INTRODUCTION

The poetry of Emily Dickinson is characterized by her willingness to challenge convention, most characteristically through her use of “dashes” in addition to normal marks of punctuation. Now that the digital representations of the actual manuscripts of her poetry are widely available, we are becoming even more fully aware of the nuanced appearances of the texts. The goal of this project is to investigate the phenomenon of the dashes found in the poetry of Dickinson by exploring the subject matter of her poetry, manuscript material, and biographical events in her lifetime in light of my own research and new developments in Dickinson scholarship.

I am extending previous speculations about the punctuation into one further aspect of inquiry. I have been investigating the correlation of the dash patterns to a medical phenomenon known as “mouth breathing.” In her correspondence with Atlantic Monthly Editor T. W. Higginson, Dickinson emphasizes that Higginson has described the “gait” of her poetry as “spasmodic,” referring to its pace (Letters 409).¹

I hope my efforts to relate the origin of the dashes in her poetry to her own literal breathing patterns will result in a further understanding of the appearance of the dashes in her poetry, and of the relation of the dashes to the overall recurrent figure of breathing itself in her poems and letters. Without necessarily proving my point definitively, I want to explore biographical and textual considerations that cause me to believe that Emily Dickinson was likely a mouth breather, and that her mouth breathing is a plausible explanation for her use of dashes. In other words, I think it very likely that Emily Dickinson might have been a mouth breather, and that this one physiological irregularity could explain her highly unconventional—even unique—punctuation.

Emily Dickinson was born into the world of breathing in 1830. Yet ever since her poetry was first shared with a select few, it has been literally gasping for breath. For a period of time, when her poetry was found and first published, it was nearly smothered. The original editors of Dickinson found it necessary to regularize her unique use of punctuation, primarily by suppressing the dashes, and to standardize such other things as capitalization and diction. Little did they know, they were actually extinguishing much of the very life of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.

As the second half of the twentieth-century emerged, Dickinson’s poetry began to breathe more freely. Scholars and enthusiasts alike experienced the poetry of Emily Dickinson along with her breath—in the form of the rhythm that punctuation definitively helps supply in poetry—for the very first time. The punctuation returned to her poetry when it was published in full for the first time in 1955 by Thomas Johnson in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. The new versions of the poems caused confusion, though, and even bewilderment in many cases. No one knew what to make of the abundant and elaborate use of dashes, the very breath of Emily Dickinson penetrating for the first time through the pages of her manuscripts, and scholars continue to puzzle over their significance.

In 1998, Ralph W. Franklin published The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, improving still further upon the dating and representation of Emily Dickinson’s poems in the Johnson edition. This new edition of Dickinson’s poems includes all of the different known variants of each text, pulling together 1789 poems from in excess of 2500 scraps of Dickinson autograph manuscripts. Franklin’s representations of Emily Dickinson’s poems include her unique punctuation and capitalization, original spelling, variant word choices that she considered, and even notes on the manuscripts upon which the poems were found. This edition is and should continue to be considered the most accurate print representation of the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson’s poetry is very dense and extremely complex, so most readers tend to see the dashes more as something to bypass rather than to understand. The brevity of her poems not withstanding, because of their difficulty there is plenty to work with in each poem, even when one dismisses the characteristic dashes. Yet scholars have long emphasized their importance. The Johnson and then the Franklin editions generated great progress in both the interpretation of her unusual punctuation and the understanding of the poems themselves. And, yet, something is still missing.

Scholars now lean toward examining the autograph manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, instead of traditional print representations of her poetry. Even Franklin’s edition has been pushed aside in order for scholars to focus on the series of marks Dickinson scratched across the small pieces of paper she wrote upon. Ironically, the first time most scholars and readers experienced the autograph manuscripts of Dickinson was in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, published by Franklin nearly two decades earlier than his variorum edition, in 1981. It now seems that every mark of Dickinson’s pen, or pencil depending on the period of time in her life, is seen as both purposeful and significant. Unfortunately, this trend only serves further to confuse the matter of Emily Dickinson’s dashes, which still remains unresolved today.

My study focuses extended attention on the origin and purpose of the dashes found so profusely in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Until this matter is resolved, the poetry of Emily Dickinson will not truly be able to live and breathe. This is where the physical phenomenon of mouth breathing comes into play. My thesis makes the biographical speculation that Dickinson’s dashes could have stemmed from her being affected by the medical condition known as “mouth breathing.” Mouth breathing is an inherently simple explanation for the origin and use of dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, as this thesis will explore, fills in many gaps left in the understanding of both the life of Dickinson and her writing.

Mouth Breathing

Life both begins and ends with a single breath. In between these two breaths, breathing—a natural reflex that unconsciously replenishes the body with oxygen—is often ignored. However, breathing is the most fundamental action taken by creatures in order to live on Earth. People die because their bodies are unable to supply their cells with oxygen, because their bodies are unable to breathe. A lack of any other form of sustenance cannot kill a being faster than the lack of air. The act of breathing is so necessarily fundamental that our bodies cannot even afford to rely on us to gather air consciously—it is something that must be done automatically and continuously. Air is generally provided by the action of breathing, and we typically breathe through the nose. The act of breathing has been so refined through the development of the human being that simply breathing through the mouth instead of the nose has immense and dire consequences on the health of the entire human body.

Everyone can breathe through her mouth. In fact, everyone does at some point during her life. Whenever exercise occurs, for example, a human being often breathes simultaneously through both her nose and mouth. However, breathing solely through the mouth, instead of the nose, has adverse effects on the health of a human being. Mouth breathers generally begin breathing through their mouths because they have no other choice. The nose is blocked entirely, by nasal polyps or because of allergies for instance, to such an extent that breathing through it becomes impossible to sustain life. The body naturally compensates for the lack of nasal breathing by the taking in of air through the mouth and into the lungs.

The Western medical and scientific understanding of the effects of mouth breathing began to take shape over a hundred years ago, toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Even then, the effects of mouth breathing appear to have been often overlooked by physicians. As Dr. Joe O. Roe notes in The American Journal of Nursing as early as 1903, “There is no perverted function attended with so many ill effects, and none persisted in so continuously and with as little concern, as that of mouth-breathing” (87). Continuing with the introduction to his essay “Mouth-breathing—Its Injurious Effects,” Dr. Roe even takes the time to emphasize how long the observation of nose-breathing as healthy has been present throughout human society: “In proof that man was intended to be a nose-breather we might cite the authority of divine writ, when it says, ‘The Lord breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,’ which shows that the ancient Jews had a proper conception of the nose as a divinely appointed organ of breathing” (87). The seemingly benign effect of changing the path by which air flows through the head, even over a hundred years ago, was understood and characterized as drastic.

Perhaps the primary danger of mouth breathing is increased risk of infection. While the sense of smell is associated with the nose, smell is not the primary function of this organ. The removal of dust, foreign objects, and germs by the nose is thwarted by the act of mouth breathing. Mouth breathing thus makes people more prone to breathing in viruses and germs, because the body’s primary defense for such invasions is bypassed. As Roe emphasizes, “the nose in filtering the air . . . is consequently of the greatest importance in the prevention of pulmonary disease” (88). Even more, as I will discuss in chapter one, it is quite significant that Roe connects consumption directly to mouth breathing: “Mouth-breathing, therefore, may be regarded as one of the principal predisposing causes of consumption, while nose-breathing is the natural safeguard for its prevention” (89).

Adding to the problems of mouth breathing, the nose also humidifies the air breathed into the lungs through normal nasal breathing. This process is so vital that nerves in the nose regulate the moisture in the nasal cavity in order to meet the needs of various qualities of air breathed in. Air bypassing the nasal cavity via mouth breathing is not humidified to the appropriate level for adequate consumption by the lungs. The throat and lungs thus often become irritated because of dry air inhaled though the mouth. Even the temperature of the air breathed into the lungs is modified by the nasal cavity, preparing it for use by the lungs. Roe writes: “As a result of mouth-breathing the throat becomes dry and irritable, the larynx irritated, attended with hoarseness and cough; the person is made more susceptible to colds” (89).

Mouth breathing even has drastic visible effects on the physical development of a human being. The lack of proper air impairs the growth of the chest of a child who breathes through her mouth, and the chest becomes “abnormally contracted” (90). The nose is itself also drastically affected by the lack of airflow, remaining “small and contracted,” and “the end of the nose frequently becomes abnormally enlarged” (90). Both of these descriptions are consistent with the physical attributes of Emily Dickinson’s torso and nose found in the two extant pictures and one silhouette image of her that survive today. The connection between the physical effects of mouth breathing and the images of Emily Dickinson cannot be denied, and serve to further the evidence in her life and writing that accent her mouth breathing as well.

