Dickinson's Dashes

The dashes in Dickinson’s poems fascinate me. Not only does she use them quite a bit at various points within her poems– and I myself have to employ enormous restraint when it comes to the number of em dashes in my own writing– but quite often she also ends her poems with them. It’s partially frustrating, like she’s ending her thoughts with a colon or a semicolon, or even a comma: you’re implying that you have more to say! But it’s also so clearly deliberate that it invites some extra thought.

Sometimes, I believe that I can make at least some sense of her final dashes. For instance, in poem 479 (“Because I could not stop for Death…”), she ends with the lines “I first surmised the Horses; Heads / Were toward Eternity - ” (23-24). The dash literally extends the poem itself into eternity, as I trail off in reading it. It fits into the poem’s statements about death perfectly. In poem 448 (“I died for Beauty - but was scarce…”), the final dash also seems related to death. The speaker ends by saying, “We talked between the Rooms - / Until the Moss had reached our lips - / And covered up - Our names - ” (10-12). The trailing off of the poem here almost resembles the moss that the speaker mentions, which seems to have crept up on the poem as well.

Other times, the final dash seems far more confusing. In poem 381 (“I cannot dance opon my Toes…”) she ends with, “It’s as full as the Opera - ” (20). Why stop with a dash here? What is she leaving unsaid? “It’s full as the Opera” seems like a clear enough phrase on its own, carrying no ambiguity whatsoever. But with the dash, I question it. I question the whole poem, whose own message seems clear enough; it’s describing glee in terms of the ballet. What to do here?

In paging through the Dickinson section of the book, I also noticed that she liked to end with exclamation points in very nearly all of the poems that do not end in dashes. This too I cannot make sense of. But it seems as though one cannot talk about her poems as a whole without bringing up a lengthy discussion of punctuation. And as I looked at punctuation in various poems, untangling the meaning of the final dashes almost seemed to help untangle the poem itself. It was an interesting exercise in analyzing Dickinson's work.