Dashes in poems full#

Photo by Phyllis ChristopherĬolette Bryce is an Irish poet who lives in the North East of England. Her own Collected Poems is just such a volume – offering up new ‘jewels’ on each return. “If I read a book … feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” wrote Dickinson in a letter. Today, that closing image might translate to “an admiring Blog”.

One wonders what such a private poet would make of our curious age of self-promotion. She reminds us that poems have a life of their own, beyond the uncertain arena of contemporary reputation.

Perhaps she is simply leading us back into the silence out of which each poem emerges.ĭickinson created poems as durable as diamonds without ever receiving the boost of publication. Like many of Dickinson’s poems, it ends on a dash. This image encapsulates an experience familiar to most of us, whether poets or not, losing a precious spark of inspiration to the “prosy winds” of everyday responsibilities. And yet, her idiosyncratic methods of denoting breath, emphasis and pauses, add up to an unforgettable reading experience. Her verse forms are more related to the common meter of traditional hymns (alternating 4-beat and 3-beat lines – as in, for example, the poem above) than to the iambic pentameter of literary tradition. She is also something of an enigma when it comes to poetic form she is both the least adventurous and the most original of poets. Image by peppergrassĮmily Dickinson was a mysterious figure in the social world of Amherst, Massachusetts, confining herself to her father’s house for much of her adult life. It adds a liveliness and fluidity to the syntax, being somehow less ‘settled’ than conventional modes, and the effect can be to revitalize the language.įrom ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun (764)’Įmily Dickinson’s house in Amherst. The Dickinsonian dash can be seen, perhaps, as both bridge and river, both connector and divider of the words and clauses.

Dashes in poems full#

There has been much speculation as to what the dashes in Dickinson’s poems may signify, but one thing is for certain, they do not translate into the commas and full stops preferred by her early editors. Commas, semi-colons, full stops, line breaks: all of these can control the pace and rhythm with which another person may speak a poet’s words. The punctuation in any poem serves as a set of instructions to the reader as to how it should be spoken aloud.

And finally, not one, but four exclamation marks: all available bells and whistles are being employed. As if those longed for nights weren’t wild enough, they are repeated three times – a classic rhetorical device – and capitalized on top. The energy in this poem is manifested by an exhilarating combination of declaration, sigh, and flow, the clauses simultaneously joined and held apart by the poet’s signature dashes. As a result, they set about re-punctuating and ‘improving’ the texts for publication, and in doing so interfered with what was most unique about them – the lightning dash-driven impression of a brilliant mind in action. From the Amherst College Archives When Emily Dickinson died in 1886, it was with astonishment that her sister Lavinia discovered close to eighteen hundred poems, many arranged into handbound booklets, packed away in a box.įour years later, when the first selection of her work was published to an appreciative readership, something had been subtly altered in the appearance of the poems.ĭickinson’s style of punctuation was so at odds with the poetic conventions of the day, it was viewed as a weakness by the literary editors appointed by her family.