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

In its closing movement, the poem, addressing the "you" that may refer to the speaker's past self, to Dickinson, or to the reader (and perhaps to all three), suggests that "Perhaps you are being kept here / Only so that somewhere else the peculiar light of someone's / Purpose can blaze unexpectedly in the acute / Angles of the rooms" (238-41). The narrator glosses this further:

What is meant is that this distant Image of you, the way you really are, is the test Of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not You hesitate, it may be assumed that you have won, that this Wooden and external representation Returns the full echo of what you meant With nothing left over, from that circumference now alight With ex-possibilities become present fact, and you Must wear them like clothing, moving in the shadow of Your single and twin existence, waking in intact Appreciation of it, while morning is still and before the body Is changed by the faces of evening (242-53)

After reading "The Poets light but Lamps - " the "you" here does sound like a direct address of Emily Dickinson. This is the calm with which the poem ends, having made its peace with its poetic predecessor, in a kind of resolve that could be described as "the sensation of having dreamt the whole thing, / Of returning to participate in that dream, until / The last word is exhausted; certainly this is / Peace of a sort" (47-50). This peace accepts that Dickinson's "Purpose" (or as she puts it, the "vital Light" of her "Circumference") will "blaze unexpectedly" in the "rooms" of Ashbery's poem, that she has "won," and he has echoed her as she predicted. Ashbery's use of "Purpose" here also connects "Clepsydra" to another use of "Circumference" in Dickinson's work, in "From Cocoon forth a Butterfly."

In this poem a butterfly emerges from a cocoon "As Lady from her Door" and flies across fields of flowers, a trope for poetry:

Where Parties - Phantom as Herself - To Nowhere - seemed to go In purposeless Circumference - As 'twere a Tropic Show -

And notwithstanding Bee - that worked - And Flower - that zealous blew - This Audience of Idleness Disdained them, from the Sky - (Poems 354)

Dickinson is playing here on the comment by Emerson quoted above that "St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere" (168). Dickinson's "Parties," or flowers, seem to go "Nowhere" by following the sun heliotropically. The circumference of Augustine seems radically diminished here, and the "Nowhere" that was testimony to God's power seems now an aimlessness, or the innocence of existing that we might associate with the simple beauty of a flower. However, Dickinson insistently complicates her figures, in part because the nature of her circumference is paradoxical. She revises the "Nowhere" status of circumference by describing it as a "Tropic Show," a thing produced or achieved by both flowers and poems. To those who do not understand the meaning of the (poetic) trope, it appears purposeless, an empty performance. This purposelessness may in fact be a way of differentiating flowers and poems from the business of the world. Unlike the poem's author, who states that her "Business is Circumference" (Letters 412), the world must have rational grounds for all its transactions, and a visible product from which to profit. The very different tropic nature of poems causes them to follow the vital lights of Dickinson's sun, her poetic understanding, to achieve "Circumference."