Finally, the sense of smell is thwarted by one’s breathing through the mouth instead of the nose. Roe, like many doctors who investigate mouth breathing, believes that breathing’s bypassing the nose suppresses the sense of smell. More modern studies have conclusively found the sense of smell lacking in oral breathing, something that is believed to be necessary for living a fulfilling life. Smelling, of course, is a large part of the sense of taste as well.

Breathing has become increasingly important in modern health practices. More modern interpretations of breathing associate the lungs themselves with energy levels. In the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Dr. Sivansankar explains that breathing through the nose causes back pressure in the lungs, allowing for the constant absorption of oxygen by the bloodstream. Mouth breathing does not generate back pressure in the lungs, which alters the pH balance of the bloodstream. The effect on the mouth breather is an increase in vocal effort necessary to sustain proper speech (1416-18). Properly breathing through the nose regulates the body and pulse, reducing hypertension and stress. The more that is learned about mouth breathing, the more it is realized that it has an undeniable effect on the entire health of a human being.

Dickinson’s Poetry and Breath

The most unique feature of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is her dashes. One primary effect of the dashes involves rhythm. Dashes represent longer syntactic pauses than do commas, and therefore they provide Dickinson’s poems with a very erratic and entirely singular rhythm. Thus Dickinson’s poetry is in part characterized by her unusual representation of the pace of language. One of my main points is that the “spasmodic” pace of Dickinson’s poetry is consistent with the seemingly irregular rhythm of the speech patterns of mouth breathers.

As I will explore more fully in chapter two, research on the dashes alone provides major points in a number of articles and books and is the primary focus of one book on Dickinson. Those who claim to have found the origin of the dashes are immediately challenged by skeptical scholars and, to date, their mystery has never been adequately explained. The matter is further complicated by the fact that Dickinson left behind a vast correspondence with many different individuals, and those letters are quite similar to the poems themselves. In fact, the scholar who is most experienced with Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, R. W. Franklin, informed Dickinson scholars: “any special theory about Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts will have to fit both poems and letters” (120). The characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poems are inherent in all of her writing.

The first chapter of this thesis addresses the issue of Dickinson herself. The life of Emily Dickinson is exceptionally complex, especially for an individual who spent a good portion of her life inside her father’s house. I will connect the phenomenon of mouth breathing to Emily Dickinson through the history of her life that is available. Through her writing, primarily the correspondences she had with others, I will explore how Emily Dickinson wrote to others about her various illnesses and how those correspondences relate to my argument of her possibly being a mouth breather. In addition, the perspectives of other individuals about Emily Dickinson and their recorded interactions with her will reinforce this thesis. The voice and breath of Emily Dickinson are often commented on by those who knew her, in ways that reinforce a representation of her as a mouth breather.

The second chapter focuses on the formal attributes of the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry. I represent graphs of the occurrence of the dashes in ways that visually further our understanding of the punctuation. I then use that data to engage with previous arguments about the dashes and to dispel some of the conclusions that scholars have drawn. I also make connections between the trends and frequencies of the appearance of the dashes to the theory of Emily Dickinson’s being a mouth breather. Finally, I analyze selections of her handwritten manuscripts for similar purposes.

The final chapter deals with breath and respiratory illness as topics and tropes in Dickinson’s writing. Respiration is a very important concept for Dickinson, a fact that further reinforces my hypothesis about the connection between mouth breathing and her work. Once, for example, when describing a cold and cough to her friend Abiah Root in a letter, Emily Dickinson eerily personifies her ailment: “out flew my tormentor, and putting both arms around my neck began to kiss me immoderately, and express so much love, it completely bewildered me” (Letters 87). This simple passage shows how Dickinson related to her cough, as if it were something sentient and living. I will present breath and illness as integral parts of Dickinson’s texts.

My conclusion will synthesize how aspects of Dickinson’s life and her writing point to the theory of her being a mouth breather, and the significance of that fact for her poetry. Dickinson’s biography, the manner in which she spoke and wrote, trends found in the dashes themselves over the course of her canon, the manner in which she represents the various senses, and the concept of breath and breathing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson all signify the importance of breath in her life and the possibility of mouth breathing as the origin of the dashes in her poetry. In the following thesis, I encourage the readers to open their minds and listen for the breath of Emily Dickinson conducting the pace of her poetry.

CHAPTER ONE: The Life and Breath of Emily Dickinson

Biographical information about Emily Dickinson is relatively scarce in comparison to that of now-canonical writers of the time. The best information about Dickinson comes from her own hand, in letters and poems, and the hands of those who knew her. As biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff emphasizes, “Few of the details of Dickinson’s adult life have been recorded; as a result, there are long periods of time—weeks, months, and on one occasion an entire year—for which not even the simplest quotidian activity of her routine can be ascertained” (140). Her sister Lavinia, for example, destroyed the letters written to Emily upon her death, further diminishing the information available about Dickinson. Luckily for us, many of the letters written by Dickinson herself to others survived, as those who corresponded with Emily Dickinson often found her vastly interesting. Even several letters between other individuals about encounters with Emily Dickinson survived. Some of those who knew her, such as her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, even wrote books about their relationship with Emily Dickinson. Other than that, the only other clues about Dickinson’s life come from what is known about the area where she lived.

The biographical information we have about Dickinson however, abounds with references to her breathing. Ordinarily, breathing is an unconscious act. Unless something interrupts it, it is almost unnoticeable. Unfortunately, for Emily Dickinson, breathing was something she was constantly aware of. Her breath, directly or indirectly, is one of the most recorded aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life. Emily Dickinson breathed air for the first time on 10 December 1830. From that point on, it can be said literally and metaphorically that Dickinson’s life was a struggle to breathe. In chapter two, I read the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry as the physical autograph representations of breath in her writing. In this chapter, I set the stage for that reading by focusing on Dickinson’s life.

Dickinson, Breath, and Illness

The basic structure of Dickinson’s life is easily traced, because she resided nearly her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts. With the exception of a few weeks, spent mostly in Boston, she did not stray at all from her hometown. Unfortunately, however, as Wolff explains, “infant death, the mortal peril of childbirth, consumption, typhoid, strep, pneumonia—all these would continue to haunt Amherst throughout Emily Dickinson’s lifetime” (95).

Disease itself plagued the entire Norcross side of her family. Consumption was especially prevalent in the family of Emily Dickinson. Her mother, Emily Norcross, married into the Dickinson family. Dickinson herself became especially good friends with one of her cousins, Emily Lavinia Norcross. Both of Emily Lavinia’s parents, Amanda Brown and Hiram Norcross, died of consumption. Emily Lavinia followed them in 1842, and her brother, William, died two years after her. According to Woolf, “The disease continued to hound the Norcross family like some inexplicable ancient curse” (60). The respiratory disease of consumption continuously surrounded and penetrated the life of Emily Dickinson.

As I mentioned in the introduction, consumption as an illness is consistent with the presence of the disorder of mouth breathing. While consumption is an infectious disease and thus cannot be inherited, allergies and mouth breathing can be. Those who are forced to breathe through their mouths, because of allergies or malformation, are especially susceptible to catching consumption. While ultimately it is impossible to prove whether the Norcross family was prone to breathing through their mouths, something made them especially sensitive to contracting consumption. This is something that very well could have been passed onto Emily Dickinson through her mother, as an extension of the Norcross curse. Mouth breathing, regardless of what caused it, could have been the reason the Norcross family was so susceptible to consumption.

Dickinson herself suffered symptoms of consumption, referred to as pulmonary tuberculosis today, for most of her life. Even though the disease appears to have been more prevalent earlier in her life, Alfred Habegger emphasizes in one of the most recent biographies of Dickinson that she suffered from “usual seasonal (consumptive?) symptoms” (423) and “her cough persisted and she remained less than ‘stout.’ It would appear that the mysterious wasting disease that killed so many was a constant thorn in her side, and in her mind as well” (262-63).

The possibility of illness was thus a prevalent force in the early life of Emily Dickinson. Her parents were aware of this fact from her childhood. Wolff points out that “throughout Emily Dickinson’s school days both parents worried about her tendency to come down with protracted bouts of flu; often they kept her home from school, sometimes even obliging her to miss an entire term” (68). Dickinson’s parents even at times sent her away, according to Wolff, to escape from the illnesses sweeping through Amherst: “her parents sent her away to visit Aunt Lavinia in Boston (as they had three years earlier after Sophia Holland’s death) to her rid of her ‘cough & all other bad feelings’” (98-9). At times, her father even ordered her to stay home from school when the weather was bad. In a letter to her friend Abiah Root, on 16 May 1848, Dickinson complains about a friend of hers who has informed her parents that she is in ill health. Her parents immediately called her home, much to her dismay: “I could not bear to leave teachers and companions before the close of the term and go home to be dosed and receive the physician daily, and take warm drinks and be condoled with on the state of health in general by all the old ladies in town” (Letters 65-6). After she spent a year of school at Mouth Holyoke Seminary, Dickinson’s father decided not to send her for another year. While the reasons are not known for sure, it is quite likely that her problems with staying healthy had a lot to do with her father’s decision.

