“Degreeless Noon”: Abstractions of Time in Emily Dickinson’s “A Clock Stopped”
A Clock stopped —
Not the Mantel’s —
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing —
That just now dangled still —
An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain —
Then quivered out of Decimals —
Into Degreeless Noon —
It will not stir for Doctors —
This Pendulum of snow —
The Shopman importunes it —
While cool — concernless No —
Nods from the Gilded pointers —
Nods from the Seconds slim —
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life —
And Him —
Emily Dickinson
Jessica Whalen
When I was a junior in high school, I had a discussion in my AP Language and Composition class about the subjective experience of time. After class I told my table at lunch about it, marveling at how what one person experiences as a second might be completely different for another. Then a more STEM-focused student interrupted me. “That’s not true,” he said, “a second is defined by a specific number of oscillations of a cesium-133 atom. It’s the same for everyone.” His objection felt entirely dismissive to me. Most people don’t think about or experience time in those terms, not to mention how the use of atomic seconds is less than a century old. This article uses literature from before that discovery– specifically, an Emily Dickinson poem– to argue the validity of a more artistic view of time not bound by rigid natural laws.
Many critics of Emily Dickinson’s work have commented on time as a recurring theme in her poetry, analyzing her relationship to time as a whole. Even in Dickinson’s most abstract works, there are references to exact times of the clock, from “Half Past Three” (1099) to “Four o’clock” (504) to “Five o’clock” (572) to, most notably, “Noon” (287) in “A Clock Stopped” (O’Brien). While an overview of these timeless poems as a whole body of work can be helpful, as much can be gained from doing a close reading of one specific example. I’m going to narrow my focus to how time functions in “A Clock Stopped” and go over specific word choices and their effects.
“A Clock Stopped” uses historical references, mathematical language, and lines that can be read in many different ways to write about a clock that’s stopped working. This stopped clock is a symbol of human life and the experience of time’s passing. Through it, she explores religion and death. In four short stanzas, it goes from a simple metaphor comparing the clock breaking to a life ending to a much more abstract place, a place that supposedly exists outside time. However, we’re given a specific clock time to go with these events: “Degreeless Noon.” This conveys the abstractness of objective measures of time within our subjective experience of it. The poem’s use of religion puts it in a specific time and place as well.
The Protestant elements of the poem are specific to her own place and time, indicating how an experience of time can depend on a person’s individual and historical context. The meter of the poem is a hymn meter, a pattern based on Christianity and English folk poems and ballads. It’s a form that’s specific to Congregationalist New England, and to the Calvinist family in which Dickinson grew up. There is another indirect reference to Calvinism in the poem in the form of the clock being a Swiss clock: not even “Geneva’s farthest skill” can repair it. Geneva was the center of the Protestant Reformation and where John Calvin famously wrote his Geneva Bible. “Geneva’s farthest skill” could be interpreted as religion itself being unable to bring a person back to life, or the clock could be religion not able to be repaired or made perfect by Protestant reforms.
“Clock” is capitalized in the poem, indicating that it stands for something abstract beyond itself: Death. Since its stopping is permanent, the clearest interpretation is that it represents death, a common theme in Dickinson’s poetry. This connection to death is strengthened by the poem’s conflation of “doctors” and “shopman” in the third stanza, as if repairing the clock and healing a sick person were one and the same. Comparing physical and even spiritual human life to the mechanical workings of an invention created by humans corresponds with some of the religious doubts people were beginning to have at the time. If newly developing scientific theories could explain away the mystery surrounding processes of thought, aging, and death, it seemed there was little difference between a person living life and a machine performing its functions. However, that need not be a bad thing. It reflects the idea that we are all part of the processes of the universe, cogs in the metaphorical machine– or a clock, here, specifically.
