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

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting External Ghost Than its interior Confronting - That Cooler Host.

Far safer, through an Abbey gallop, The Stones a'chase - Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter - In lonesome Place -

Ourself behind ourself, concealed - Should startle most - Assassin hid in our Apartment Be Horror's least (Poems 670)

Dickinson's poem succinctly describes the confrontation - between self and self - that Ashbery's engages in a more windy and indirect manner. However, this self-to-self confrontation haunting "Clepsydra" derives (at least at this moment in the poem) from Dickinson, and as a result the haunting is a dual one, that of the poetic other, as well as the personal one.

Ashbery extends the house metaphor Dickinson employed by adding

the certainty that it Wasn't a dream your only clue to why the walls Are turning on you and why the windows no longer speak Of time but are themselves, transparent guardians you Invented for what there was to hide (233-35)

That the "walls" of Ashbery's brain - the structures that support the edifice of identity - are turning on him suggests that his confrontation with the haunting, mediated as it is through Dickinson, is a transformative one: the walls of his own brain have betrayed him (by being changed). Ashbery reminds us that it is the poetic and personal relation to the past that is the transformative agent when he changes the windows from portals that allow us to look at the past and the passage of time into things that guard us, either from our own internal truth or from the external one that we cannot bean This hidden truth has its own independent existence: it has "Grown up, or moved away, as a jewel / Exists when there is no one to look at it" (236-37) and "this / Existence saps your own" (237-38) because it reveals that the solipsistic self is not alone in the world, and is certainly not the center of that world. The existence of truths other than our own is devastating, and at this moment the fact of Dickinson's presence, a presence with which Ashbery has fought and negotiated throughout "Clepsydra," seems to defeat the later writer. The reach of Dickinson's circumference seems to engulf "Clepsydra"'s ability to speak its own independent truth.

But the last portion of the poem, having faced the most difficult truth - that our own understanding of the world is only one of a multitude ways of seeing, which also influence and mediate our own - incorporates the deflation of ego that this represents. Ashbery acknowledges that his poem may exist so that "the peculiar light of someone's / Purpose can blaze unexpectedly in the acute / Angles of the rooms" (239-41), but adds in what seems like a non sequitur, "It is not a question, then, / Of having not lived in vain" (241-42). This statement, which recalls the questions and replies of "Clepsydra"'s opening, signals a new direction of inquiry, one that invokes the present writer's life and so turns its attention from the past's influence on the present, to the present itself. With this we also return to the closing section of the poem, which no longer reads simply as an acknowledgment of the poetic predecessor who dominates the poem with her "circumference now alight / With ex-possibilities become present fact" (248-49). Dickinson seems at this juncture to have receded; Ashbery seems to be addressing the self who has acknowledged failure in producing only "this / Wooden and external representation" (11. 245-46) of what he meant. But instead of focusing on this failure, Ashbery declares that "regardless of whether or not / You hesitate, it may be assumed that you have won" (244-45) - which, while only an assumption, nonetheless signals a mood that is new to "Clepsydra." The self "Must wear [the ex-possibilities of the past] like clothing, moving in the shadow of / Your single and twin existence" (250-51). This lack of choice reminds us of the defeat at Dickinson's hands and is an acknowledgment of the power of the past. However, the defeat is mitigated by the images invoked: the past clothes the present; it protects the self from exposure and helps to define the self's appearance. These images are gentler and less competitive with the past than earlier ones; as the poem observes: it is possible to "wak[e] in intact / Appreciation of" (251-52) the necessity of accepting our relationship to the past. Through appreciation may come a new kind of tolerance, perhaps even a feeling of resolution.