John Ashbery's revision of the post-romantic quest: meaning, evasion, and allusion in "Grand Galop."

The barking dog at the beginning of the next section marks the end of this meditation, as the balloon-popping signifies a similar juncture in the argument of "Self-Portrait." But the speaker immediately begins to recapitulate the argument of the previous two sections; once again the words which were branching from the things they signify are pictured as having "a sort of bloom on them," which is however immediately qualified by their evanescence and imprecision as signifiers: they "were weightless, carrying past what was being said" (15). The focus shifts from language to things outside the house, the coolness of the evening and the neighbors "parading with their pets / Past lawns and vacant lots, as though these too were somehow imponderables" (15). The imponderables are the things the paths of our minds unconsciously avoid engaging, just as sidewalks exist to keep us from blazing our own trail through the neighbor's yard.

This frustration with the limitations of thought qualifies the extent to which we may agree with David Lehman that "Ashbery does not reconcile contradictions; rather he presents them in a state of more-or-less peaceful coexistence" (102) because this supposed coexistence is an uneasy one, always threatening to deliquesce under the solvents of the critical mind. It would be better to describe Ashbery's method here as trying out one notion or another, not ever achieving a final synthesis but never abandoning the project.

This channeling of thought finds its referent in the social world, where individuals isolate themselves from each other with "the decency of one's private life / Shut up behind doors, which is nobody's business" (Self-Portrait 15). One finds here an exact inversion of Whitman's quest, mad for contact with his fellows, in Ashbery's matter-of-fact statement of separation. As the ennui noted in the first section starts to recur "With the sky now a bit impatient for today to be over / Like a bored salesgirl shifting from foot to stockinged foot," the speaker's own impatience with the banal details of life, "khaki undershorts hung out on lines," boils over: "are we never to make a statement?" (16). The agitation evident in the tone here continues; the speaker's urge to make a statement finds him blurting out, "It's getting out of hand .... / It's a bit mad" (16).

This sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of people or of things occurs frequently in Ashbery, as for example in "The New Spirit," where the poet is

newly conscious of the multitudes that swarm past one in the street; there is something of death here too in the way they plunge past toward some unknown destination, leaving one a little shaken up on the edge of the sidewalk. Who are all these people? What does it mean that there are so many? ... One stays like this on the edge of the throng trying to think these things out. It may become necessary to shut them all out, with the light of the sun and the other planets ....

Similarly, in "Grand Galop" the profusion of quotidian details, of people, ideas, information, dogs, buildings, "with the arrival and departure / Of each new one overlapping so intensely in the semi-darkness ... that getting to know each just for a fleeting second / Must be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole" (16) frustrates the meditative mind. One thinks of Wallace Stevens's "pensive man" ending up having to content himself with broad concepts lacking in details "Like some pocket history of the world, so general / As to constitute a sob or wail unrelated / To any attempt at definition" (16). An interpretation or a history that is too general will not help us find meaning, just as the large abstractions were much less help than a mere "feature / Of some obsolete style" (15).