Dickinson and the Dash

Emily Dickinson stands out among poets because she dared to compose her poetry in highly untraditional manners.  She is noted not only for her unconventional word order and use of capitalization, but also for her placement of punctuation—especially in the case of the dash.  Most of Emily Dickinson’s poetry contains anywhere from eight dashes, as seen in poem 269, which begins “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!” to 48 dashes, as seen in poem 522, which start with the line “I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—“ (Dickinson).  These little horizontal lines vary in length as well as the distance between the words that surround them.  The significance in each halting mark varies among poems as well as within them.  Some dashes suggest a certain amount of emphasis on the word they separate, and other dashes create stilted lines that make it impossible for one to read the text in a continuous, flowing manner.  The dashes sometimes indicate moments in which one should pause for breath, such as in poem 591.  Describing the death of a “Fly,” Emily Dickinson increases the number of dashes from the first stanza to the last stanza as a sign of the narrator and the insect’s simultaneous fading from consciousness as shown by the ending lines “With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz – / Between the light – and me – / And then the Windows failed – and then / I could not see to see – (Dickinson, lines 13-16).  The final dash stands leaves room for interpretation as it gives the poem an open ending rather than the closed finality of a period.  Emily Dickinson’s unique poetic style allowed her to explore outside the realm of conventional punctuation.  Her use of dashes gives readers a different experience with poetry and the opportunity to focus on format as well as content.

Here is a link to one author’s thoughts on Emily Dickinson’s use of the dash: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/dash.htm