Reading Emily Dickinson is having a conversation with her. It’s helping her wrestle with and grasp concepts that present an intellectual, emotional, philosophical, any sort of challenge. Thus the critical components of her poetry are essentially critical components in a conversation. Her poems speak to the reader with their own distinct voice, a lyrical voice characterized by a familiar hymn metric pattern. Her poems follow both the cadence and the rhythm of the hymn from she adopted. Alternating between four and three-beat lines, this adopted-form is essential to Dickinson’s poetry. She effectively uses the predictability of the meter as a contrasting backdrop to her content. As Stevie Smith explain in the Poetry Foundation’s Biography of Emily Dickinson, “while certain lines accord with their place in the hymn — either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion – the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence included the words the speak the greatest ambiguity”(Smith).
In addition to creating a conversation through the metric structure of her poetry, Dickinson also creates a connection by writing in the first person. In doing this, Dickinson both expresses her own thoughts, ideas, opinions and feelings while simultaneously connecting with the reader. By writing in the first person, she forces the reader to become the “I” in the poem, the speaker; the reader embodies the poem and forges a conversational connection with Dickinson.
Dickinson also utilizes punctuation to mimic the nature of personal conversation. She invokes the dash as a way to both reach out to the reader – as an invitation to join her – and a way to create a hesitation that is natural in speech. As Howe describes “she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on the intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse…a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking” (21). Dickinson’s dashes represent her both defying the convention of masculine discourse and holding back in an effort to reach 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.
Dickinson’s poems reflect how central friendship and personal connection was in her life. Her poetic approach crafted a particular kind of connection with her reader. According to Smith, “she asks the reader to complete the connection that her words merely imply – to round off the context from which the allusion is taken, to take part and imagine the whole”. In her poetry, Dickinson structurally binds seemingly ill-fitted fragments in a harmonic hymn, symbolically showing that connections are essentially everywhere and with everyone.
Yet another way in which Dickinson creates a connection with the reader, is through her effort to define abstractions. Her poems frequently open with metaphorical definitions, such as “Hope is a feather”, the Spirit is a Conscious Ear”. By employing “is” the first line is invariably a statement of comparison. In the world of Dickinson’s ‘poetry, “definition proceed via comparison” (Smith). One cannot say directly what is; the essence is indefinable. Instead, Dickinson articulates connection created out of correspondence. In Dickinson’s writing, comparison is a reciprocal process; her metaphors observe not firm distinction; by defining one concept in terms of another she produces a new layer of meaning in which both terms are changed. In this sense, her poems/words circle around the transformation of terms, an incessant metamorphosis. The final lines of her poems, defined by their inconclusiveness, are anything but definite. Dickinson’s endings are really only beginnings. Again, circling back to the invitation of reader participation that is central to her poetry, ending her poems with inconclusive fragments are another way in which Dickinson initiates and nurtures a connection with her reader. It is as through she has contributed what she desires to the conversation only for the reader to bring his/her thoughts to create meaning.
Works Cited:
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Print.
Smith, Stevie. “Emily Dickinson: The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson>.
