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

But "Clepsydra" also warns against taking too literally this idea of the past being recreated by the present, continuing: "But there was no statement / At the beginning" (93-94). The invisible fountain of poetic production that "Clepsydra" both describes and is invents all of these conceits:

... one must not forget that the nature of this Emptiness, these previsions, Was that it could only happen here, on this page held Too close to be legible, sprouting erasures, except that they Ended everything in the transparent sphere of what was Intended only a moment ago (97-102)

These "previsions" can only exist on the page But paradoxically, once they do exist, they end what they saw. "Previsions" is now made to refer also to the difference between poetic inspiration and realized poetic product: once the prophetic imagination is put down on the page it is no longer elastic and boundless. The previsions can have only a limited number of referents; the imagination is constrained by what the words used to express it can mean.

As "Clepsydra" works out its conflict with its poetic past it jets upward, falls back, and jets upward again, its poetic flow alternately presenting visions of transparent possibility and the dying fall of doubt and fear of limitation. Several of these dying falls are important for how they evolve the spatial imagery and relate it to the past figure addressed as "you," who is both Dickinson and the poet's earlier self or selves Ashbery observes that always there comes "a moment when / Acts no longer suffice" (131-32), a moment which "reduce[s] that other world, / The round one of the telescope, to a kind of very fine powder or dust / So small that space could not remember it" (141-43). The telescope was introduced earlier in the poem as a metaphor for looking at "an empty yet personal / Landscape" (111-12) and here is recalled as an instrument of the creative exploration of the past. However, now "space" cannot "remember it" - that is, the spatial dismemberment caused by the act of remembering cannot be repaired; the dying fall of the fountain leads to a sagging of belief in the effectiveness of action, which in this poem means creative action, that which happens on the page.

But these doubts in the act of creation are resolved, as everything in "Clepsydra" is, temporarily, in the poem's declaration that

The past is yours, to keep invisible if you wish But also to make absurd elaborations with And in this way prolong your dance of non-discovery In brittle, useless architecture that is nevertheless The map of your desires (168-72)

It is the past, the "you" to whom the speaker owes every "crumb of life" (193), that

intensifies echoes in such a way as to Form a channel to absorb every correct motion. In this way any direction taken was the right one, Leading first to you, and through you to Myself that is beyond you and which is the same thing as space, That is the stammering vehicles that remain unknown, Eating the sky in all sincerity because the difference Can never be made up: therefore, why not examine the distance? (198-205)