are building colossi," the narrator says, imbuing the ordinary with grandeur, yet maintaining an air of despondency. Voles, small and insignificant creatures, are building something immense; even within the confines of "medium-sized" awareness, something colossal is emerging, but its nature remains undefined and unknowable.

The mention of "morose gardens" and "anthills that looked like they belonged there" injects the poem with an air of domestic but tarnished idyll. The statement "The sausages were undercooked, / the wine too cold, the bread molten" serves as a concrete manifestation of life's imperfect moments. These are not epic tragedies, but small disruptions that disturb the harmony we often crave, implying that satisfaction is elusive even in small, everyday experiences.

While the narrator goes on a quest-pawning an old car, buying a ticket to the funhouse-he ends up "back here at six o'clock, / pondering 'possible side effects.'" The venture outward does not result in a significant transformation but brings him back to the starting point, further emphasizing the cyclical and often unsatisfying nature of seeking meaning or change. It's as though life's uncertainties and limitations cannot be easily escaped, not through physical journeys or changes in circumstance.

The poem concludes with a complex view of love. "There was no harm in loving then, / no certain good either." Love, like all the landscapes and experiences described in the poem, is neither entirely beneficial nor wholly damaging; it's another intricate part of life's puzzle. In saying "But love was loving servants / or bosses," the narrator recognizes the inherent power dynamics at play in most human interactions. Love doesn't offer a "straight road" but adds its own shades to the "penciled losses" around the door, to the complexities and challenges of existence.

The closing lines-"Twenty years to fix it. / Asters bloom one way or another"-resonate with a quiet acceptance. Time moves on, things may or may not get fixed, but life-in all its flawed beauty-persists. Asters will bloom regardless of our personal tumults, underscoring the insignificance of our worries in the grand scheme of things. Ashbery's poem serves as an intricate tapestry of life's uncertainties, its small and large disappointments, but also its enduring, if complicated, beauty.

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