Thus far, the most intriguing part of Dickinson’s poetry has been her punctuation, particularly her dashes. I find this especially interesting because I frequently use dashes and slashes in my own writing but have always considered using them to be a sign of weakness in my writing, mostly an indicator of indecisiveness and incompleteness; in contrast, Dickinson’s dashes are deliberate and, thus, an essential part of her work. The definition of dash itself has a variety of meanings, most; however, refer to motion, often, a sudden quick or even violent movement. This definition helps to illuminate the function of Dickinson’s dashes. Her dashes make her work dynamic as they imply a development or movement between ideas.  Not only does Dickinson invoke dashes to express her own ideas, the dashes also are her way of connecting with the reader. A dash, physically, as an abrupt horizontal line in the middle of text, seems to simultaneously reach out to the reader as well as push him away. In this sense, her writing becomes alive; like Whitman and Emerson, her writing is organic, not only echoing the human condition but also becoming almost human itself.  Her poems are purposefully left incomplete as a reflection of the poem’s process of development and with her deliberate dashes, she puts responsibility on the reader to finish the work. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is an example of the various functions of Dickinson’s dashes. She opens the poem with two, structurally identical stanzas that employ two dashes framing the middle word in the third line and one dash at the end of the forth.  The dash at the end of the forth line of the second stanza, “My Mind was going numb – “, serves three purposes: 1) it forces the reader to pause, a rest in her poetic melody and 2) it bridges the space between the second and third stanza. Paradoxically, Dickinson uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush together. She then conclude the poem with “And Finished knowing – then – “. This line reminds me of the game that my family and I used to play on road trips. One of us, usually my father, would start telling a story then, after a paragraph or two, pass it on to someone else. Then that person, picking up from where my father left off, would tell more of the story. Dickinson invokes the same idea, she uses her dashes to pass off the poem to the reader. Dickinson does not write poems that give answers but rather provoke the process of discovering answers within oneself. Through her unconventional use of punctuation, especially her dashes, Dickinson’s poetry becomes alive, reaching out to the reader, engaging and encouraging them to find meaning. The deliberate dashes make Dickinson’s poetry as much an expression of the reader as her own ideas.

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