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Emily DickinsonA Clock stopped—
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Dickinson generally offered no titles, and it is standard to refer to the first line as a title or by a number assigned to them by editors who collated them after her death. “A Clock Stopped—” is #159 in Todd (1896); #287 in Johnson (1955), and #259A (1980) in Franklin.
Dickinson most often wrote in common meter, or a line of eight syllables followed by one of six syllables. In this syllable count, there is the unstressed syllable followed by one that is stressed. Dickinson did not employ several common constructions of punctuation, often using dashes instead of commas or periods, something that Todd conventionalized and Johnson restored. Dickinson also employed her own unique capitalization, not capitalizing proper nouns only but any word that she deemed important or wanted to stress.
Slant rhyme—as in “pain” (Line 7) and “noon” (Line 9)—popular with contemporary poets, was not used commonly in Dickinson’s day. Dickinson does employ rhyme in each of her stanzas in “A Clock stopped—.” Besides the slant rhyme in stanza two, exact rhymes appear with “skill” (Line 3) and “still” (Line 5); “snow” (Line 11) and “No” (Line 13); and “slim” (Line 15) and “him” (Line 18). Untraditionally, however, she alternates how many lines separate the rhymes, which changes the schema from a more traditional ABCB notation.
Extended Metaphor
An extended metaphor is a comparison that is continued throughout the poem from beginning to end. An extended metaphor lets the writer draw correlations between an abstract concept (here, death) and a tangible description (here, the clock’s failure). The reader can visualize the mechanism of the clock and thus perceive the cessation of the body in a way that makes the concept clearer, more memorable, and more negotiable. The stanzas are organized around the explanation of the stoppage of the clock/mortal, the last seconds before the mechanism broke or death occurred, the finality of the problem, and the hubris of thinking resurrection can happen through human intervention. The speaker means for the clock to function as the human body, with all its parts stopping. That death is a permanent condition. Human beings, like the watchmaker, medical experts, and seller cannot bring the clock/body back to functionality. Their efforts are futile in face of the ultimate “Him” (Line 18) of authority at the end of the poem who has caused the stoppage to begin with. The poem’s structure relies on its metaphor running through the entirety and would lack power if the clock image were only mentioned once.
Dash
Dickinson’s use of the long dashes is well known. Most of the poet’s 1800 poems were handwritten. Without having a computer that could bold or italicize or underline, this method allowed Dickinson to add emphasis to her lines and words within. The dashes in “A Clock Stopped—” are particularly effective in creating a tone of solemnity. Their frequency adds in slowing down the reader’s processing of the extended image, adding pauses that help to indicate the feeling of stopping. This is shown best in the line “A Clock stopped—” with a dash providing a stop itself. The fragmentation created by the dashes shows, too, the “quivering” (Line 8) of the last seconds. Here, the lines seem to almost jerk.
In other cases, the dash serves to create an aside or clarification. In “It will not stir for Doctors— / This Pendulum of snow” (Lines 10-11), the dash serves to reference the “it” in the first part as being the “pendulum” (Line 11). The dashes also help to clarify that the old shopkeeper, with his “Decades of Arrogance” (Line 16), thinks he can control the “Dial life” (Line 17) of the clock, cajoling it back to life while the speaker is making the point that it is up to “Him” (Line 18), the supreme being, rather than any of the mortals in the poem.
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By Emily Dickinson