Illness is also a constant topic in Dickinson’s letters. She even uses terms relating to medicine or illness, such as “fatigue,” “imbibe,” “indissoluble,” and “hemorrhage,” as verbs and adjectives in her letters to describe how she feels or what is happening around her (see for example letter 261, Letters 404). Emily Dickinson was obviously more aware of the significance of her illness than anyone else, and went to great lengths to understand its relationship with her. Writing to her friend Abiah Root in 1848, Dickinson refers to one of the periods of treatment for an illness: “I was dosed for about a month after my return home, without any mercy, till at last out of mere pity my cough went away, and I had quite a season of peace” (Letters 66). She does not give any credit to the treatments she received; instead, she claims that “out of pity” her cough went away. Dickinson actually refers to the cough, the illness, as something sentient and living.

One particular letter is quite interesting because of the unusual figuration with which it describes illness. I cite at length from her very strange and extended epistolary description of her malady. The trope of personification, one which attributes unusually powerful agency to otherwise inanimate objects, dominates:

I am occupied principally with a cold just now, and the dear creature will have so much attention that my time slips away amazingly. It has heard so much of New Englanders, of their kind attentions to strangers, that it’s come all the way from the Alps to determine the truth of the tale . . . Attracted by the gaiety visible in the street I still kept walking till [the] little creature pounced upon a thick shawl I wore, and commenced riding – I stopped, and begged the creature to alight, as I was fatigued already, and quite unable to assist others. It would’nt get down, and commenced talking to itself – “cant be New England – must have made some mistake, disappointed in my reception, don’t agree with accounts, Oh what a world of deception, and fraud – Marm, will [you] tell me the name of this country – it’s Asia Minor, is’nt it. I intended to stop in New England.” By this time I was so completely exhausted that I made no farther effort to rid me of my load, and traveled home at a moderate jog, paying no attention whatever to it, got into the house, threw off both bonnet, and shawl, and out flew my tormentor, and putting both arms around my neck began to kiss me immoderately, and express so much love, it completely bewildered me. Since then it has slept in my bed, eaten from my plate, lived with me everywhere, and will tag me through life for all I know. I think I’ll wake first, and get out of bed, and leave it, but early, or late, it is dressed before me, and sits on the side of the bed looking right in my face with such a comical expression it almost makes me laugh in spite of myself. I cant call it interesting, but it certainly is curious – has two peculiarities which quite win your heart, a huge pocket-handkerchief, and a very red nose. (Letters 86-7)

To have a close relationship with something such as an illness illustrates the crucial, indeed critical, effect that it had on her. Dickinson animates her illness into a being with its own consciousness. The illness in the above letter is even granted the ability to speak, in addition to many other methods of communication—the symptoms plaguing her. Dickinson is ill to such an extent and for so long that she says it “will tag me through life for all I know,” an apt foreshadowing of what was to come.

Every time someone around her became sick, Emily Dickinson inevitably was cursed with dealing with the illness herself. Writing to her sister over a decade later, Dickinson is aware of a recent bout of illness of her mother, and again uses imagery that makes illness tangible—this time, an object: “Tell Mother to catch no more cold, and lose her cough, so I cannot find it, when I get Home” (Letters 435). The passage indicates that Dickinson was worried about being around other sick people because she so easily caught illnesses that could be passed from one person to another. By this time, Emily Dickinson was thus clearly aware of her special susceptibility to catching illness from others. This tendency, too, is consistent with the effects of mouth breathing, which makes one more prone to catching air-transported illnesses.

Breath and Dickinson’s Voice

Dickinson’s manner of speaking and breathing directly affected her written word. As Brita Lindberg-Seyersted writes in The Voice of the Poet: “Her writing is of the nature of speech also in the respect that, as testified to by observations and evidenced in letters, she wrote as she spoke” (58). While there are always exceptions to the rule, this is an integral observation in understanding both Dickinson’s writing and her use of dashes.

Emphasis on Dickinson’s unusual voice is used to characterize her more than anything else by those who interacted with her. No other single quality, personality trait or otherwise, is described more frequently in first hand accounts of interaction with Emily Dickinson. And, more important, descriptions of her voice very often emphasize the strangeness of her breath. In August of 1870, for example, T. W. Higginson, frequent correspondent and, famously, mentor, wrote home to his wife when he was visiting Dickinson at her Amherst residence. His letter to her has become one of the most renowned and often quoted passages used to describe Emily Dickinson. He recounts meeting Dickinson:

A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer – with no good feature – in a very plain & exquisitely clean white piqué & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies, which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said, “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice – & added under her breath, Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what to say. (Qtd in Leyda 151)

Higginson describes Dickinson’s voice, what she said, and the fact that part of what she said was both “breathless” and “under her breath.”

Other accounts almost exactly match Higginson’s in their stress on Dickinson’s oddly “breathless” voice. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson’s niece, in her book Emily Dickinson Face to Face, begins by describing Dickinson’s voice as “breathless in turn” (17). In another similar account, Clara Green, who met Emily Dickinson with her sister Nora and her brother Nelson, describes Dickinson’s voice almost identically: “She spoke rapidly, with the breathless voice of a child and with a peculiar charm I have not forgotten” (Leyda 273). These three descriptions of Emily Dickinson’s voice provide an interesting portal into understanding how Dickinson spoke conversationally.

The breathless voice of Emily Dickinson could indicate the effect that mouth breathing had on her speech. The key connection between these “breathless” descriptions and mouth breathing might well lie in another passage from Bianchi’s Emily Dickinson Face to Face. Bianchi describes something Emily Dickinson said: “‘Would Matty like to have a pussy of her own to take home and keep always?’—adding with a catch in her breath—as their lawful owner was upon us—‘Take more than one! Take them all! Don’t stop to choose, dear!’” [emphasis mine] (7). Thus it seems that Emily Dickinson’s speech rhythms were fundamentally characterized by her need so often to stop and catch her breath when talking—enough to merit its crucial repeated attention by those around her, and even mention within a quotation of Dickinson’s very words as part of something she said by her niece.

However, when she recited poetry or read other works out loud, something different happened. While it appears that Dickinson spoke in conversation rapidly, a contrast seems to exist with her manner of reciting poetry or reading other works out loud. Habegger, in his biography, highlights a portion of a 1895 essay, crediting the earlier find to Mary Loeffelholz, which elaborates on Emily Dickinson as a reader:

Emily was herself a most charming reader. It was done with great simplicity and naturalness, with an earnest desire to express the exact conception of the author, without any thought of herself, or the impression her reading was sure to make. (398)

From this passage, it appears Dickinson took her time reading out loud. The description of her reading in this passage is not consistent with the descriptions of her rapid and out of breath conversational speaking.

That change of pace could very well have been quite deliberate. Mouth breathers are often aware of the irregularity in their breathing and especially its effect on the pace of their speech, either consciously or not. Reading out loud was a common and important performative gesture during the period when Dickinson lived, thus she would have had both exposure to and experience in reading to others. This awareness would likely have caused her purposefully to slow her speech in order properly to represent texts with punctuation foreign to her natural breathing patterns. Dickinson’s own poems would be read slowly precisely because the punctuation would match her slow reading and breathing patterns.

The distinction between the way Emily Dickinson spoke conversationally and the way she read poetry out loud might also explain the different frequencies of dashes found in her letters and poetry. Both the letters and the poems contain an unusual number of dashes, a gesture I am associating with irregularity in her breathing. Her letters contain few dashes, thus indicating fewer pauses, making their pace quicker and more like how she spoke conversationally. Accordingly, then, perhaps Dickinson’s poems have more dashes than her letters because she would have imagined them as being read more slowly, just as she spoke more slowly and deliberately when reciting poetry. Interestingly, as we shall learn in the next chapter, both her letters and poems conform to the same dash frequency patterns found in her writing over the course of her life, even though her use of dashes in each fundamentally differs.

