The Double Dream of Spring

Poems

John Ashbery

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780912946276
• eBook ISBN: 9781480459182
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

One of Ashbery's most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era's most revolutionary poets
The Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery's National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice—reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken—that just a few years later would carry Ashbery's Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century's most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including "Soonest Mended," "Decoy," "Sunrise in Suburbia," "Evening in the Country," the achingly beautiful long poem "Fragment," and Ashbery's so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape."
 
The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery's reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it.
 

Fragment

The last block is closed in April. You

See the intrusions clouding over her face

As in the memory given you of older

Permissiveness which dies in the

Falling back toward recondite ends,

The sympathy of yellow flowers.

Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day

The saw-toothed flames and point of other

Space not given, and yet not withdrawn

And never yet imagined: a moment’s commandment.

These last weeks teasing into providential

Reality: that your face, the only real beginning,

Beyond the gray of overcoat, that this first

Salutation plummet also to the end of friendship

With self alone. And in doing so open out

New passages of being among the correctness

Of familiar patterns. The stance to you

Is a fiction, to me a whole. I find

New options, white feathers, in a word what

You draw in around you to the protecting bone.

This page only is the end of nothing

To the top of that other. The purity

Of how hard it is to choose between others where

The event takes place and the outside setting.

Day covers all this with leaves, with laughter and tears.

But at night other sounds are heard

Propositions hitherto omitted in the heat

Of smoke. You can look at it all

Inside out for the emblem to become the statue

Of discipline that rode in out of the past.

Not forgetting either the chance that you

Might want to revise this version of what is

The only real one, it might be that

No real relation exists between my wish for you

To return and the movements of your arms and legs.

But my inability to accept this fact

Annihilates it. Thus

My power over you is absolute.

You exist only in me and on account of me

And my features reflect this proved compactness.

That coming together of masses coincides

With that stable emptiness, detaining

Where this energy, not yet or only partially

Distributed to the imagination creates

A claim to the sides of early autumn.

Suffocating, with remorse, and winking with it

To tablelands of disadumbrated feeling

Treetops whose mysterious hegemony concerns

Merely, by opening around factors of accident

So as to install miscellaneous control.

The part in which you read about yourself

Grew out of this. Your interpretation is

Extremely bitter and can serve no profitable end

Except continual development. Best to break off

All further choice. In

This way new symptoms of interest having a

Common source could produce their own ingenious

Way of watering into the past with its religious

Messages and burials. Out of this cold collapse

A warm and near unpolished entity could begin.

Although beyond more reacting

To this cut-and-dried symposium way of seeing things

To outflank next mediocre condition

Of storms. The hollow thus produced

A kind of cave of the winds; distribution center

Of subordinate notions to which the stag

Returns to die: the suppressed lovers.

Then ghosts of the streets

Crowding, propagating the feeling into furious

Waves from the perfunctory and debilitated sunset.

Yet no one has time for its preoccupation.

Our daily imaginings are swiftly tilted down to

Death in its various forms. We cannot keep the peace

At home, and at the same time be winning wars abroad.

And the great flower of what we have been twists

On its stem of earth, for not being

What we are to become, fated to live in

Intimidated solitude and isolation. No brother

Bearing the notion of responsibility of self

To the surrounding neighborhood lost out of being.

Slowly as from the center of some diamond

You begin to take in the world as it moves

In toward you, part of its own burden of thought, rather

Idle musing, afternoons listing toward some sullen

Unexpected end. Seen from inside all is

Abruptness. As though to get out your eye

Sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no

Longer visible, they breathe in multicolored

Parentheses, the way love in short periods

Puts everything out of focus, co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• The Task
• Spring Day
• Plainness in Diversity
• Soonest Mended
• Summer
• It Was Raining in the Capital
• Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
• Song
• Decoy
• Evening in the Country
• For John Clare
• French Poems
• The Double Dream of Spring
• Rural Objects
• Years of Indiscretion
• Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
• Sunrise in Suburbia
• Definition of Blue
• Parergon
• The Hod Carrier
• An Outing
• Some Words
• Young Man with Letter
• Clouds
• The Bungalows
• The Chateau Hardware
• Sortes Vergilianae
• Fragment
• About the Author
• Copyright