One of Emily Dickinson's most notable stylistic traits was her pronounced use of the dash. Dickinson included so many dashes in her work that their frequency is on par (and, in some cases, exceeds) with that of commas and periods. This unique trademark was essential to the rhythm, structure, and layout of her poetry. While Dickinson was not the only one to utilize the dash, it was featured in her work with a prominence and complexity that was unparalleled at the time.
Take, for instance, this excerpt from the last stanza of "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -," one of her most famous poems:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The poem depicts the speaker at the moment of her demise. Light begins to fade and she hears the faint sound of a buzzing fly. The dashes are constant and cut between images and phrases, like the splicing of film stock. They disrupt the rhythm of each line, creating a choppy interruption in the flow of text. This fits the content of the poem perfectly in that the speaker is drifting between life and death, barely aware of her surroundings. In making these vague impressions of the outside world fragmented, the dashes serve an essential function. They segment the sound of the fly, the light from the window, and the fading of the speaker's sight. This use of dashes was revolutionary in that it built upon their contemporary use and showed what else they were capable of doing to image and structure.
A similar effect is achieved in one of Dickinson's other well-known works, "Before I got my eye put out," a poem about the speaker's failing eyesight:
The Meadows—mine—
The Mountains—mine—
All Forests—Stintless Stars—
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes—
The images are fragmented by the dashes, reflecting the steady decline of the speaker's eyesight. It is another instance of a formal choice mirroring the content. The speaker is shown trying to capture moments of beauty in nature as her eyesight worsens. These dashes give the stanza a snapshot quality, isolating each phrase much like the speaker herself would be isolated. Dickinson is better able to demonstrate this perspective with the aid of dashes.
In contrast, here is an example of a more conventional use of the dash. The following is a passage from "Annabel Lee," a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, a near-contemporary of Dickinson's:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea
In this example, the dashes serve to demarcate repetition and passionate interjection. The speaker's emotion is on display here as, at the end of the poem, he decries the tragedy of his lost love. Overcome with passion (as most of Poe's tragic romantic protagonists tend to be) the speaker repeats himself to demonstrate the depth of his feelings. Structurally, the dashes' purpose is fairly simple; they occur in instances of repetition and give a general impression of the poem being read aloud by the speaker.
Dickinson changed the use of the dash so dramatically precisely because she placed them in her work in such an unusual way. By including the dash so frequently in her poems, it served a multiplicity of purposes. It was able to change the rhythm of a line, break up a sequence of images, and even change the thematic emphasis of a section. The formal innovation of this move not only defined her poetry, but influenced many of the subsequent poets and writers who studied her work.
