A Summary and Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Clock Stopped’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Clock stopped’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, but it uses its central metaphor to explore one of the most salient themes of her poetry: death. Dickinson uses the image of the stopped clock to reflect on the ending of a life and what this means.

The clock in the poem is a small grandfather clock: a detail we can deduce from the fact that it has a pendulum (as grandfather clocks do) and the fact that it doesn’t sit on a mantelpiece. The clock is situated in a shopman’s window.

Summary

A Clock stopped –
Not the Mantel’s –
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing –
That just now dangled still –

Emily Dickinson begins ‘A Clock stopped’ with that very simple line: ‘A Clock stopped’. The metre reflects the stopping of the clock: ‘Clock stopped’ is either a spondee (that is, two stressed syllables side-by-side) or, at the very least, a heavy trochee (with ‘Clock’ being emphasised slightly more than ‘stopped’).

Either way, there is no neat to-and-fro that one gets with a line of, say, iambic pentameter, to mirror the ticking and tocking of a clock – and then, with that dash, the line is over, just as the clock’s motion came to an end.

We are then told that all of the best clockmakers in Geneva couldn’t mend it. That ‘still’ which concludes the first stanza is ironic: until ‘just now’ the cuckoo ‘puppet’ continued to dangle, but now he is ‘still’ in the other sense of being ‘motionless’ (or, if you will, lifeless).

An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain –
Then quivered out of Decimals –
Into Degreeless Noon –

The notion that the figures of the clock ‘hunched’ literally ‘with pain’ is pathetic fallacy, and introduces the secondary meaning of the poem, which is that the clock stopping is meant to remind us of our own deaths, which so often are accompanied by pain.

‘Figures’, as John Robinson observes in his study Emily Dickinson (Faber), is a pun: the numbers on the clock face are ‘figures’ but Dickinson also summons the human figure or body, too (and bodies are ‘hunched, with pain’, of course).

The idea of the clock running out of decimals – just as the minutes and seconds of our own lives must one day run out – consolidates the idea that the clock is being personified, as if it is human just like us. Note the way ‘Decimals’ chimes with ‘decibels’, a word which doesn’t appear in the poem but ironically haunts it, we might say, via the suggestion of the sound the clock would make if it hadn’t stopped.

It will not stir for Doctors –
This Pendulum of snow –
This Shopman importunes it –
While cool – concernless No –

The pendulum of the clock – which we can now understand as a stand-in for the human heart, which beats with its rhythm just as the pendulum swung from side to side – will not start going again, not even for Doctors. Now the clock is well and truly humanised or personified.

It’s also gone cold, like a dead body: it’s a ‘pendulum of snow’. The heart beating in the chest is thus figured as resembling a pendulum swinging inside a grandfather clock, its rhythm steady and constant.

The owner of the shop where the clock is found urges the clock to start, but nothing will work. The notion of the various parts of the clock nodding a ‘No’ (which is oxymoronic: people nod for yes, not no) suggests the temporary movement of the pendulum and other parts as people try to will the clock to start ticking again.

Nods from the Gilded pointers –
Nods from the Seconds slim –
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life –
And Him –

The poem’s final stanza refers to the ‘Decades of Arrogance’ of the Shopman, implying that the shop-owner took the clock’s continued ‘life’ for granted, and now it has stopped working berates it for having stopped.

Is this, then, a veiled reference to the way we take each other for granted, and it’s only when people die that we stop to appreciate the difference they make?

Of course, Emily Dickinson’s poem, as this summary demonstrates, is far less sentimental than that implies. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the clock that stopped is the human heart that, too, must stop one day.

Analysis

‘A Clock Stopped’ cleverly conflates the ‘stopped clock’ with the image of a dead body. But this conflation raises an interesting question. Is the clock in the poem an actual clock, or merely a metaphor for a dead human body? In other words, is the clock in the poem a metaphor for a person, or are the ‘human’ features of the clock metaphorical?

Dickinson invites and exploits this confusion, beginning her poem by describing what is clearly ‘A Clock’, before shifting, halfway through at the beginning of the third stanza, to talk of ‘Doctors’: ‘It will not stir for Doctors’. Are the ‘Doctors’ here figurative doctors, such as that ‘Shopman’ who owns the clock and tries (and fails) to revive its mechanism?

Perhaps the best way to analyse and interpret Dickinson’s poem is to say that the poem is about a clock throughout, but that she is using this miniature grandfather clock (the very name of the clock inviting a comparison with humans, and with old age and death) as an extended metaphor for human life (and death).

Viewed this way, many local details in ‘A Clock Stopped’ take on additional significance. That description in the first stanza, of the clock as a ‘puppet’, suggests – as Helen Vendler points out in her study, AMAZON – the notion that human beings, too, are mere ‘puppets’ who are not fully in control of their own lives, controlled as they are by outside forces (God? the State?).

Form

Unusually for an Emily Dickinson poem, ‘A Clock Stopped’ largely contains full rhyme, rather than the pararhyme or half-rhyme which Dickinson often prefers to use. There is only one instance of pararhyme, in the second stanza: ‘pain’ and ‘noon’.

However, the rest of the poem isn’t fully rhymed: although we do find rhyming pairs such as ‘skill’ and ‘still’, ‘snow’ and ‘No’, ‘slim’ and ‘Him’, there are also many lines which are not rhymed at all.

Dickinson also departs from her preferred quatrains in the first and final stanzas of the poem, which contain five lines. There is a ghost of a form in ‘A Clock Stopped’, but it is not a rigidly regular one. This mirrors the loss of regularity, we might say, attendant on the clock’s loss of rhythm: the pendulum that marked time has ceased to swing, just as the human heart has ceased to beat.

If you want to own all of Dickinson’s wonderful poetry in a single volume, you can: we recommend the Faber edition of her Complete Poems. Discover more about Dickinson’s classic poems with ‘I died for Beauty, but was scarce‘, ‘One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted‘, and ‘I cannot live with You‘.