Disseminating "circumference": the diachronic presence of Dickinson in John Ashbery's "Clepsydra." - woman poet Emily Dickinson; poet

The journey described in "From Cocoon forth a Butterfly" is also a bizarre one, where the butterfly becomes the lady, and before disappearing mysteriously, floats briefly in the sky above those earthly inhabitants that work to survive, or above those that, like poems and flowers, simply exist in a kind of transcendence that makes of their earthly origins a paradox. The natural world in Dickinson's poem, despite its defamiliarized cast, seems "a distant image," to borrow "Clepsydra"'s phrase, of Ashbery's time-distorted landscapes that act on human beings with strange willfulness and mystery. One of the strangest aspects of this Ashberian landscape is what "Clepsydra" describes as "the discovery of the declamatory / Nature of the distance traveled" (86-87). The distance traversed declaims itself; the journey thus becomes an inherently rhetorical act, and not only as the butterfly's journey is, passing by "Tropic shows," or as Dickinson's own journey in the making of a poem is, by creating those tropic shows. The journey described in "Clepsydra" is a rhetorical act in that it is the moving back to a prior writer, and in that, by doing so, it invokes the "declamatory / Nature" of that backward movement Ashbery is suggesting that the past in fact declares itself. This notion of "Clepsydra"'s relationship to its past is at once similar to Bloom's sense that the poetic past is psychologically inescapable for the poet in the present, while at the same time it defies his claim that "really strong poets can only read themselves."(14)

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.