Of Stopped Clocks and Narcissistic Frogs
Of Stopped Clocks and Narcissistic Frogs
A Meditation on two of Emily Dickinson's poems, by Giles Watson
If the chronology of R.W. Franklin’s complete collection of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson is to be believed, at some time in the middle of 1861, the poet wrote two poems, one after the other, which hinged on negation – or more specifically, the word “No”. When I was learning to become a teacher, my mentor advised me, only half-jokingly, that it was good for all prospective pedagogues to sit before a mirror every morning and practise mouthing that word, a word which is contained within its own homonym: the verb “to know”. Children won’t end up knowing much if we don’t learn to say it to them sometimes, and sometimes, “No” is the profoundest and the most honest thing to say. Cordelia said it more than once to her father King Lear, with ample justification and complete integrity, but she compounded it into a word which caused a snicker on the faces of the lovers of Shakespearean word-play, because “Nothing” was also a euphemism for “vagina”. Her honesty (another word with a double meaning in that misogynistic time) led to tragedy; she and her father became No-thing at all: dead. “No” is arguably the most ethically serious, and ultimately truest, word in the language, because we all come from there, and we all end up there.
Traditional chronometers eschew the zero as if the original clock-face was designed by a person terrified of – nought. A clock which stops merely records the time of its stopping, as the pocket watch of a much later poet, Edward Thomas, did when a five-nine shell whipped past his ear, and stopped the ticking of both his heart and chronometer at precisely twenty-four minutes to eight and twelve seconds. If a clock’s hands go flaccid, it is eternally half-past six: time to get up on a weekday, or time to have dinner. Clocks are, in fact, an apt symbol of our tendency to deny the inevitable – to assume that we can control time, rather than it controlling us. Ultimately, the more religiously we wind the clock, the more rapidly time wears out the cogs and spring inside it. Then, the clock stops, and time, triumphant over technology, marches on.
“A Clock stopped –
Not the Mantel’s –”
There is our first negation, at the beginning of Line 2. A Clock – capitalised, as powerful things usually are in Dickinson’s poetry – has just clogged up in a blot of assonance. It is “Not the Mantel’s”: not a clock like the multiple beautiful antiques in my parents’ house which my father has maintained in glorious ticking condition ever since I was a child, winding and correcting them every few days, and occasionally disassembling them to wash away any clogged old oil with lighter fluid. Some people say that Dickinson’s must be a grandfather clock, with its arm-length pendulum inside a tall cupboard beneath it. Others, going by what comes next, think it is something akin to a cuckoo clock. I have long thought it might be more like the Munich Glockenspiel, which unleashes a parade of mechanical puppets at appointed hours. The other type of clock which is most decidedly “Not the Mantel’s” is the type designed a bit more than a century before Dickinson’s time by John Harrison: a ship’s chronometer, intended to keep as near to perfect time as possible, so that it could be used for estimating longitude. Few clocks have been so vital to the (temporary) preservation of human life as these. But this one has stopped.
“Geneva’s farthest skill
Cant put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still –”
So, this clock either has real mechanical puppets, or its long pendulum is its puppet, or the puppets are in its insides. If it is a ship’s chronometer which has stopped, then perhaps the ship has run aground on the Gilstone Rock, west of the Isles of Scilly, its seamen hanging like rag dolls off the sharp pinnacles of the Western Isles. No matter what we decide, all the clockmakers of Geneva cannot re-animate the puppet; it hangs on a cant, and no amount of cant or excuses will suffice. It is dead and dangling because the spring is broken, or the cog-teeth worn away. The heart has given out; no surgeon can jump-start it.
“An awe came on the Trinket!”
“Awe”, I suspect, here means an overwhelming sense of the abject, not of the sublime. Dickinson plays a wonderful trick here, because she does in her poem what life cannot do; she gives us an action-replay of the moment of death:
“The Figures hunched – with pain –
Then quivered out the Decimals
Into Degreeless noon –”
What are these “Figures” which are subjected to the tyranny of such horrible verbs: “hunched”, and “quivered”? Perhaps they are the puppets, or the dying human beings that by now they surely symbolise, in their death-throes, or worse, perhaps, quaking with fear at the thought of the pain that will wrack them before the moment of death. But the clock-face itself is inscribed with “Figures”, too. Perhaps we are now confronted with a Daliesque melting clock. It is certainly a very confused and confusing clock, if it operates on the Decimal system, and it has perhaps become conflated with that other navigational preserver of human life, the compass, or with that other instrument used to calculate the moment of noon at sea, the sextant. Everything has collapsed; according to this clock, it is now the zeroth hour, the nadir, noon on the far side of the world, but never here again. “Noon”, too, contains the word, “no”. This is irrevocable:
“It will not stir for Doctor’s –
This pendulum of snow –”
“Snow” contains the word “no”, too, and we have already seen in a previous meditation that we are all ultimately “Soundless as Dots/ On a Disc of Snow”. There cannot possibly be any tock left in this clock, not even for Doctors, plural or possessive. The whole structure will liquefy.