Breathing with Others

Dickinson transformed the works of others in order to adapt their work to her breathing and language patterns, by punctuating the works of others with dashes where she needed them. When reading the work of others out loud, Dickinson needed to be aware of her breathing so she could account for its discrepancies with the punctuation of the writer. The punctuation that came so natural to her writing was not present in the works of others. In one example, Dickinson inserted dashes when copying the work of George Herbert, as Franklin points out in The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (121). In fact, in their 1945 collection of Dickinson’s poetry, Bolts of Melody, Dickinson’s niece and Dickinson’s brother Austin’s paramour mistakenly published this portion of a Herbert’s “Mattens” as Dickinson’s own, thinking her transcription of the poem was an original composition because she had applied her own unique form of punctuation when copying it (125).²

This transcription shows how her use of punctuation was something inherent in her. In the second to last line of the poem, Dickinson even changed the properly spelled word “upon” to the way she spelled it her entire life, “opon.” The original two stanzas taken from George Herbert’s “Mattens” and Dickinson’s copy are as follows:

My God, what is a heart?
Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
Or starre, or rainbow, or a particular
Of all these things, or all them in one?

My God, what is a heart?
That though shouldst it so eye, and wooe,
Powring upon it all they art,
As if that though hadst nothing else to do?

Second and Third stanzas from “Mattens” by George Herbert (1633)

My God – what is a Heart,
Silver – or Gold – or
precious Stone –
Or Star – or Rainbow –
or a particular
Of all these things – or
all of them in one ?

My God – what is a Heart –
That though should’st it so
eye and woe
Pouring opon it all thy
art
As if that though had’st
nothing else to do –

Copy by Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s copy of the two stanzas of the poem actually retains the same lineation as the original. When Dickinson ran out of space, she moved to the next line and indented it to show it was still part of the same line. The copy above represents the actual autograph spacing used by Dickinson, and her lineation will be explored further in chapter two. For now, what is important to notice is that Emily Dickinson replaced Herbert’s punctuation with her own, changed the spelling of some words, and even replaced the word “Powring” with “Pouring.” These changes show that Dickinson transformed the punctuation of the works of others to meet her breathing needs, primarily by adding space for breath through the addition of dashes.

One of the most telling examples of how Emily Dickinson was interpreted by others during her day comes from her early correspondence with T. W. Higginson. After reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Letter to a Young Contributer” by T. W. Higginson, Emily Dickinson decided to write him a letter on 15 April 1862. The letter shows a number of different things, so I begin with a transcription of the short letter itself:

Mr Higginson, Are you two deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –
Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –
If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would give me sincerer honor – toward you –
I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it’s own pawn –
(Letters 403)

The most interesting portion of the letter is Dickinson’s asking Higginson if her “Verse is alive,” if “it breathed.” In a very crucial moment, Dickinson herself clearly and fundamentally associates her poetry with breathing.

In a letter responding to Higginson, Dickinson gives many clues of his reaction to her poetry. His actual response to her inquiring mind is not directly available, because it had most likely been burned by Dickinson’s sister Lavinia. It appears that his reception of her poetry was not immensely positive, considering the reaction she has to both his criticism and praise. First Dickinson uses the discourse of illness in description of the correspondence: “Perhaps the Balm, seemed better, because you bled me first” (Letters 408). Dickinson goes on, explaining his reaction further: “I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish” – that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin –” (Letters 408). Then, she moves to language that stresses Higginson’s reaction to Dickinson’s irregular, unusual rhythm:

You think my gait “spasmodic” – I am in danger – Sir –
You think me “uncontrolled” – I have no Tribunal
(Letters 409)

This portion of the letter, expressed quite prosaically—if not poetically—opens the door to Higginson’s reaction to her poetry. As mentioned previously for effect, it can be inferred that Dickinson asked if her verse breathed, and Higginson replied by calling her gait “spasmodic.” Higginson, likely a nose breather, would be distracted by Dickinson’s dashes, as many modern readers and scholars are. This explains his response to her poetry, more specifically the dashes that interrupted his gait, not Dickinson’s.

Dickinson’s Alabaster Chambers

With her first letter to Higginson, Dickinson included both a card with her signature, and four different poems. One of the poems she included was “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Emily Dickinson’s poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” is unique in that so many versions of it exist, opening a door that enables readers to witness the progression of her craft over a short, yet crucial, period of time. Some time after 1861, when the final completed version of this poem was scribed into her fascicles, Emily Dickinson responded to a letter which today does not exist. She was writing a reply to her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, with whom she had a vast correspondence during her lifetime. She asks Susan, “Is this frostier?” (Franklin 161). Dickinson is referring to a poem she initially wrote in 1859, in which the first line, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –” remained unchanged in all its incarnations. Immediately following the one-line question came another version of the second stanza that greatly differed from both the 1859 and 1861 versions of poem 124. The 1859 version of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” is more than a rough draft of the final poem, though. Dickinson destroyed almost all of the original drafts of her poems, so it is crucial to pay attention to how she changed the few poems which are not forever dormant in their final fascicle form.

The drafts of this poem provide important understanding to the evolution of both Dickinson and her poetry during one of the most important times in her life, when she began copying her poems into fascicles bound with string. The first stanza remains similar in all versions of the poem, but the second stanza, due to the critique of the initial poem by Susan, was changed by Dickinson again and again. While the second stanza of the poem was rewritten several times by Dickinson, the first two versions cataloged by R. W. Franklin as poem 124 exemplify a vast change in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I want to emphasize that the drafts illustrate an important general trend: During the progression of this poem, Emily Dickinson began using her characteristic dashes more frequently. The shift from the often ignored 1859 version of the poem to the more vast 1861 variant shows a more mature wisdom that can only be expected to shine from such a unique individual during the progression of her craft.

Two versions of the first stanza of the poem exist, showing a subtle syntactical change that represents a vast metaphorical fissure in the life of Emily Dickinson. Susan Dickinson, writing about the first stanza, told Emily: “I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again” (Franklin 161). Both of the versions of the poem begin with a very similar stanza. The change in the lineation is the most visible difference between the two versions, but it does not change the meaning of the stanza:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon –
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone. (Fr124B)
version of 1859

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
And untouched by Noon –
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone! (Fr124E)
version of 1861

Ignoring the use of dashes for a moment, the only substantive difference between the two is the substitution of the word “sleep” with the word “lie” in the fourth line. The substitution of this word shifts the image from the dead as sleeping, or waiting for resurrection, to the dead as entirely inanimate—perhaps forever. Dickinson questions religion and the existence of God and an afterlife often in her poetry, which shows how such a small shift in language is actually very important to her. If the corpses are sleeping, we expect them to awake; if they just lie in their tombs, then they could remain forever dead and the suggestion of resurrection would be ironic.

Dickinson’s use of dashes is adapted into the dominant form of punctuation in her poetry sometime in the early 1860s. This transformation is exemplified by the 1859 and 1861 versions of the second stanza of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (Fr124), represented here:

Light laughs the breeze
In her Caster above them –
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence –
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
version of 1859

Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow –
version of 1861

While it is important to take in account all variants of each Dickinson poem, these two versions of the second stanza embody the evolution of Dickinson’s craft. In 1862, it is believed Susan Dickinson attempted to publish a version of this poem, one very similar to the 1861 version, so it is possible that Emily Dickinson was rewriting this poem up to a few years after the initial two versions (Franklin 164).

By looking at the variant final stanzas written, we can see clearly that Dickinson had a rhythm which remained prevalent through years of writing and rewriting “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (Fr124). Even considering an increase in the use of dashes over the course of the writing of this poem, the rhythm of the words themselves, if the dashes were removed entirely from both versions, remains unaltered. The introduction of more dashes does however slow the pace or tempo of the poem, but does so without interrupting the rhythm of the words. In fact, similar rhythm is quite common—even inherent—in all of Dickinson’s poetry. The increase in the use of dashes is thus independent of the rhythm of the language in her poetry, and serves only to alter the pace of a structure inherent in both her writing and speaking.

The different versions of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (Fr124) diverge in their relation to the world as well, indicating a shift in Dickinson’s relationship to the world. The 1859 version of the second stanza is confined to the world immediately above the cemetery in the poem. The wind blows in the Castle (the sky) above the graves, a bee is buzzing about, birds are singing, and sagacity, the wisdom of all who lie in the cemetery, is gone. The main difference between the two poems is the vastness outside of the cemetery expressed by Dickinson and, more than likely, the time of day. The 1861 version of the poem is vast, speaking about worlds moving and stars rowing across the sky, which can only been seen at night. The second stanza also includes the fact that kings die and magistrates fall, and they are no different from anyone lying in the graves of this cemetery.

