The Em--Dash

This speaker of this poem describes how her dwelling place is greater than dwelling in a house because her dwelling place is "Possibility." She says that prose is like a house, while poetry is more like a forest. The forest is a dwelling place with more possibility, with more windows, doors, chambers, and unrestrained visual power. In contrast, a house invokes the sense of order, boundaries, and an absence of creative possibilities. A forest on the other hand, does the work of reaching toward heaven to gather Paradise, and the speaker says poetry is a medium that strives to do something similar.

The unusual and frequent use of dashes in this poem does several significant things. Firstly, the content of the poem is about the versatility of poetry, and in using the dash so strangely, Emily Dickinson exercises poetry’s power of versatility, being unrestrained by conventional rules of grammar and punctuation. It is a demonstration of how poetry is "Possibility." Also, the poem often borrows from prose’s conventional use of punctuation and grammar with the use of commas to separate or connect ideas at line breaks and in the middle of sentences. Dickinson replaces the use of commas with the dash, stretching the limits that convention often sets in prose.

The use of this dash in terms of the ideas within the poem is puzzling to me, as they sometimes seem to connect words and ideas, while other times to separate them; still further, sometimes this dash seems to do both. The frequent interruption readers feel with the dashes embedded into trains of thought has the effect of fragmenting and disconnecting the ideas. Yet, the disconnection is less final as the use of a period would be, and so all 12 lines still seem connected together like fragmented puzzle pieces make up a whole. Each of these collections of words are like trees in a forest, individual yet part of a whole; this poem is the embodiment of the analogy it speaks of poetry being like the dwelling place of a forest. These ideas and images are conjured through techniques and ways that only poetry could make possible, therefore demonstrating how poetry is possibility.