“The Shopman importunes it –
While cool – concernless No –
Nods from the Gilded pointers –
Nods from the Seconds slim –”
“No… Nods… Nods…” Dying is inexorable as sleep – a final nodding and cooling off. No amount of gold leaf on the ends of the hands can prevent the clock’s failure to help us conquer time. Its unfixable doom merely sets us nodding into unconsciousness as the clock-face turns blankly towards those
“Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life –
And Him –”
*
And although it is a separate poem, with a very different mood, it is as though Dickinson took another tack that night, and kept writing:
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!”
Here’s a way, perhaps, to choose something less pitiful than those “Decades of Arrogance” between birth and that masculine pronoun cut off so agnostically with a dash. You may be more fulfilled if you are no longer the ob-ject of the sentence. Admit that you are No-body, seek another No-body, and find some fellowship in it. Beware of blowing your bugle even about this:
“Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!”
What would Dickinson make, I wonder, of the vainglorious, narcissistic self-advertisement which so many of our modern cultural, technological and political institutions encourage in us, and those social media which prod some to strut their arrogance, and others to trumpet their humility to the world? Try reading that last line of hers aloud. There’s that helpful homophone: “Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you – no!”
“How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”
Because it is really really really really really really boring, after all, this chorus of self-announcement during the brief, spasmodic breeding-season of our lives, “livelong” until suddenly it stops. I note in passing that hardly any of Dickinson’s poems became “public” in her lifetime. Some were published under pseudonyms, and all were maimed by male editors who pointedly put paid to her dashes as if they were too much of nothing.
By way of postscript, I can’t help wondering whether Emily Dickinson ever heard versions of an old British comic folk tale about foolish, untechnological local yokels, called ‘The Ticktoad’. It usually goes something like this. A group of gormless idiots are out in the fields one day, and they find a new kind of toad or frog sitting in the grass. It is metallic in colour, and it makes a strange ticking noise. It seems rather too newfangled a sort of species for these guys’ conservative tastes, so they take their hoes and mattocks and bash it to pieces before it can hop off and breed with another one, and then walk off none the wiser.
The Ticktoad is a pocket-watch, of course. Perhaps those yokels were right to smash it on the spot.
A Meditation on two of Emily Dickinson's poems, by Giles Watson
If the chronology of R.W. Franklin’s complete collection of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson is to be believed, at some time in the middle of 1861, the poet wrote two poems, one after the other, which hinged on negation – or more specifically, the word “No”. When I was learning to become a teacher, my mentor advised me, only half-jokingly, that it was good for all prospective pedagogues to sit before a mirror every morning and practise mouthing that word, a word which is contained within its own homonym: the verb “to know”. Children won’t end up knowing much if we don’t learn to say it to them sometimes, and sometimes, “No” is the profoundest and the most honest thing to say. Cordelia said it more than once to her father King Lear, with ample justification and complete integrity, but she compounded it into a word which caused a snicker on the faces of the lovers of Shakespearean word-play, because “Nothing” was also a euphemism for “vagina”. Her honesty (another word with a double meaning in that misogynistic time) led to tragedy; she and her father became No-thing at all: dead. “No” is arguably the most ethically serious, and ultimately truest, word in the language, because we all come from there, and we all end up there.
Traditional chronometers eschew the zero as if the original clock-face was designed by a person terrified of – nought. A clock which stops merely records the time of its stopping, as the pocket watch of a much later poet, Edward Thomas, did when a five-nine shell whipped past his ear, and stopped the ticking of both his heart and chronometer at precisely twenty-four minutes to eight and twelve seconds. If a clock’s hands go flaccid, it is eternally half-past six: time to get up on a weekday, or time to have dinner. Clocks are, in fact, an apt symbol of our tendency to deny the inevitable – to assume that we can control time, rather than it controlling us. Ultimately, the more religiously we wind the clock, the more rapidly time wears out the cogs and spring inside it. Then, the clock stops, and time, triumphant over technology, marches on.
“A Clock stopped –
Not the Mantel’s –”
There is our first negation, at the beginning of Line 2. A Clock – capitalised, as powerful things usually are in Dickinson’s poetry – has just clogged up in a blot of assonance. It is “Not the Mantel’s”: not a clock like the multiple beautiful antiques in my parents’ house which my father has maintained in glorious ticking condition ever since I was a child, winding and correcting them every few days, and occasionally disassembling them to wash away any clogged old oil with lighter fluid. Some people say that Dickinson’s must be a grandfather clock, with its arm-length pendulum inside a tall cupboard beneath it. Others, going by what comes next, think it is something akin to a cuckoo clock. I have long thought it might be more like the Munich Glockenspiel, which unleashes a parade of mechanical puppets at appointed hours. The other type of clock which is most decidedly “Not the Mantel’s” is the type designed a bit more than a century before Dickinson’s time by John Harrison: a ship’s chronometer, intended to keep as near to perfect time as possible, so that it could be used for estimating longitude. Few clocks have been so vital to the (temporary) preservation of human life as these. But this one has stopped.