The trials and tribulations of completing “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” parallel the struggles of Emily Dickinson in the early 1860s. In a letter to Dickinson, Susan Dickinson tells her that she is not “suited dead” with the second stanza. Half-way through the letter Susan has an epiphany of sorts: “It just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself and needs no other, and can’t be coupled—Strange things always go alone—as there is only one Gabriel and one Sun—You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess you[r] kingdom doesn’t hold one” (Franklin 161). Unfortunately, even with several rewrites, including the wonderful 1861 version, Emily was never able to please Susan Dickinson with a second stanza, as evidenced in their correspondence. Something which remains unknown today, sometime around 1865, caused Dickinson to cease her efforts to have her poetry published, caused her to stop binding her fascicles with yarn, and kept her from ever returning to work on this wonderful poem.

Strange Things Always Go Alone

The composition of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (Fr124) highlights an important transitional period in the life of Emily Dickinson. Scholars have long reminisced about a single cataclysmic event in Dickinson’s life that occurred somewhere in her mid twenties to mid thirties (1855-1865). Little is known about Dickinson during this time, especially during the last half of the 1850s. The years 1855-58 are veiled in complete mystery, as Habegger explains:

The documentation of her life in these years is so slender that some have concluded she had an incapacitating and well-covered-up breakdown, perhaps even a fully psychotic episode . . . That she experienced severe and mounting troubles is clear. That she became any less capable of performing her usual functions, domestic and compositional, is not. The sharp reduction in the number of her surviving letters has several explanations: most of her earlier friendships had lapsed; and with Sue and Austin settling in next door she had no occasion to produce the detailed record of the early 1850s. Most important, her continuing shift from reportorial to lyric modes tended to throw another veil over her life, the thickest one yet. To an extent, she disappeared into her poems, which, in 1858, apparently without telling anyone, she began preserving in small, neatly copied, hand-sewn booklets. Increasingly, her bulletins would come from a place no one we know had seen or visited. (327) The only known “severe and mounting troubles” in Dickinson’s life include the ever-persistent problems with illness and a bout of severe eye trouble that she encountered during this time. However, these issues can more than likely be placed after 1858. Illness was always a force of reckoning in the life of Emily Dickinson, but the elevation in her dashes from 1861-64 may signify the most severe problems she encountered—especially if the dashes in her poetry represent breath. The eye troubles seem to become severe during the same period, and they appear to be resolved in the final year Franklin attributes a great number of poems to, in 1865. Thus, something else must have been responsible for Habegger’s observation.

Martha Nell Smith associates the troubles Habegger mentions with the loss of love. In Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, Smith postulates that Dickinson was in love with Susan Gilbert, the woman who married her brother Austin in 1856. In one of many letters to Susan before she married her brother, Dickinson writes, “I think of love, and you, and my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still” (Letters 201). Smith has found that the letters to Susan Gilbert from Emily Dickinson have been altered—pieces were deliberately cut from them in order to mask their true intentions. Smith believes the culprit to be Austin Dickinson, as she writes in Rowing in Eden: “the censorship of Dickinson’s papers at the end of the century suggests that her passionate friendship with Sue was not simply innocent” (23). If this is true, the severe problem Dickinson may have encountered during this time was the loss of a love and an inadvertent betrayal by her brother. What made matters worse is that Austin and Susan ended up living across the street from Emily Dickinson.

As the 1860s appear, more evidence and history exists to shed light on Emily Dickinson, but the poems she writes complicate the understanding of her even more. There is a good chance that the number of poems scribed in the fascicles during this time is from Emily Dickinson copying prior poems in addition to writing new ones. I believe Dickinson may have thought that she was dying at the turn of the decade from the 1850s to the 1860s, and this could be the reason for the great number of poems attributed to these years. Regardless of what afflicted her, it seems that Dickinson was preparing her poetry for the inevitable coming of death. This would explain the vast quantity of poems attributed to the early 1860s, when she most prolifically copied poems into fascicles and bound them with string. Unfortunately, Dickinson destroyed the original drafts of her poems after copying them into the fascicles. There is a good chance that much of what she copied into the fascicles in the early 1860s could have come from a prior time. During this same time, in the early 1860s, Alfred Habegger finds that the subject of pain becomes prevalent in the poetry of Dickinson. Habbegger writes in his biography of Emily Dickinson:

The idea of extreme pain, appearing in a few poems in 1859, became one of Dickinson’s major subjects in the early 1860s. Of the twenty-one instances of the word “hurt” in her poems (noun or verb), every single one occurs between 1860 and 1863. The apparatus of torture—“grimblets” (Fr242), “metallic grin” (Fr243), “A Weight with Needles” (Fr294)—now becomes almost routine, along with references to Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion, generally linked to the speaker’s own passion.” (408)

The extreme pain that he talks about could have been pain from the union and betrayal of her possible lover Susan Gilbert and her brother Austin. During this period of time, from 1861 to 1864, it cannot be ignored that something else was going on, though. The extreme increase in the frequency of dashes in both Dickinson’s poems and her letters must signify something.

The poems attributed to the years 1861 through 1864 are all also very similar in their use of dashes, possibly linking them to the pain mentioned above. As my research in chapter two shows, these four years have twice the amount of dashes as any other year in Dickinson’s life, and, I believe, they also represent most of the years in which nearly half of her poems were copied into her fascicles. If the dashes of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are representative of her breath, then something caused the need for her to breathe more frequently than ever. This is something that could be explained by her consumption or other illnesses during this time, or quite simply the need to breathe through her mouth because of allergies. Regardless, life may have been so dismal that she did believe her death was imminent, and thus resigned herself to copying the poems into her fascicles during these years. In addition, when copying the poems, she probably read them out loud to herself, as was customary during the time. If so, she would have found a need for more dashes in her poetry due to her current illness. Even if she did not read them out loud, her natural rhythm still could have been fundamentally altered by her illness and need to breathe more often. This is why all of the poems, those that she probably copied and even those that she wrote during these four years, have a greater frequency of dashes. It is not likely that she used this many dashes when originally writing these poems. In the few final years of the 1850s, the poetry that is dated shows no signs of an elevated use of dashes. By the time 1865 arrives, the use of dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson once again dissipates to pre-decade levels. It only ever rises again toward the end of her life, when she wrote less and less.

Wearing Alabaster

After 1865, the stories that have generated the myths of Emily Dickinson start to take shape. By this time she is thirty-five years old. The largest myth about Emily Dickinson is that she never left her house and spent her entire life indoors. She experienced life outside of her house for thirty-five years, though, and she even reminisced about it in letters to those with whom she corresponded:

How glad I am that spring has come, and how it calms my mind when wearied with study to walk out in the green fields and beside the pleasant streams in which South Hadley is so rich! There are not many wild flowers near, for the girls have driven them to a distance, and we are obliged to walk quite a distance to find them, but they repay us by their sweet smiles and fragrance. (Letters 66)

Dickinson herself kept an herbarium, in which she gathered the flowers that she found on her walks and pressed them into a single volume. She even asked her friend Abiah Root if she had an herbarium, claiming that “it would be such a treasure to [her]” (Letters 13). In the end, Dickinson’s own herbarium housed specimens of over four hundred pressed flowers. Yet, even with such a love for nature, after spending the summer of 1865 away, “Emily Dickinson returned to Amherst in October. She lived for more than twenty years but never again left home—that home which to her was “the definition of God” (Bingham 437).

Emily Dickinson began exclusively wearing white sometime around the early to mid 1860s. According to Habegger: “Exactly when the poet began wearing white year-round isn’t known. In December 1860, as if putting a stop to rumor, she pointedly asked Louisa Norcross to “tell ‘the public’ that at present I wear a brown dress” (516). Habegger even points out a poem in which Dickinson writes about wearing white:

A solemn thing – it was – I said –
A Woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should count me fit –
Her blameless mystery –

A timid thing – to drop a life
Into the mystic well –
Too plummetless – that it come back –
Eternity – until –

I pondered how the bliss would look –
And would it feel as big –
When I could take it in my hand –
As hovering – seen – through fog –

And then – the size of this “small” life –
The Sages – call it small –
Swelled – like Horizons – in my breast –
And I sneered – softly – “small”! (Fr307)

This poem, attributed to 1862 by Franklin, emphasizes the individuality of Dickinson. She seems to have chosen a life of solitude, not to marry, and ponders how this will be perceived by others, by God. In the end, a confident Emily Dickinson appears, sneering at those that will deem her life small. It is interesting how right she is in this poem, as her thoughts, their words and breath, are now immortalized forever. Whatever the reason for wearing white, by the time she was wearing it daily, Emily Dickinson was in such a reclusive state that her sister Lavinia, who was roughly the same size as Dickinson, was fitted for her sister Emily’s dresses. Dickinson’s myth only spread as she retreated into the confines of her father’s house and dressed wholly in white. Even the coffin she would be buried in was white.

On 13 May 1886, Emily Dickinson slipped into unconsciousness. “The next day Austin noted that his sister’s stertorous breathing had gone on for a full day: ‘Emily is no better—has been in this heavy breathing and perfectly unconscious since middle of yesterday afternoon’” (Habegger 626). The following day, 15 May 1886, as noted again by Austin, Emily Dickinson “ceased to breathe that terrible breathing” (Habegger 627). Bianchi recorded how young she looked in her final chamber, in Face to Face: “Her deep Titian hair never got a grey thread. Her white skin never showed a blemish, its lack of color unnoticeable . . . Age never benumbed her” (67). Emily Dickinson was adorned in a white dress and robe, placed in a white wooden coffin, and buried in the cemetery of Amherst beneath a white gravestone.

Originally, it was concluded by doctors that Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s Disease, a common diagnosis during that time in the New England area. Habegger, however, mentions something very interesting. Drawing on the authority of Dr. Norbert Hirschborn and Polly Longsworth, he writes:

The true cause of death, they argue, was severe primary hypertension, a diagnosis not available in 1886. This explanation seems consistent with the known facts in the case: the stress under which the poet lived; the emotional effects of her bereavements; the state of medical science at the time; and the record of symptoms in her last two and a half years, thinking particularly of her bouts of fainting and final stroke. (Habegger 623)

As shown in the Introduction, mouth breathing raises the pH balance of the blood, and causes hypertension. Mouth breathing may have been the specter haunting Dickinson her entire life, its hooded gasp showing itself proudly at her end.

The dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson represent her breath. Breathing, or more importantly trouble with breathing, is abundant in the biography of Emily Dickinson. Her voice itself was representative of her breathing and, as shown in this chapter, she wrote as she spoke. This is further evidenced by the fact that she manipulated the written works of others in order to fit them to her own breathing patterns. Even her own mentor, T. W. Higginson, did not understand the intricacy of breathing inherent in her life and represented in her poetry, and he experienced it first hand. The theme of breathing is not simply something in her biography, though. Emily Dickinson’s life and death were a struggle to breathe, and this had a great effect on her writing.

CHAPTER TWO: Conducting Emily Dickinson’s Dashes

Emily Dickinson’s formidable canon of verse (almost 1800 poems) and letters spans a massive array of subjects, both physical and metaphysical, and represents one of the most important bodies of literature we have. Unfortunately, Emily Dickinson is also one of the most misunderstood American authors. Her poems are exceptionally dense, especially given their brevity. In addition, we still grapple with what to make of her odd punctuation, especially the dashes. We still do not know how to read them. Current scholars generally read them in ways that literally take away from the aural quality of Dickinson’s poems in an attempt to find meaning through a visual acuity that serves to be at best incomplete.

Emily Dickinson’s autograph script is a main point of contention among contemporary scholars. The manuscripts themselves have generated much debate as the interpretation of the physical characteristics of her script, especially slight variations found in her dashes, have arisen a multitude of suspicions as to purpose of the dashes. Interpretations of her use of space, lineation, and word division have only complicated the poems of Emily Dickinson further.

The handwriting of Emily Dickinson might well express her irregular struggle to breathe through her especially elaborate use of dashes in her writing. When one is reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it is as though her breath can literally be heard weaving in and out between the words of her verse. Trends in her writing, in the frequency of dashes that appear in both her poetry and letters, weave into the history of her life. It is likely that the simple reality behind her use of dashes and the attributes found in her handwriting both derive from the result of natural phenomenon. The variations found in her script are nothing more than the natural result of normal fluctuations of pen movement in handwriting. The dashes—the singular most visible aspect of the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson—generate more of a pause for breathing than conventional punctuation such as periods and commas, which is precisely why Dickinson needed them to match the natural rhythms of her own speech, ones consistent with those of a mouth breather.

Modern Dickinson Scholarship

In recent years, scholarship has increasingly moved toward examining the manuscripts themselves, because of the unique features found in the autograph script of Emily Dickinson. Unfortunately, the observations of Dickinson’s handwriting impede the the understanding of her poetry by emphasizing the dashes as something unique and separate from the natural phenomenon of handwriting and the breath that generated them. Lindberg-Seyersted observed in 1968:

It would seem probable that a careful study of the poet’s manuscripts would make it quite clear what punctuation marks she actually used. This is not so, as everyone knows who has tried to decode these sheets of notepaper, scraps of paper, bits of envelopes. The conventional signs she used were the period, question mark, exclamation point, and comma; besides these there is a variety of marks of varying lengths and slants which have generally been referred to as “dashes.” (184)

Reading Dickinson’s poems in her own hand has led many scholars to interpret the poems in a variety of new ways, especially surrounding her use of dashes. Unfortunately, throughout the history of Dickinson scholarship, the more her dashes are explored, the more complex are the explanations that arrive for their existence and their purpose. Considering the length and breadth of Dickinson’s canon, future scholarship has the possibility to confuse the matter even more. The problem is that scholars generally focus on individual aspects of Emily Dickinson’s autograph script, instead of observing them as a part of a handwriting whole.

Even after decades of debate, the dashes still remain as one of the more controversial points in Dickinson scholarship. In Inflections of the Pen, Paul Crumbley argues that Dickinson’s dashes serve an integral purpose in generating voice shifts, and he provides a very compelling argument for this theory. He represents the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry with sixteen different print marks. Crumbley’s marks are meant to indicate dashes of different lengths, at different angles, and at different positions above and below the line of writing. Crumbley claims that the different dashes “contribute to the tension felt by the speaker in addition to disrupting the syntax” (57). In addition, he mentions that more print versions of dashes may be needed to accurately represent all of the different dashes of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Crumbley’s interpretation of the differing dashes of Emily Dickinson is an example of how her dashes continue to be visually manipulated into an increasing number of generally confusing interpretations.

The opposing view is buoyed by the scholars who have spent the most time with Dickinson’s actual manuscripts, Thomas Johnson and Ralph W. Franklin. They argue that one dash is no different from any other dash, regardless of slight variations found in their appearances. Franklin shares his experience with the manuscripts in the following passage from his 1967 book The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration:

Familiarity with the manuscripts should show that the capitals and the dashes were merely a habit of handwriting and that Emily Dickinson used them inconsistently, without system. . . . Frequently several autograph copies of the same poem exist, each with variant punctuation and capitalization . . . That the capitals and dashes were merely habits of handwriting without special significance is also shown by the poet’s using them not only for poems but for letters too. (120)

Christanne Miller concurs with their observations in her essay, “Dickinson’s Experiments in Language,” in The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Miller writes: “years of teaching Dickinson have convinced me that the unusual features of her work lend themselves to overinterpretation, providing eager critics with the opportunity to see every mark and syllable as individually deeply significant” (255). This is especially true about the dashes themselves. Long have Dickinson scholars attempted to explain and bring meaning to the unusual punctuation inherent in both her poetry and letters.

What is even more baffling than the many ways the dashes of Dickinson can be interpreted is the origin of the dashes themselves. In The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration, Franklin mentions that Edith Perry Stamm believes the dashes to originate from practices taught at Amherst Academy and that they indicate voice inflection (119). Franklin adequately debunks this theory, but does not provide any explanation for the origin of the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry himself. The stanza form commonly employed by Dickinson led some scholars to believe that it was derived from hymns, so the dashes were possibly musical devices of some sort. Few scholars, however, are content with this explanation, as there is very little proof to support it beyond the form of the poems themselves. The vastness of Dickinson’s canon provides many new ways to interpret her poems, but without knowing the origin of the dashes, it is hard to support any special theory about their purpose.

Emphasizing the Rare

Many scholars focus on other strange and rare occurrences found in the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson and draw conclusions based on them, further emphasizing the manner in which Dickinson’ script impedes the understanding of her poetry and its form. One such occurrence is the division of the word “Countrymen” in the poem “This is my letter to the World” (Fr519). This is one of the few instances where Dickinson splits a word in half across lines, when it seems that she should have simply moved the entire word to the following line. When this was found, scholars quickly found a few other instances where this occurs. Some believed that Dickinson’s poems were perhaps not represented accurately in Franklin’s 1998 edition of poems, and that the lineation found in the manuscripts should be precisely preserved. Franklin and Johnson have concluded that Dickinson used the normal convention of extending a single line across two lines, by indenting the portion of the line that extends past the space available on the next line, when running out of writing space. This has been challenged by modern Dickinson scholars, though.

Martha Nell Smith brings up the unconventional possibilities of Dickinson’s lineation in her wonderful book Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Smith talks about another well-discussed poem dealing with lineation: “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –” (Fr407). When looking at the photostat of the poem in Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, Smith’s point that the division of the word “Apartment” is purposeful appears to be quite valid. She represents the third stanza of the poem as follows, showing the split of the word “Apartment” near the end of the stanza:

Ourself behind Ourself –
Concealed –
Should startle – most –
Assassin – hid in Our Apart-
ment –
Be Horror’s least – \ (Fr407)

Smith explains: “What we expect is not what we get: the unanticipated mid-syllable line ending, not haphazzard, is a deliberate breaking of form” (19). This, however, is not an experiment in lineation.

Smith’s observation is not repeated in the other variant of “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –” (Fr407). As I discussed in chapter one, even though Emily Dickinson copied poems and destroyed the original drafts, several variants of the same poem sometimes still exist because she often sent letters with poems. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson only include photostats that were found in the fascicles themselves, and they do not include versions of poems sent to correspondents in the letters of Dickinson. Another version of this poem exists, sent to Susan Dickinson a couple of years after it was scribed into the fascicles. When comparing the two versions of the poem, we find differences that show that Dickinson was not deliberately breaking form. The first line of the stanza is split at a different place: “Ourself behind / Ourself, Concealed –” Franklin considered this to be one line and, considering the small but noticeable indentation of the second line, it seems that convention holds true and this line should be considered as one. As for the splitting of the word “Apartment,” it does not occur in the identical poem sent to Susan Dickinson. While the word is physically split at the letter t in the middle of the word, it is apparent that it is not split by a dash or a division in the word, but simply by the mark that is supposed to cross the letter t. Smith fails to represent Dickinson’s indentations in her print version of the stanza in Rowing in Eden. The significant indentation represents that the last syllable of the word “Apartment” actually belongs to the prior line. While I do not agree with Smith on the division of the word “Apartment,” I must applaud her contributions to Dickinson scholarship.

Proof that the strange lineation in Dickinson’s manuscripts is not intentional ironically comes from her own hand. In a letter to Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) in 1852, Emily Dickinson proclaims her disdain for paper:

Susie, what shall I do – there is’nt room enough; not half enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav’nt the slightest respect for him! (Letters 184)

Emily Dickinson was thus aware of the lack of space provided by the paper she wrote upon, furthering the proof that she did not experiment with lineation but was bound by the confines of the page itself. As Dickinson aged and her autograph script became larger and larger, she would have become even more aware of the problems of space as the paper she used did not become any larger. The rest of the proof that Emily Dickinson did not purposefully generate differences between dashes and experiment with lineation comes directly from her handwriting itself.

Trends in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Trends of mechanical aspects of Emily Dickinson’s poetry can give a “certain Slant of light” (Fr320) to the understanding of both her poetry and her life. The trends—the frequency of the dashes, the number of words per poem, the line lengths, and the number of poems attributed to specific years—highlight interesting aspects of the life and poetry of Dickinson. Through the observation of one trend, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, in The Voice of the Poet, has found that:

the prevailing tone of Emily Dickinson’s poetic output of the early 1860s is one of immediacy and urgency. The “spoken” character of the poems is very strongly felt. Sometimes it is a childish voice; often we hear a woman speak; at other times, we cannot identify the voice very precisely. (48)

Lindberg-Seyersted was able to establish this point of view because of a single observed trend in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, that of the connection between her increase of production and use of dashes in the early 1860s.

The most obvious trend in the poetry of Emily Dickinson is the frequency of dashes. It has been previously observed by scholars that an increase in the use of dashes in her most prolific period, from 1861-1865, occurred in both her letters and her poems. The following chart, one I generated for the purposes of this thesis, represents the average yearly frequencies of dash use as indicated in the Franklin texts.

As my research shows, the average frequency of dashes in her poetry from 1861 to 1864 is generally double to triple that of the rest of her life. The connection between the years of great poetic production to increased dash use previously observed by scholars does not hold true in 1865, though. The chart begins with the year 1858, because it is the first year that scholars have attributed more than a few poems to a single year. The earliest dated poem in Emily Dickinson’s canon was placed in 1850 by both Thomas Johnson and Ralph W. Franklin. However, by this time, Emily Dickinson was already twenty years old. By the time she began writing more than a few poems a year, according to the known statistics, she was almost thirty. Looking at the frequency of dashes for each poem over the course of her poetic lifetime, we can see that the amount of poems attributed to her most “creative” years, 1861-1865, appears as a momentous writing achievement. The following graph individually represents the dash per line frequency for nearly all of the poems in Dickinson’s canon, chronologically situated from Franklin’s edition.

The same pattern occurs as the previous graph, but a greater plateau is formed because of the number of poems attributed to such a short span of time. This is why I believe that Emily Dickinson spent more time copying older poems into her fascicles than writing new poems from 1861 through 1865; the numbers are simply too astronomical.

The trend of the frequency of dashes and their correlation with poetic production does not hold up under scrutiny. First, it is hard to believe that Emily Dickinson wrote so little for the first thirty years of her life, and then in five years wrote nearly half of her canon. Afterwards, her production of poetry returns to more manageable numbers, an average of nearly twenty-seven poems per year. Interestingly, Franklin attributes 229 poems to 1865, the first year in which the frequency of dashes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry drops back down to normal. Whatever the reason for her prolific use of dashes, it diminished sometime late in 1864. So, the connection between the great frequency of dashes and Dickinson’s poetic production during these years is not entirely accurate. There is only one more year to which Franklin attributes more poems than 1865, two years earlier in 1863, and yet 1865 has one of the lower average frequencies of dash use in Dickinson’s entire life. It is obvious that Dickinson continued to copy the remaining collection of previously written poems into her fascicles during 1865, until she had finished copying all the poetry she had written before the age of thirty. It would make sense to speculate then, that whatever afflicted her from 1861 through 1864 ceased to have such a prominent effect on Emily Dickinson’s breathing in 1865, thus causing the frequency of dashes in her writing to decline.

During this time, in the transition between the years 1864 and 1865, while the letters of Emily Dickinson display similar attributes to the poems, the mood of their content shifts greatly. The use of dashes in her letters from 1861 to 1864 is elevated in the same manner as her use of dashes in her poetry. Unfortunately, there are not many surviving manuscript letters from the year 1865. Those that do exist all seem to have a lower frequency of dashes than that of the preceding four years. More importantly, the tone and subject matter of her letters also shifts greatly. In November of 1864, while in Cambridge, Dickinson mentions in a letter to her sister Lavinia: “I have been sick so long I do not know the Sun” (Letters 435). Her mood seems to shift by March of 1865, as evidenced in a letter to Louise Norcross. Dickinson is back in Amherst, before venturing to Cambridge for the last time in her life. She writes to Louise “Peace is a deep place. Some, too faint to push, are assisted by angels” and “New heart makes new health” (Letters 440).

In the most telling letter during this period, a poem itself illustrates the great transition exhibiting the emergence of hope. As the frequency of dashes in her poetry falls and the quantity of poems attributed to a single year remains great, Emily Dickinson writes a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson upon the death of her sister Harriet Gilbert Cutler. In the letter, she writes:

Unable are the Loved – to die –
For Love is immortality –
Nay – it is Deity –
(Fr951A)

Dickinson has transitioned from the transformation of the dead from sleeping to lying in their “Alabaster Chambers” in 1861, to the inability of the Loved to die in 1865. Love is transformed from immortality to deity in this poem itself, expressing the hope Dickinson is trying to inspire in Susan Gilbert. Around this same time, according to Franklin, probably somewhat later due to the lower frequency of dashes, Emily Dickinson copies another version of this poem into her own fascicles:

Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity –

Unable they that love – to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
(Fr951B)

The second version of this poem is even more interesting than the first stanza she sent to her sister-in-law. The second stanza of the poem not only transforms the loved into deity, but the lover as well. Suddenly, instead of the impending death that everyone in life will have to face, death itself is transcended by loving another. The transition from 1864 to 1865 is also embodied by Dickinson’s use of dashes. The frequency of dashes has declined from the period of time when she sent Susan the first stanza. The connection between a decrease in dash frequency and the emergence of hope is quite significant, furthering the evidence of the tie of dash use to the health of Emily Dickinson. An example of the actual manuscript of this poem is presented here:

Poem 951, Set 7. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 1171. ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The second version of “Unable are the Loved to die” (Fr951B) might also suggest a significant improvement in the health of Emily Dickinson through her breathing. Two of the dashes in the first stanza have been removed entirely, and two others have been downgraded, so to speak, to commas. A comma does not generate as long of a pause as a dash, which is why Emily Dickinson began using dashes in the first place. In fact, the use of dashes actually replaced a previous practice of using exclamation marks early in Dickinson’s life when she was struggling to find a way to represent her breath. In its final incarnation, the only dash that remains is the one that ends the stanza. This decrease in dash use represents healthier breathing by Dickinson than in previous years. In fact, the mention of illness disappears in the 1865 letters, and the only references to health problems are associated with her eyes.

