Ashbery

When reading They Dream Only of America, I felt like John Ashbery was talking about wanting the freedom to be himself in public. I could be off on this one but I think he was talking about people in America that were homosexual and how he wanted the curtain to open so they could be free to be who they really were. Now, why did I think it was about the homosexual movement? Well, several things in his poem stood out to me, one being, “And hiding from darkness in barns, they can be grown ups now,” and another one was, “The lake a lilac cube.” I looked at these two sentences at someone who had to hide who they were and they had the feeling of being boxed in with no way out. The last two sentences, “For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it,” and “And I am lost without you,” here I think he is saying how he wanted to be free to tell the world who he was but was afraid of what would happen to people if they did. The last sentence I think was quite clear, he was lost with out being with his friend.