The Hourglass of Consciousness: On Dickinson’s Stratified View of Tim

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s poetry presents a profound and complex meditation on the nature of time, which remains an underexplored facet of her work. Moving beyond the conventional binary of linear and cyclical time, this essay argues that Dickinson develops a stratified view of time. Through close readings of key poems, including “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and “Pain-has an Element of Blank,” this study demonstrates how Dickinson’s poetic language deconstructs objective temporality to foreground the constitutive role of consciousness. Dickinson progresses from acknowledging time’s relativity to examining its granular, subjective perception, often metaphorized as falling grains of sand in an hourglass, thus revealing an attempt to use poetic language to arrest these fleeting moments of awareness and asserting existence against oblivion and forging a momentary sense of eternity within the finite self. This analysis not only deepens the understanding of Dickinson’s poetics but also facilitates a richer interdisciplinary dialogue between literature, philosophy, and phenomenology on the problem of time.