“Geneva’s farthest skill
Cant put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still –”
So, this clock either has real mechanical puppets, or its long pendulum is its puppet, or the puppets are in its insides. If it is a ship’s chronometer which has stopped, then perhaps the ship has run aground on the Gilstone Rock, west of the Isles of Scilly, its seamen hanging like rag dolls off the sharp pinnacles of the Western Isles. No matter what we decide, all the clockmakers of Geneva cannot re-animate the puppet; it hangs on a cant, and no amount of cant or excuses will suffice. It is dead and dangling because the spring is broken, or the cog-teeth worn away. The heart has given out; no surgeon can jump-start it.
“An awe came on the Trinket!”
“Awe”, I suspect, here means an overwhelming sense of the abject, not of the sublime. Dickinson plays a wonderful trick here, because she does in her poem what life cannot do; she gives us an action-replay of the moment of death:
“The Figures hunched – with pain –
Then quivered out the Decimals
Into Degreeless noon –”
What are these “Figures” which are subjected to the tyranny of such horrible verbs: “hunched”, and “quivered”? Perhaps they are the puppets, or the dying human beings that by now they surely symbolise, in their death-throes, or worse, perhaps, quaking with fear at the thought of the pain that will wrack them before the moment of death. But the clock-face itself is inscribed with “Figures”, too. Perhaps we are now confronted with a Daliesque melting clock. It is certainly a very confused and confusing clock, if it operates on the Decimal system, and it has perhaps become conflated with that other navigational preserver of human life, the compass, or with that other instrument used to calculate the moment of noon at sea, the sextant. Everything has collapsed; according to this clock, it is now the zeroth hour, the nadir, noon on the far side of the world, but never here again. “Noon”, too, contains the word, “no”. This is irrevocable:
“It will not stir for Doctor’s –
This pendulum of snow –”
“Snow” contains the word “no”, too, and we have already seen in a previous meditation that we are all ultimately “Soundless as Dots/ On a Disc of Snow”. There cannot possibly be any tock left in this clock, not even for Doctors, plural or possessive. The whole structure will liquefy.
“The Shopman importunes it –
While cool – concernless No –
Nods from the Gilded pointers –
Nods from the Seconds slim –”
“No… Nods… Nods…” Dying is inexorable as sleep – a final nodding and cooling off. No amount of gold leaf on the ends of the hands can prevent the clock’s failure to help us conquer time. Its unfixable doom merely sets us nodding into unconsciousness as the clock-face turns blankly towards those
“Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life –
And Him –”
*
And although it is a separate poem, with a very different mood, it is as though Dickinson took another tack that night, and kept writing:
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!”
Here’s a way, perhaps, to choose something less pitiful than those “Decades of Arrogance” between birth and that masculine pronoun cut off so agnostically with a dash. You may be more fulfilled if you are no longer the ob-ject of the sentence. Admit that you are No-body, seek another No-body, and find some fellowship in it. Beware of blowing your bugle even about this:
“Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!”
What would Dickinson make, I wonder, of the vainglorious, narcissistic self-advertisement which so many of our modern cultural, technological and political institutions encourage in us, and those social media which prod some to strut their arrogance, and others to trumpet their humility to the world? Try reading that last line of hers aloud. There’s that helpful homophone: “Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you – no!”
“How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”
Because it is really really really really really really boring, after all, this chorus of self-announcement during the brief, spasmodic breeding-season of our lives, “livelong” until suddenly it stops. I note in passing that hardly any of Dickinson’s poems became “public” in her lifetime. Some were published under pseudonyms, and all were maimed by male editors who pointedly put paid to her dashes as if they were too much of nothing.
By way of postscript, I can’t help wondering whether Emily Dickinson ever heard versions of an old British comic folk tale about foolish, untechnological local yokels, called ‘The Ticktoad’. It usually goes something like this. A group of gormless idiots are out in the fields one day, and they find a new kind of toad or frog sitting in the grass. It is metallic in colour, and it makes a strange ticking noise. It seems rather too newfangled a sort of species for these guys’ conservative tastes, so they take their hoes and mattocks and bash it to pieces before it can hop off and breed with another one, and then walk off none the wiser.
The Ticktoad is a pocket-watch, of course. Perhaps those yokels were right to smash it on the spot.
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