Emily Dickinson’s Dash – The splinter and pluraliser of syntax and meaning.

By: Coach Ken

An Emily Dickinson poem would not be recognisable without her signature dashes. But how do we make sense of her penchant for the dash? How do they shape her poetics? How do we effectively operationalise the literary analysis of this dash?

The Dash as “Sound of Interruption” (Towle)

Beth Towle likes to call the dash the “sound of interruption”.

But one of the most interesting glitch forms happens when punctuation serves as interruption. I do not mean the full-stop period or the lazy comma. Rather, I mean the sudden and visually interesting types of punctuation that not only break pattern but also force the eye to reckon with the interruption. These sorts of visual clues mess with the music of a poem, force the reader to change register or voice. They are surprising and disruptive, mirroring the interrupted patterns of working-class life.

No one mastered this type of interrupted sound and vision better than Emily Dickinson. Her dashes are little breaks in form that force the reader to reconsider meaning. It can become confusing at times to read a Dickinson dash. Where do we place the emphasis of meaning – on the word before the dash or the word after? Do we assume the dash plays the same role as a period or comma or do we need to new way to think of the pause it creates? Much has been made of the possibility that Dickinson meant for her dashes to be considered as marks of rhythm or meaning. Scholars have been trying to understand the ways in which her downward versus upward slash-marks might mean different things. There are considerations about dash-length that original manuscript readers have had to take into account. Many others have pointed out the ways in which the dash is also an act of violence. And it certainly is, in that it forces unpleasant things to happen to our consideration of sound in Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson’s dashes perform better than most poets could ever hope to do with mere words: they express aching dissonance, painful interruption.

In other words, the dash, in Dickson’s hands can be: 

• An act of violence – a moment of disruption, or even fragmentation and severing. 

• A splinter of syntax and meaning – Dickinson’s poetic syntax is often ambiguous as the dash often creates different possibilities of reading and understanding the poetic lines. In this regard, syntactical and semantic ambiguity also implies syntactical and semantic plurality, creating plural connections between phrases/words/lines even as it creates severances.

• A shape-shifting punctuation that acquires the functions of other pronunciation forms – The dash is an ambiguous mark of logic and cadence, it can function as comma, semi-colon, colon, the dash, or all of the above…

• A rhythmic modulator – Metre becomes unstable for semantic and patterns of rhythmic stresses become uncertain but also plural.

• A moment of silence, a temporary pause, a moment of disjunction.

• A double/plural voicing – A dash could also signal a shift to, or performance of, a second/another voice speaking in place of the first … or speaking with the first voice.

As such, the dash is Dickinson’s splendid genius, for her use of the dash affects meaning-creation by CONCURRENTLY manipulating and pluralising syntax, rhythmic and semantics possibilities. No wonder the meaning of Dickinson’s poetry is so hard to pin down… it is meant to be tricky, slippery and shape-shifting. Above all, given how the dash pluralises meaning and interrupts cadence and thought, the dash is a destabiliser of thought itself.

Emily Dickinson's Unutterable Word as Dash

As one literary critic Deirdre Fagan puts it, “The dashes become a thread between the sayable and the unsayable, a caesura between life and death, a pause, a gasp, sometimes a chasm over which one must make a leap of understanding”. And perhaps, the dash invites the reader to take a leap of faith, to be comfortable with the idea that meaning is plural and that any attempts at pinning down a singular poetic meaning that is always met with the deferral and elusiveness of concrete, final meaning. Poetic meaning in Dickinson’s hands, is always destabilised/destabilising, pluralised/pluralising and changing.

One more way of understand the dash in Dickinsonian poetics is how the dash approximates and expresses ideas but never fully articulates them through words/diction/language. The dash, in this regard, is a gesture and articulation of that which lies beyond language/linguistic expression itself - that which eludes language. By extension, the dash is also the thread between what can be or cannot be known. After all, to put something into words, into language, is to know it and affirm its existence.

And this is fitting for Dickinson’s poetry, especially in poems that contemplate death. Many of these poems conclude with a dash and invite questions about how the dash functions grammatically and logically. Is it a full-stop? Is it a temporary suspension that hands both the poem and the reader in a liminal space that at once gestures towards completion and finality yet resists them at the same time? 

Analysing some dashes in "Because I could not stop for Death”

Consider this extract (penultimate and final stanzas) from “Because I could not stop for Death” (479):

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground -

The Roof was scarcely visible -

The Cornice - in the Ground -

Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity -

The penultimate stanza of the poem describes the fragmented sights of what seems like a tomb, yet the extended metaphorical images are couched in the language of homely architecture. As such, the tomb is rendered familiar, homely, as a house, yet the dashes complicate this stable imagistic interpretation, for the dashes visually renders/segments the house into fragmented parts of “[r]oof” and “[c]ornice” therefore also performing, or reflecting, the persona’s own limited sight and thus partial knowledge of what she sees, just as the “[r]oof was scarcely visible”. The dash, in other words, disrupts the legibility of the poetic line for the reader as much as it reflects the persona’s struggles of clear sight. 

The dashes also omit, thereby pluralising, the logical linkages between phrases and poetic lines. For instance, “The Roof was scarcely visible -/The Cornice - in the Ground -” can be read in multiple ways. On the one hand, the cornice can be seen as an imagistic fragment that does not follow the subsequent phrase “in the ground”, meaning that the dash that brackets the cornice image is in effect functioning as a comma, suggesting that the cornice imagery is only supplementary and can be omitted – the cornice is only noticed and named, without relation to other elements in the setting, and without having been ascribed a function or descriptive adjective. In this regard, if the cornice is an omissible image, then one may interpret the third and fourth lines of the penultimate stanza as “The Roof was scarcely visible [because it was] in the ground”.

On the other hand, if the dashes that envelope the cornice imagery does not function as a pair of commas, and the reader instead considers the dash that follows the cornice as an omitted copula, then the interpretation of the same third and fourth lines could be “the Cornice [is] in the Ground”. As such, given these omissions of linkages and copulas, the permutations of interpretation are endless, depending on how the dashes are understood to function syntactically. But all this difficulty of interpretation and reading, however, is in fact, generative and productive, for the reader is also taken into the experience of the persona herself, seeing and knowing the world through fragmented pieces, knowing yet not fully knowing what is around her, just as she cannot possibly be fully aware of what comes after an inevitable death.

Thus, the poem appositely concludes with the dash as well, because it concludes on a gesture towards the unknowable. The dash carries and propels residual momentum beyond the poem’s boundaries as the persona considers, or “surmise[s]” eternity. She can approximate some knowledge of eternity that lies beyond limited mortal life yet cannot possibly access it. The dash, in this regard, functions both as a full-stop but also a semi-colon– It acknowledges that life will end, given our mortal limitations, yet also defers the final completion of the final poetic line and thus gestures to the possibilities that may lie beyond mortal life itself - of life after life.