The Double Dream of Spring

by John Ashbery

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

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

95 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Formal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.

Reviews

[Laurence Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most obscure poetry every to be penned. But some of the best! Just don't be surprised if you can't understand a poem on your fifth, tenth, or fiftieth try. It's normal.

[Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nunca entendí nada. Tiene imágenes bien fuertes. Apocalíptico.

[Christian Caryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nailing down consciousness is a bit like trying to catch a fish in a stream with your bare hands. Few writers succeed in rendering the effort as well as Ashbery.

[Ioan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal
Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.
But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning
There can be no further discussion."

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like "some trees" this collection of 28 poems is uneven with a handful being really good and the others not so much. Highlights ~ "soonest mended" "summer" "song" "the double dream of spring" "rural objects" "years of indiscretion" "some words" and "clouds".

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps Ashbery worked to make his poetry opaque to criticism, but that very opacity had just the opposite effect, where long poems like "The Fragment" have since generated thousands of pages of theories on form, meaning, and intent by a veritable battalion of esteemed academics.

Despite these reams of textual interrogation, I find the level of abstraction (if not experimentation) on the page to wash away meaning and enjoyment along with perspective and context. I feel as if Ashbery is playing a game with the reader, and by the end of this volume (which isn't devoid of interest, especially to see the prismatic way that his readings/translations enter into dialogue with his own work), I'm ready to concede defeat.

[Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Condensed depths of days. Spurts on interior supreme !

The final poem FRAGMENTS held a density I’ve never yet encountered. Re reading the re read until the surface is breached then reading again and again and again till the veil of narrative is laid out above the weight of moments and allusion.undeniable beauty in description extending everything to the furthest reaches of what they might just hold within and the fleeting feelings of what remains at the end of a day.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Another feeble, wonderful creature is making the rounds
again,
In this phraseology we become, as clouds like leaves
Fashion the internal structure of a season
From water into ice. Such an abstract can be
Dazed waking of the words with no memory of what
happened before,
Waiting for the second click.

[Daanish Shabbir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soonest Mended!

Now that i have become a Jungian, I'm more interested in what Ashbery is doing

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

...This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
Now there is no question even of that, but only
Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,
With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across
The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away
And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash
Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:
This is what you wanted to hear, so why
Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers
It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor...

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is helpful to view the painting by Giorgio de Chirico from which this volume gets its title to get into Ashbery’s detached and distant voice. Quite frankly I struggled to grasp his intellectual refraction of the seasons of a life, and, if I comprehend correctly, of a cultural tedium which could be from any time in the history of humanity, but seems pointed to the dysfunctional mires of the 1960s when we began to perceive “mass practices have sought to submerge the personality / By ignoring it,” aptly addressed in perhaps my favorite of this volume, “Definition in Blue.” Some other phrasings that catch at my fancy are “each day digging the grave of tomorrow” in “Clouds,” and “Thus your only world is an inside one / Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena” in “Fragment.” If I can sense any of Ashbery’s perceptions correctly, it is that we pass through life much as clouds do.

[Nate Niehaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t get it

[Kokelector · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una amiga de clubes de lectura, una vez contó que los libros le gustaban de acuerdo al estado de ánimo con el que los leía; si le tocaban alguna fibra o podía sentirse parte de su vida esa lectura. Y la poesía pareciese ser el mejor acercamiento a esa definición; Ashbery lo he leído en un momento en la que la inseguridad de todo, es el tónico diario. Son poemas breves, otros largos, pero que no tienen ningún sentido entre sí al parecer, que su único conector es la pluma del autor, pero que finalmente van debelando que los pensamientos que aquí se versan son como ocurren a diario, sin conexiones aparentes pero que son parte de una sola vida. Poemas que tratan sobre el olvido, otros sobre la magnitud de un atardecer, como la primavera a veces llega en los peores momentos e incluso la adivinación mediante escoger un verso de Virgilio... y así, la miscelaniedad de la vida misma. Es una lectura que permite ir ordenando esos pensamiento por medio de la melodía de sus versos.

(...) “Pero todo lo bueno se acaba, de modo que uno debe/adentrarse.../en el espacio dejado por sus propias conclusiones. ¿Es eso/envejecer?” “Les decía Hola a los otros niños y ellos le contestaban Hola. Qué estupenda pandilla.” “serás el pastor cuyo pero se ha escapado/sabrás menos de dónde proviene tu desventura/que lo que sabes del momento exacto en que tu/aburrimiento brotó por vez primera.” “Pero, ¿por qué tiene el presente que parecer tan/particularmente urgente? “porque detenerse aún significa la muerte, y la vida/continúa/continúa su camino hacia la muerte. Pero a veces la vida/también consiste en detenerse.” (...)

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ashbery is among America's greatest poets. His work doesn't always hit but when it does it hits hard. Here are some powerful passages, first from "The Task":

I plan to stay here a little while
For these are moments only, moments of insight,
And there are reaches to be attained,
A last level of anxiety that melts
In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim's feet.

