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

Ashbery's use of the rather tired idea of life as a journey, "on the way / You go," is in part his standard device of revitalizing stock phrases, here put to work as a contrast to Dickinson's bizarre journeys. But Ashbery's interest in the journey cliche extends beyond a single poem; he predicated The Double Dream of Spring; the volume that follows Rivers and Mountains, on this idea as well. Charles Berger observes (after citing Whitman's "By Paths Untrodden" as a forerunner) that Ashbery describes in Dream of Spring's first poem "the ensuing volume as a journey, the goal of which turns out to be a possible cure for angst" (147). "Clepsydra" anticipates this idea of poem-as-journey-as-cure, only here the journey is not simply that of the speaker and of the poem traveling through the narrative moment, but of the poem traveling backward and forward in time to render up, both as point of departure and destination, the prior time (poetic and personal) from which poem and speaker set out. That is, Ashbery literalizes the journey-of-life conceit, which is a conflation of space and time. And as he does this he works off the sense of Dickinson's imaginary journeys, which render mental excursions - philosophical-poetical forays into established conceptual systems that Dickinson wishes to dismantle - in fantastic and symbolic terms that are meant to leave readers floundering and dislocated, so as to be surprised into a new understanding of themselves in relation to the world.

In addition to setting out on a journey, "Clepsydra"'s opening introduces and foregrounds the sky image. The sky and sun (the same sun that authorizes the firing of Dickinson's poetic lenses?) are presented as authorities, and because both sky and sun figure prominently in Dickinson's typology, Ashbery's choice of the word authority, with its root in author, introduces the issue of literary authority.

Dickinson's (and Ashbery's) use of sky as a ruling poetic figure bespeaks a debt to the late Emersonian sense of sky as an emblem of the limitations that hinder the human struggle for power over the natural world. Emerson says in "Experience": "God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest slay, and another behind us of purest sky" (265). Dickinson takes exception to Emerson's sense, figuring sky not as a screen or mechanism to frustrate human desire, but as a luminous fact that is mysterious yet (mysteriously) encompassable. Emerson, continuing in "Experience," claims that "Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive" (265). But for Dickinson, calculation, along with other mathematical terms and operations, represents, in Gary Stonum's words, "a means by which the self constructs, controls, organizes, and takes possession of experience. More specifically, calculation works to ensure that objects and experiences do not elude our mental grasp" (133). In her estimation: