Emily Dickinson

A clock stopped—not the mantel's

A CLOCK stopped—not the mantel's;

Geneva's farthest skill

Geneva = Swiss watchmaking, the world's best. Even the finest clockmaker can't fix this particular stoppage.

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

quivered out of decimals

Moving from measured time (decimals, fractions of seconds) into timelessness. Death exits the counting system.

Into degreeless noon.
It will not stir for doctors,

pendulum of snow

Snow = cold, white, still. The body has gone cold and motionless like a stopped pendulum.

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

Decades of arrogance

The clock's hands keep their haughty positions while the dead person can't respond. Time itself is indifferent to individual death.

The dial life and him.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Clock That Isn't a Clock

The opening line's dash does crucial work: "not the mantel's" tells us immediately this is a metaphorical clock. Dickinson is writing about death—specifically the moment a human heart stops—but she never says "heart" or "death" directly. Instead she sustains the clock conceit for all 16 lines.

Watch how the metaphor develops. First the body becomes a "puppet" that was "bowing" (breathing? the chest rising and falling?) but now hangs "still." Then it's a "trinket" experiencing "awe"—Dickinson anthropomorphizes the clock even as she mechanizes the human. The "figures hunched with pain" could be numbers on a clock face or the facial features of someone dying. She's collapsing the distinction between person and timepiece.

The phrase "degreeless noon" is the poem's hinge. Noon usually means 12:00 exactly, but "degreeless" removes all measurement. The dead have entered a state beyond temperature (degrees), beyond the 360 degrees of a clock face, beyond any quantification. It's simultaneously the brightest moment (noon) and the end of all calibration.

Dickinson vs. The Professionals

Lines 9-12 bring in the doctors and the shopman (undertaker or watch repairman—deliberately ambiguous). Both are professionals who work on broken things, and both are utterly useless here. The body responds with "cool, concernless No"—that comma makes the "No" almost lazy, unbothered.

The final image is devastating: the clock hands "Nod" (repeated for emphasis) with "arrogance." They're still in their positions, still marking time, completely indifferent to the stopped mechanism below. The "dial life" (the living person, still measured by clock time) faces "him" (the corpse) across "Decades of arrogance." Not actual decades—the arrogance OF decades, time's supreme indifference.

CONTEXT Dickinson wrote obsessively about death despite (or because) she rarely left her house. She attended few funerals but witnessed several deaths of people close to her. This poem's clinical precision—treating death as a mechanical failure—is characteristic of her refusal to sentimentalize mortality.