This way, unable to stop communicating?

("Brute Image")

This wish for privacy, for restraint, is most moving when the poems that express it are themselves restrained--either metrically, as above, or to two or three tones of voice or registers of diction, or, simply, by being short. As Helen Vendler has noted, the situations and contexts in an Ashbery poem relate not to one another but to the poem's (emotional) center. The poems are often strongest when some structural constraint adds to their centripetal force.

Coexisting with Ashbery's desire for privacy, however, is the desire to continue, to keep talking, to keep communicating, as an exemption from endings or from death. Facing death as others will not, Ashbery's speakers are out of place and quiet at the margins of their crowds, resigned or despairing even as they act out their roles in celebrations:

We were given false information on which

our lives were built, a pier

extending far out into a swollen river.

Now, even those straws are gone.

Tonight the party will be better than ever.

So many mystery guests. And the

rain that sifts

through sobbing trees, that excited skiff...

("On the Empress' Mind")

Sometimes the desire for privacy wins out, and the speakers complain about not being able to leave the world, or announce that they are in fact leaving it. At other times the speakers are too alone, and beg for time or energy to continue traveling/ working/ communicating.

We may expect a poet about to leave the world to wonder whether his work will survive. So he does, sometimes despairingly: