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

The poem explores the conflict it has set up between spatial and temporal landscapes through the circumference image:

But the argument, That is its way, has already left these behind: it Is, it would have you believe, the white din up ahead That matters: unformed yells, rocketings, Affected turns, and tones of voice called By upper shadows toward some cloud of belief Or its unstated circumference. But the light Has already gone from there too and it may be that It is lines contracting into a plane. We hear so much Of its further action that at last it seems that It is we, our taking it into account rather, that are The reply that prompted the question (34-45)

All this is glossed by the observation: "we must progress toward the whole thing / About an hour ago" (51-52). In this passage several themes are being negotiated simultaneously. Now it is the "argument" that has a "way," which picks up "the way / You go" of the beginning and applies the self's spatial journey (leaving some things "behind"; being concerned with other things "up ahead") to a literary or verbal one. With "The reply that prompted the question," the subject of questions and replies (introduced first with "Hasn't the sky?") is developed too. The allusion now is to the literary conversation across time that "Clepsydra" is having with Dickinson. This diachronic conversation creates the paradoxical unfolding of time in which responses prompt queries, and we progress toward something in the present tense by way of the past. This paradox faintly echoes Dickinsonian paradoxes, especially the poem "Pain - expands the Time -," which speaks to the malleability of the temporal as it continues: "Ages coil within / The minute Circumference / Of a single Brain - " (Poems 967).

In the Clepsydran paradox, temporal and spatial journeys are brought into conflict for the purpose, ultimately, of conflating the two. This conflation is latent or implicit in some of Dickinson's poems, such as "Pain - expands the Time - " and "The Poets light but Lamps," but it is not explored in her work as it is in "Clepsydra," where it is used to suggest that to move forward we must move backward. At the crux of this conflation (a conflation which is, at line 40, still nascent) is the image of circumference. Ashbery connects circumference to the sky motif by loosely relating the former to "some cloud of belief": the cloud inhabits the sky of Ashbery's poetic production, and it is toward this that the future ("the white din up ahead") is called.(13) Ashbery frames his poetic production in the terms of Dickinsonian typology when he admits that all of the stuff of the current life ("unformed yells, rocketings, / Affected turns," which can double as references to writing) may be drawn to his own lyric center (the "cloud of belief') or to "its unstated circumference." That this circumference is "unstated" and is followed by the lines: "But the light / Has already gone from there too" seems an acknowledgment that it is an indirect ("unstated") reference to the Dickinsonian circumference of vital light, whose inherent power Ashbery is simultaneously acknowledging and trying to escape. With the invocation of circumference, the dismembering of the sky is linked to remembering Emily Dickinson by way of the poem's spatial-temporal conflation.