This, from "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox":

My youth was spent, underneath the trees
I always moved around with perfect ease
I voyaged to Paris at the age of ten
And met many prominent literary men
Gazing at the alps was quite a sight
I felt the tears flow forth with all their might
A climb to the Acropolis meant a lot to me
I had read the Greek philosophers you see
In the Colosseum I thought my heart would burst
Thinking of all the victims who had been there first
On Mount Aearat's side I began to grow
Remembering the Flood there, so long ago
On the banks of the Ganges I stood in mud
And watched the water light up like blood
The Great Wall of China is really a thrill
It cleaves through the air like a silver pill
It was built by the hand of man for good or ill
Showing what he can do when decides not to kill
But of all the sights that were seen by me
In the East or West, on land or sea,
The best was the place that is called H-O-M-E.

If either of these passages work for you, you'll probably like this volume of poetry.

[Abe Something]

Who am I put stars on such a work?
Alternates between masochistic and sublime moods. I was driven to the brink several times but the moment before I finally felt too antagonized by Ashbery to keep going I’d hit a line like:

“So we might pass over this to the real
Subject of our concern, and that is
Have you begun to be in the context you feel
Now that the danger has been removed?”
(from Evening in the Country)


…and I’d keep going.

I realized at some point that approaching these poems as poems wasn’t working for me, but that illustrating each poem as a painting in my mind helped me to see… something. There are simply so many ideas, images, and intellectual cul-de-sacs at play in any given poem that to expect to follow a straight line through any of them feels like a fools errand. Pinning pictures of ideas in the landscape of my mind gave me a sense of satisfaction I had lacked until devising this approach.

Anyways, this work felt beyond me when I tackled it 20 years ago and it still feels like it got the best of me all this time later.

Here’s another moment that stopped me in the tracks.

“But the others—and they in some way must know too—it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, easy of the Sun and west of the moon.”

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Articulating thoughts is kinda hard, but five stars fo sho. Instead, I'll just leave an excerpt from his "French Poems" featured in this work:

Pt 4 of French Poems

“Simple, the trees placed on the landscape
Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.
The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,
Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene
For our position alone.

Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things
One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.
For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.
This number having lost its describable fineness,
Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.

Everything is landscape;
Perspectives of cliffs beaten by innumerable waves,
More wheat fields than you can count, forests
With disappearing paths, stone towers
And finally and above all the great urban centers, with
Their office buildings and populations, at the center of which
We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants
So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”

[scrapespaghetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Bungalows
...
You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,
What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal
Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.
But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning
There can be no further discussion.
And the river pursues its lonely course
With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape
For green brings unhappiness—le vert porte malheur.
“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain
Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”
...
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very challenging stuff, and I was impressed by the fact that the poet did not have to resort to verbal pyrotechnics such as coining neologisms or invoking obscure vocabulary in order to create an atmosphere wherein the reader thinks a clear sense lay just around the next comma, or in the next line, only to find that, no, we are now off somewhere else. For those who like their poetry to have a message or a clear meaning, this will be an endlessly frustrating read. For those who enjoy the music of language and read poetry as a sort of Zen koan for the mind (i.e., something designed to frustrate attempts to fix meaning and thereby to liberate from conventional or habitual patterns of thought), this is a winner.

[Humphrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my favorite Ashbery collection. It certainly feels the most consistently enthralling, and for chronological readers it has the advantage of being, in my opinion, his first fully realized effort. "Soonest Mended" and "Summer" are absolutely excellent; I also really enjoyed "The Task," "Evening in the Country," "The Bungalows," and "Sortes Vergilianae," though there are many others that could be considered for the list ("Parergon," "Clouds"?). I'm not so sure about Ashbery's long poems, here "Fragment": sheer duration in his style stretches past any possibility of thematic coherence. In some respects this is interesting, and it calls to mind continuities with other New York School poets even more so, but to me something of the polished, delineated object is lost.

[Santiago Mellet Iglesias]

No sé si es el más accesible de Ashbery de los que he leído o si tan sólo me voy acostumbrando a su estilo; puede que ambas cosas, me pareció menos difuso que the tennis court oath y más conciso que some trees, se nota más hilo en los poemas sin dejar de ser acefalamente ashberiano. Bastante melancólico, aún para Ashbery. Lo amé.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I plan to stay here a little while
For these are moments only, moments of insight,
And there are reaches to be attained,
A last level of anxiety that melts
In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Ashberry is a verse werido and obscure as hell, but he is also glowing, brilliant, and slightly sweet.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Soonest Mended” and “Evening in the Country” are so good.

[ExeDavid · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

[José Robles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta guapo.

[c · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky."—For John Clare

French Poems is awesome.

"Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox" is a fucking mess. Ashbury can call it a fugue if he wants.

I skimmed about half of the last half; a lot of it devolves into a lot of grey, abstract, subjectless lines that seemed vaguely to be about aging. Not my favorite.

[Jason Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of Ashbery's most mystical, beautiful poetry is in this volume. I particularly love "Sunrise in Suburbia".

"Face to kiss and the wonderful hair curling down/Into margins that care and are swept up again like branches/Into actual closeness/And the little things that lighten the day/The kindness of acts long forgotten/Which give us history and faith/And parting at night, next to oceans, like the collapse of dying."

[Rue Solomon · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't normally enjoy poetry, but this book had been growing on me (much like a poetic fungus?)

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was maybe the first Ashbery collection I read through. I couldn't identify it or place it within the orthodox surrealism of which I was acquainted. Later I read Tennis Court Oath, and was doubly baffled. Now, this volume seems to be his breakthrough book, but also a bridge to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E.