The information we’re given about the clock in the poem is limited, especially given how short it is, but what we do know emphasizes the permanence of death. The clock “stopped,” or is “stopped,” a state emphasized by the dash that appears at the end of the line. Then, we get the line “Not the Mantel’s,” which seems to be saying that it’s not a mantel-clock, unless we connect it to the lines that follow it: “Geneva’s farthest skill / Can’t put the puppet bowing.” Instead of a specific kind of clock, this line opens up a different reading that the “Mantel’s skill” can’t fix the clock any more than skilled clockmakers from Geneva can; the Mantel is a metonymic representation of something near and “Geneva” represents distance. Geneva is a specific place and represents a specific historical context, but in the full set of lines, it seems to indicate a person who can repair the stopped clock exists neither near nor far.
These formal features create an effect that is mechanical, a ticking machine, and yet, human. The dashes bring up a noteworthy point about the punctuation of the poem. The original manuscript version of the first stanza reads:
A Clock stopped —
Not the Mantel’s —
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing —
That just now dangled still — (Dickinson, lines 1-5).
With “Geneva’s farthest skill” being the only line that doesn’t end in a dash, connecting it to the interesting image of a “puppet bowing / that just now dangled still.” The puppet, like the clock, has become “still” and is akin to a human body after death. These metaphors work well because, as Claudia Schwartz notes, “figurative language applied to clocks in everyday speech can be counted on to personify the object. Clocks have hands and a face, and even the heartbeat is imitated by their tick” (Schwartz 93). Dashes create the effect of a tick as well, and capitalized nouns create not just abstractions, but also personifications.
When we read the line “an awe came on the trinket” in the second stanza, the last word of the phrase stands out. “Trinket” is a word that means both a small ornament, a piece of equipment, or a thing of little value. If we continue the line of thinking that the clock is the human body, then Dickinson is calling the body an ornament to decorate the soul, our equipment
to navigate through this world, or something too temporary or material to be valuable. Perhaps, this is because of how frail it is and how it dies easily, or because it has less worth compared to a person’s mind, soul, or even writings. This poem, for instance, is something that remains of Dickinson and brings her into our time long after her body has passed away.
If clocks are like humans in their figurative attributes, a puppet or “trinket” is even more so a blending of the mechanical and the organic. Its resemblance to a human being strengthens this connection to the death of a person. This is interesting because we think of puppets as being controlled by humans; yet, here is a puppet that “Geneva’s farthest skill” can’t get to work again. It “just now” became still, meaning this poem is set in the exact moment of a life ending. “Bowing” implies the puppet’s body will no longer curve with movement, and this calls to mind the “Pendulum” of the third stanza. The word “Pendulum” is notable as well, apart from being capitalized and therefore abstracted, a pendulum can represent two opposite extremes. When a pendulum “will not stir” it’s in a state between extremes, as noon is in the middle of the day, the middle of the poem, and the precise moment of the clock and puppet stopping, which separates life from death. What reinforces this is the line “That just now dangled still,” which gives the specific time of death as “just now.” “Now” and “noon” have a similar sound, and with the clock stopped at noon it’s always going to be suspended in a continuous present– “Forever is composed of nows,” as Dickinson wrote (Dickinson 690). Finally, the puppet is comparable to the pendulum, because both of them have “dangled” still and are now effectively frozen in time. Our subjective experience of time stops in death.
Taken as a whole, the line “Can’t put the puppet bowing” confuses the imagery of a poem as, at first glance, one would think the puppet is a separate image from the clock. However, given it is implied to be a Swiss clock, the Swiss Chalet style of cuckoo clocks would have meant several “puppet[s]” “trinket[s]” or “figures” could have been represented on the clock, such as cuckoo birds or couples dancing at certain times of day. The numbers of the clock itself are “figures” as well, which further blurs the lines between clock, puppet, and person.
