Symposium 2004

Reading the Lines:The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinson's Dashes

by Rosanna Nafziger, Sophomore

The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.

This implicit intimacy becomes clear in a poem where
Dickinson directly tempts the reader into examining her thought process. In “The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” she appears to provide a map challenging the reader to follow her mind:




The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside -
The Brain is deeper than the sea -
For - hold them - Blue to Blue -
The one the other will absorb -
As Sponges - Buckets - do -
The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound –
 


By writing of the brain as an expansive power as weighty as
God, --both in general terms as well as referring, of course, to her own brain in particular—she intimidates the reader who wishes to follow the poetic path left by such a powerful object. In “Dashing Genius: Emily Dickinson and the Punctuation of Cognition,” Elizabeth Howell Brunner proposes that “the dash represents the multiple avenues of thought inherent to genius and challenges the reader to puzzle through sophisticated metaphoric connections which are perhaps less obvious to our slower minds” (2). She even suggests that Dickinson’s dash was perhaps an “unconscious tribute to a gap and a leap within the mind” parallel to neurons firing across synapses (1).

As an element of connection, Dickinson’s dash links parallel
or complementary notions in “The Brain - is wider than the Sky.” In the first line, the dash forms a slight pause between “Brain” and “is,” leading the reader to sense the pattern of creation in Dickinson’s mind as object followed by action. The unconventional disturbance between noun and verb creates the effect of first conceiving and pondering the object—the Brain—and then moving on to developing the object through associated description, in the usual fashion of the human creative process. Dickinson omits this dash between noun and verb in the parallel lines beginning each of the subsequent stanzas (“The Brain is deeper than the sea—,” and “The Brain is just the weight of God—,”) conceivably because she has already established this connection between object and development and the two have become one thought unit requiring no creative process to link them. The thought connection in the dashes allows the reader into the moment of poetic creation, when two apparently dissimilar things—the Brain and the Sky—are connected. Like voyeurs, we feel we have been allowed an intimate glimpse of Dickinson’s own brain.

At the same time, the nearly-perfect repetition of dashes in the
sentence structure of “The Brain - is wider than the sky” undermines the sense of observing an immediate and raw creative process. The general structure of each stanza includes a dash following “For” in the second line, with another before the final three words, and the final line incorporates a phrase/word inserted in the middle of the line separated by dashes on either side. The dashes, instead of indicating instantaneous thought connection, appear formulaic and create a distance between the reader and some notion of a creative moment for Dickinson. However, complexity and calculation need not deter a reader from recreating the moment of creation; after all, the creation of the poem takes place in more than a single moment, but the absence of temporal dimension in printed words produces the illusion of instantaneous creation. In fact, the time required to absorb Dickinson’s form and meaning lengthens the amount of time the reader associates with the poem’s creation, giving the reader the impression of following the poet through the lengthy process of writing, and an even deeper sense of vicariously “creating” the poem.

Besides denoting a pause of mental connection associated
with joining an idea and its development, Dickinson’s dashes also serve to link the words they group. “The Soul selects her own Society” uses dashes that allow the reader to group words in an imitation of Dickinson’s own associations:

The Soul selects her own Society -
Then - shuts the Door -
To her divine Majority -
Present no more -
Unmoved - she notes the Chariots - pausing
At her low Gate -
Unmoved - an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat -
I've known her - from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then - close the Valves of her attention -
Like Stone -
 
Kamilla Denmand describes this unity of the fragments
between the dashes when she notes that the dash “creates a poetry whose interpretation becomes a process of decoding the way each fragment signals meaning,” (33). Following Dickinson’s guides, the reader attempts to recreate her thinking by viewing the phrases between dashes as single poetic units. While readers instinctively slow the process of connection at the dash, they jump to clump the words between dashes into single poetic units. Consider the difference between the first lines of “The Brain - is wider than the Sky” and “The Soul selects her own Society.” In the former, the reader hesitates to discover what “The Brain” will do before first holding up the object and examining it, whereas “The Soul” is not considered apart from “selecting her own Society.” Here the reader gains a sense of viewing the direct associations in Dickinson’s mind—those associations that require no pause for the leap of a synapse.

