Disseminating "circumference": the diachronic presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's "Clepsydra." - woman poet Emily Dickinson; poet

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Annette Gilson

John Ashbery's "Clepsydra" (Rivers and Mountains), a bewildering torrent of a poem, becomes more intelligible on discovery of an internal structure: it is bounded at each pole by the figure of circumference, which appears first at line 40, near the poem's beginning, and again at line 248, at its end. The term circumference has many poetic reverberations, and within the American tradition, one of the loudest is that of Emerson in his essay "Circles," which opens with the famous declaration:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. (168)

As many critics have noted, Emerson is an important influence on Ashbery, but Emerson is not the only source for the poetic term circumference. Emily Dickinson too is indebted to the American essayist who was her contemporary, but she took the term and made it her own, and it is around her "Circumference" that Ashbery considers drawing a circle.(1)

In one of her most frequently cited circumference poems, "The Poets light but Lamps -" (Poems 883), Dickinson describes the influence that poets have on later readers as a kind of "vital Light" that ensures that the poets' "Circumference" will be preserved. Both of Ashbery's references to circumference reflect this Dickinsonian luminance, explicitly linking an image of light to a spatial circumference figure.(2) In this way "Clepsydra" registers the dimension of Dickinsonian circumference that suggests that the "vital Light" of a prior poet continues to exist, even after she is dead, by lighting the "Lamps" of later poets. The earlier poet's "Circumference" thus exists simultaneously with that of a later poet (who is also giving forth light, though Dickinson herself is not concerned with the nature of the later poet's poetic production). This simultaneity is central to "Clepsydra," which explores the relationship of the individual to his or her past, while at the same time, through its references to Dickinson, thematizes its relationship to its own poetic past. The Clepsydran exploration of diachrony bears a striking resemblance to the theories of influence that John Hollander develops in The Figure of Echo. I will touch on Hollander's theories because they can provide a working vocabulary for this essay's investigation of "Clepsydra"'s diachronic relationship to Emily Dickinson.

Hollander differentiates between outright allusion and echo in order to describe a mode of reference that is less overt or intentional than the direct invocation of a prior text by a later one. He explains that a poetic figure can be said to echo a prior figure when the author is not conscious of the reference, or when the specific textual context has been lost to the reading audience. In the case of echoic references, the later poem's meaning is not dependent on interpretive inclusion of the prior poem. What is especially interesting about this theory is Hollander's emphasis that, whether echoic or direct, the allusion is by nature diachronic, and even self-referentially so. He explains that the "allusive echo, leading from poem to poem, [is] itself a trope of the later text" (113), and this is true for Ashbery's poem as well.(3)

That the echo trope resounds throughout "Clepsydra" is not surprising, given the poem's interest in personal and poetic histories. But "Clepsydra" is uneasy about its debt to Dickinson and the problem that remembering the past generates for it, an uneasiness that more nearly suggests Harold Bloom's aggressive theories of influence and belatedness than Hollander's theories of simultaneity.(4) However, Hollander does provide a useful model for understanding the later text's awareness of itself in relation to the earlier one by describing this awareness

as a trope of the fallen and unfallen conditions. Major English and American poetry after Milton would continue to play on the relation between a "present," contemporary meaning of a word, and an alluded-to, earlier, "original" one - a dialectic of the prior as opposed to the phenomenologically primary. (113)

For Ashbery this is a living issue. He asserts: "I see myself in this totality" - alluding here to the poetic past as well as the private history of the individual - "and meanwhile / I am only a transparent diagram, of manners and / Private words with the certainty of being about to fall" ("Clepsydra" lines 190-93).

The fall Ashbery fears is the danger that in calling up the work of the past writer, "Clepsydra" will become derivative or lose its poetic cohesion; as a result the references to Dickinson continuously vacillate between being direct allusion and haunting echoes, though for reasons different from those Hollander gives. This difference leads us back to Bloom: "Clepsydra" can be read as a sustained meditation on the threats posed to what he terms, in The Anxiety of Influence, the latecomer.(5) But Ashbery is not misreading Dickinson so as to go beyond her. Her poetry is necessary to "Clepsydra," providing as it does one of the later poem's central tropes, even though it also threatens Ashbery's own circumference each time his poem returns to it. This explains the obliquity of some of "Clepsydra"'s references to Dickinson: the poem's invocation of a referentially indirect or "unstated circumference" (40) articulates the danger that the poetic past represents for its poetic present. In other words, "Clepsydra"'s echoic allusions are the manifestation of its ambivalence toward the prior writer. Both Hollander's and Bloom's theories help to outline the complex relationship "Clepsydra" is marking out between itself and Emily Dickinson.