Despite the way the line “While cool, concernless No” is grammatically bizarre and may not make sense on first reading, adding to the striking sense of abstraction, it seems as if it’s something the Pendulum itself is saying to the importuning shopkeeper, but it can also be read as flowing directly into the final stanza In addition, something I noticed after several readings of the poem is that two of the most seemingly puzzling phrases, “Pendulum of snow” and “cool, concernless No” actually form the word “noon” again in the middle: “sNOw” and “cONcernless” (emphasis mine). Noon, a specific time of day, is extremely significant to the poem and the language reflects this.
As I’ve established, noon is a specific clock time that the poem mentions rather than remaining abstract, but “degreeless noon” can represent a liminal space in time as well. Noon recurs in several of Dickenson’s poems as it has great poetic significance as the time that divides morning from afternoon. Interestingly, despite the recurrence of a specific time of day in her poems, Dickinson did not know or had difficulty telling time in her younger years. In a letter to Thomas Higginson, she writes, “I never knew how to tell the time by the clock until I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask anyone else” (Letters #342b). In not knowing how to tell time, she was unable to experience it in the same objective way as “anyone else” who could read clock faces. Nowadays, many people growing up don’t learn analog clocks either, as digital clocks, again, allow us to experience time differently– lacking human characteristics of hands and faces but retaining numerical symbols, such as “12:00” for noon.
More importantly to our understanding of the poem, noon specifically is the time when the clock hands are both pointed upward— toward heaven, which is also why they’re referred to as “pointers” that indicate the afterlife. Schwartz writes that “Noon is a palindrome with no beginning and no end, that reads the same way forward and backward, implying circularity and infinity,” and that the “oo” in the middle resembles an infinity sign, something retained in the digital clock’s “12:00” (Schwartz 93-94). “Cool” once again has the double-o spelling that Schwartz pointed out looked like infinity. Alternatively, the infinity signs present in the structure of the poem connect a single “now,” an instant, with eternity. Every minute is relative to time as a whole.
The clock itself has hands that move circularly, so to interpret the clock as a human suggests that we as humans experience a circular motion through time, making it easy to connect the time in which the poem was written with our own. As Peggy O’Brien writes, a clock face with two hands is “a dualism, bound to relativity, bound to a center and going round and round a circumference of minutes, hours, days, finally a lifetime” (474). Human beings, likewise, are bound to relativity in measuring the abstract concept of time, and each given time is relative to every other.
While critics such as Schwartz have seen noon as a “synonym for eternity” in Dickinson’s poetry, it is also closely linked in this poem with death (Schwartz 93). According to Dickinson’s poem 1068, “Antiquest” is felt at noon, a word that sounds like “antique,” something from a different time, perhaps even a clock. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon website defines “antiquest” as “more ancient, eerie, or quaint than any other time,” along with twelve different definitions for noon (Emily Dickinson Lexicon). “Eeriness” links it further to death as a moment of something ending or stopping. The hands of the clock pointed upward are what makes noon “degreeless:” the ray is at an angle of zero degrees. Mathematical language is also present in the line “Then quivered out of decimals,” which, like noon, would mean a state that is no longer in partial numbers or degrees but has reached a decisive whole number. This is likely the same reason Dickinson chose “Decades of arrogance” for the final stanza: a connection to decimals, and a decisive period of time. Schwartz writes that “The gap between” Dickinson and “her posthumous audience can only be bridged by taking a position exterior to time,” but it is this specificity of her position within time that contemporary audiences can understand and relate to (Schwartz 85). We are all positioned in time, and no one is outside of it. Subjective experiences are important to understand and acknowledge because no one exists in a vacuum of pure, unaffected objectivity. The reason we divide time the way we do is not because of some inherent truth about the universe, but because of our own experience as people, and the specific measurements were standardized based on science after the fact. While measuring the oscillations of an atom remains a valid way to think about and measure time, so are poetry and art, the complex systems of creativity that make us human.
Bibliography
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Schwarz, Claudia. “Emily Dickinson’s Journeys Beyond Time.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 32.1 (2007): 83–99. Print.