In “The Soul selects her own society,” Dickinson uses phrases
like “—shuts the Door—,” “—she notes the chariots—,” and “—close the Valves of her attention—,” as complete thought units which she employs to the effect of words in the “sentence” of her poem. Viewed from this perspective, single words strangely isolated by dashes operate as conjunctions in the larger “sentence”, as does “then” in the final stanza. Conventional punctuation would accept the dash after “One” but placing another between “Then” and “close” oddly emphasizes “Then”. If, however, we look at that dash as a means of grouping the words in the phrase “close the Valves of her attention,” the reader leaps to follow Dickinson’s treatment of “close the Valves of her attention” as one poetic unit, reading the phrase as the metaphoric expansion of a single idea. In this example, the sense of intimacy has the practical application of aiding metaphoric understanding, but that impression of intimacy alone fortifies the reader to penetrate Emily Dickinson’s frequently-cryptic poetry.
An occasional perceived distancing between the acts of
reading and writing follows not only passages where the dashes adhere to regular, calculated structures that seem not to mirror the creative process, but also passages where the use of dashes appears arbitrary or random. Yet I contend that the very mystery of the dashes in a poem like “This was a Poet—It is that,” is what gives the reader the sensation of most intimately viewing Dickinson’s thought patterns.

This was a Poet - It is That
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings -
And Attar so immense
From the familiar species
That perished by the Door -
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it - before -
Of Pictures, the Discloser -
The Poet - it is He -
Entitles Us - by Contrast -
To ceaseless Poverty -
Of portion - so unconscious -
The Robbing - could not harm -
Himself - to Him - a Fortune -
Exterior - to Time –

 
In his 1967 book Emily Dickinson: An Introduction and
Interpretation, Richard Pickard expresses a frustration with the seeming arbitrariness of Dickinson’s punctuation and capitalization. He sees the primary purpose of the dashes as musical effects for tone, but says that “This eccentricity often defeats the meaning, for it is difficult to determine when the dashes indicate a metrical pause or when they are to be treated as commas, semicolons, or periods” (49). “This was a Poet - It is That-” provides a good example of the confusing disjunction caused by Dickinson’s use of dashes.
We note that certain dashes create parallels, as between the
first line, “This was a Poet — It is that,” and later, “The Poet — it is He;” but the final stanza (referring to “The Poet”):

Of Portion—so unconscious—
The Robbing—could not harm—
Himself—to Him—a Fortune—
Exterior—to Time—

is so riddled with dashes the reader scrambles to assemble the fragments, mentally erasing dashes in the process of constructing sentences. Similarly, while reviewing Paul Crumbley’s Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson, Tim Morris wrote that upon encountering Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum edition of Dickinson’s works, “I read past its strange dash-filled punctuation, mostly ignoring it to develop phrasings that I invented myself or unconsciously remembered from the earlier published versions of poems” (Morris). Mentally erasing the poet’s notations to determine some preconceived notion of poetic meaning is a critical act that dismantles the intimacy created between reader and poet and the trust implicit in attempting to recreate the poet’s moment of creation. However, the sense of inability on the part of the reader when faced with dashes that are nearly impossible to avoid “erasing” does not necessarily imply the reader’s failure to vicariously create the work with the poet. Even if Dickinson’s notations are indecipherable or appear arbitrary, seeming to distance the reader from the meaning, the interpretation of those notations as Dickinson’s personal notes gives the reader a voyeuristic sense of observing Dickinson’s mind—as if the poem itself is her thought. Thus, the strangeness of the dashes still allows the reader to participate in shaping the text and enjoy the sensation of re-creating Dickinson’s moment of writing—encouraging a deep implicit intimacy between her and the reader.

This implicit intimacy between poet and reader facilitated by
Dickinson’s unconventional use of the dash arises from the dash’s ability to convey a sense of connection between thoughts, to divide words into groups of direct association, and to appear to indicate Dickinson’s highly personal notations. Ironically, what at first seems an idiosyncratic stylistic effect operates to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the creative process of a highly reclusive individual. Far from distancing the reader, the dash actually provides a gateway between the act of reading and the poet’s moment of creation, only possible if we view the text as a shifting co-creation of reader and poet.



Edith Wylder, The Last Face: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971).
Jerusha Hall McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55.4 (2003) 569-601.
Michael Theune, “’One and One are One’…and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical Signs,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001) 99-116.