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

As her "vital Light" "blaze[s]" in "Clepsydra," this poem (as the "distant / Image" of Dickinson) "Returns the full echo" of what she meant when she said that "The Poets light but Lamps- / Themselves - go out- / The Wicks they stimulate- / If vital Light//Inhere as do the Suns-" (Poems 883). Ashbery's admission that there is "nothing left over, from that circumference now alight / With ex-possibilities become present fact" testifies to the fact that his "Age" too is, in Dickinson's words, "Disseminating [her] / Circumference."

But at the same time that Ashbery seems to be addressing Dickinson, he is also addressing the self, in particular the self's past identity which, like an imago, haunts the individual existing in the present. The "circumference now alight" calls up Dickinson, but the "you," wearing, "like clothing," its ex-possibilities, calls up an intimate, embodied self. Beyond resolving the tension with Dickinson that runs throughout "Clepsydra," the end of the poem unites the personal and poetic pasts in the poetic circumference from which, "Clepsydra" promises, there is "nothing left over." And in creating this union, Ashbery differentiates his circumference from the Dickinsonian one.

The Dickinsonian "Circumference" figure functions as a kind of emblem for the movement in much of her work from the expectable, quotidian world to the bizarre or otherworldly. In a somewhat showy confounding of the normative and the mysterious, Dickinson declares to Colonel Higginson: "Perhaps you smile at me - I cannot stop for that - My Business is Circumference" (Letters 412). The day-to-day world conjured up by the term "Business" is turned on its head with the addition of the inscrutable term that Dickinson made her own. In the same vein she writes to Mrs. J. G. Holland: "All grows strangely emphatic, and I think if I should see you again, I sh'd begin every sentence with 'I say unto you -' The Bible dealt with the Centre, not the Circumference - " (Letters 850). Dickinson uses the biblical language ("I say unto you") for the evocative force it lends as a medium of mystery; it becomes a kind of lens through which the prosaic reality of everyday life is recast, its appearance shown to be masking some hidden meaning.

This intimation that something dramatic lies behind the quotidian world is central to Dickinson's poetic sensibility. However, her remark also criticizes the assumptions on which that biblical language rests, assumptions that have to do with the Bible's adherence to traditional authority structures. Dickinson effects this criticism by calling up Emerson, not only the author of "Circles," who lauds God's circumference as being nowhere, but the Emerson of "The Poet," who describes this figure as "the sayer, the namer, [who] represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the center" (224). Dickinson is defining herself against the Emersonian conception of (male) poetic identity, and associating it with traditional biblical power structures and gender relations.(8) She is also suggesting that, contrary to our normal assumptions about it, the Bible's real center is its preoccupation with earthly or human-centered issues, which leads it to neglect the transcendent or sublime that she figures through her other-worldly and mysterious notion of "Circumference."