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

The poem deliberately blurs its invocation of the poetic past by using vague terms that can refer also to the individual's personal past:

To have this to be constantly coming back from - Nothing more, really, than surprise at your absence And preparing to continue the dialogue into Those mysterious and near regions that are Precisely the time of its being furthered... ... it was then, that it was these Moments that were the truth, although each tapered Into the distant surrounding night (60-71)

By allowing the ambiguous "this" from which the poem or narrator is "coming back" to refer to a "dialogue," the poem invites us to read the referent as diachronic conversation, especially now that the Dickinsonian image of circumference has been invoked. This invocation of Dickinson that only indirectly acknowledges her influence is itself a subject of the poem: we are influenced by the past but initially resist that influence, or do not even know how to talk about it. Until the introduction of "circumference," the Dickinsonian typology present in "Clepsydra" was the borrowing of terms without the substance of those terms yet put into play. As "Clepsydra" begins to forge its meanings more deliberately, the Dickinsonian imagery that had already seeped into its fabric drenches the later poem, simultaneously giving that poem its theme while paradoxically threatening its integrity: to remember Dickinson is to dismember itself.

"Clepsydra'"s ambivalent relationship to Dickinson is at the heart of its continued exploration of the conflation of the spatial and temporal. Out of this ambivalence it invents a new landscape, in which "regions" are "time" and "Moments" taper off into "the distant ... night." The poem moves from these momentary truths that dissolve into the night, back to the image of sky (here the sky at night), whose starlight may be "only the reverse / Of some more concealable, vengeful purpose to become known / Once its result had more or less established / The look of the horizon" (74-81). This attributing to the sky a "vengeful purpose to become known" responds to sky's earlier dismemberment which functioned as the spatial analog for remembering Dickinson. Ashbery's lyric identity, as figured by the poem "Clepsydra," wants to wreak vengeance on that which threatens its integrity, and in this way is very Bloomian in its relationship to the prior poet. But to sustain its meditation on the diachronic relationship it has to the past, "Clepsydra" does not let us forget Dickinson or the fact of its own awareness of her. The reference to "purpose" functions also to anticipate (or recall) the poem's suggestion at its close that "Perhaps you are being kept here / Only so that somewhere else the peculiar light of someone's / Purpose can blaze unexpectedly" (238-40) in the "rooms" of this poem. And both purposes call up the defiantly "purposeless Circumference" of "From Cocoon forth a Butterfly," discussed at the beginning of this essay.