The trend of the length of Dickinson’s poems over the course of her life also contributes to the overall understanding of her poetry. As my research has indicated, the average length of Dickinson poems both before and during her “creative” period is around twelve lines per poem. Immediately after 1865, the average length of poems drops to eight lines per poem. This tendency shows that Dickinson typically wrote longer poems before and during the first half of the 1860s and gradually moved into writing shorter poems after 1865. The poems of her later life are the poems of a more mature poet, and by this time Dickinson is able to say a lot more with fewer words. Emily Dickinson’s evolution to shorter poems occurs sometime during the first half of the 1860s. However, because of the large number of poems copied during this period, the trend still represents the longer poems more typically associated with earlier times in her life. This trend is perfectly mirrored by the average number of words per year in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The following graph represents both the trend of number of lines in a poem and the coinciding trend of the average number of words per poem:

The length of lines in the poetry of Emily Dickinson are consistently constant. What makes the above graph intriguing is that it brings together two coinciding trends, the number of words and lines per poem, that follow the same pattern over the course of Dickinson’s entire poetic life. The coinciding trends can mean only one thing, that the length of individual lines in her poetry generally never changed. In Christanne Miller’s essay, “Dickinson’s Experiments in Language,” found in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, she recognizes that the free-verse lines of similar length “rock between one- or two-word longer lines” (254). Miller also mentions that multiple variant word choices do not dramatically alter “the sense of the poem,” something first realized by Brita Lindberg-Seyersted in The Voice of the Poet: “In her suggested variants for words or phrases, Dickinson maintained . . . the rhythm she had first set down” (134). Dashes are sometimes even found with variant word choices, but only if the word they are to replace is followed by a dash as well. The breathing and speech of Emily Dickinson directly correlates to phenomenon found in her writing.

The length of the lines in Dickinson’s poetry relate to the natural rhythms of the English language. For a long time, scholars have been trying to understand why Dickinson’s poems are so similar in style to hymns, without always realizing how close to the natural speech rhythms of the English language the form is. The ballad stanza, four lines alternating in tetrameter and trimeter length, is similar to the form of a hymn. This form is also considered “Common Meter,” and is rooted in English literary history. Lindberg-Seyersted mentions “the four-beat line of Old English poetry seems to be inherent in the structure of the language itself” (130). She goes on to explain that Dickinson also uses “Sevens and Sixes” (7, 6, 7, 6) and “Common Particular Meter” (8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 6). This meter is not just something that is inherent in Dickinson’s poetry, though. It is something inherent in all of her writing. In 1993, William Shurr published New Poems of Emily Dickinson, a book containing nearly five-hundred “new” poems pulled from the letters of Emily Dickinson that have similar metrical qualities to the poetry in her canon. While this book is not widely accepted by scholars, who tend to consider her letters another form of her craft, it does show the immense connection between Emily Dickinson’s letters and her poems.

The mechanical trends in the poetry of Emily Dickinson also correlate to biographical events during the course of her life. As previously believed, the increase in the frequency of dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson is not directly connected to the increase in the production of her poetry. The increase in the use of dashes thus has to be attributed to something outside of simply an increase in poetry production. Mouth breathing fits perfecting into the fissure generated by this discovery—filling it with the fluidity of breath.

Investigating Ink

The autograph script of Emily Dickinson has been a point of contention among scholars ever since the manuscripts have been made more widely available to the public through publication and digital representations on the Internet. Dickinson primarily wrote on unlined paper, and when looking at the dashes in her own hand, they do appear quite different from one another. While there is no overly-significant difference between the lengths of dashes, there are obvious differences in their angles and orientation around lines formed by the progression of writing on the page. A problem exists when focusing on the dashes themselves though: the words surrounding them, in the handwriting of Dickinson, do not appear connected to the dashes. The connection is in the handwriting itself, though, something which is perhaps second nature to both Thomas Johnson and R. W. Franklin, who were used to reading the manuscripts. Dickinson did not intentionally create dashes of different lengths, at different angles, or in different orientations above or below the line, and this becomes clearly obvious when looking at the handwriting surrounding the dashes.

In the previous chapter, I examined the poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” in order to show an integral shift in the life of Emily Dickinson and how it revealed itself in her poetry. In this chapter, I will examine the manuscripts of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” and “There’s a certain Slant of light” in order to explore the abundant possibilities available in the autograph script of Emily Dickinson. I begin by introducing a print representation of the poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” (Fr320):

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
(Fr320)

The poem speaks of a powerful force that shines from the heavens. This oppressive force, the same force felt in the weight of “Cathedral Tunes,” comes from the air, something that cannot be seen. Belief is something Emily Dickinson struggled with her entire life. She removed herself from church services before removing herself from the world entirely. The struggle to find meaning in something that causes the shadows to “hold their breath” is an internal struggle Dickinson often undertakes in her writing. However, this discussion is something reserved for the final chapter of this thesis. In the meantime, the exploration of current trends in Dickinson scholarship involving the manuscripts themselves is necessary.

The following pages represent the actual manuscripts this thesis uses in order to investigate the script of Emily Dickinson. I have chosen poems based on their relevance to the subject and their ability to represent various autograph characteristics. As the discussion continues, portions of these manuscripts will be inserted into the rest of the chapter in order more precisely to reveal the characteristics mentioned. I encourage readers to return to these pages in order to see all the characteristics working together in the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, so that a greater understanding of the complexities involved is reached. Take special attention in noticing the difference between commas and dashes, the crossing marks of the t’s, and the differences between the dashes themselves. Most important, we should notice the angles at which the words and dashes themselves are written. These attributes of the autograph script of Emily Dickinson show the progression and angle of writing, and verify that the unusual features given great significance by some scholars are nothing more than natural phenomena in the art of writing itself.

Poem 320, Fascicle 13. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 270. ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Poem 124, Fascicle 10. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 193. ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Poem 124, Fascicle 10. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 194. ©The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

It appears that Emily Dickinson was a fast writer, but she wrote faster and more slowly at different times and the pace shows in her manuscripts. In the letters she sent to others, she often signed her name followed by a dash. When she was writing quickly, the dot above the i in “Emily” and the following mark both appear as dashes, quickly drawn one after the other. In poems in which she was less rushed in her writing, the mark above the i is an actual dot, and the mark following her name is even less of a dash, sometimes only a dot itself. In the instances when she wrote quickly, the dashes in the poetry preceding her autograph are long and much more pronounced. They appear to jump off the very page itself. In the poems she wrote less quickly, the dashes are shorter. Even the lines crossing her t’s are shorter, although, as will be explained below, it does depend where in the word the letter t appears. Overall, though, there is no exceptionally significant difference in the lengths of the dashes. What is more pronounced are the slants which the dashes take.

The letter t in the poetry of Emily Dickinson gives insight into the progression of writing and thus the dashes because of the mark that crosses the letter. If the letter t appears near or at the very end of a word, the mark is generally short. The mark itself often appears after the letter, never physically crossing the t. Instead, it appears after the word, even at times after a letter following the t, to the point where it appears as a dash. The first examples of the letter t appear below:

These images show that Dickinson was a fast writer; she kept with the linear progression of writing without having to disturb her writing by going back to cross the t. At times, this tendency even occurs in the middle of the word, physically separating the word into two parts. If there are two letter t’s in the same word, a single line was often used to cross both of them. An example of the crossing mark of a t splitting a word is shown here:

When Dickinson returns to cross the letter t, however, the mark is generally longer than the typical mark used to cross the letter, especially if the word is longer and the letter t is toward the beginning of the word. If the letter is a capital T, as at the beginning of a line of poetry, then the letter is made by never lifting the pen from the page and appears as an askew X, with its bottom two points connected. Examples of these versions of the letter t are presented here:

The letter t is important when studying the dashes because it often shows the angle of the word the letter is a part of, and thus the progression of writing. The mark crossing the t is commonly parallel to the overall linear progression of the word, whether slanted or not, as the above examples illustrate. In many ways, the dashes themselves provide the same evidence.

Highlighting the progression of writing, dashes following words often have the same characteristics of the mark crossing the t in the word. It often appears that the dash was written directly after the crossing mark, as the two lines are almost always parallel and often two parts of the very same line. Interestingly, this is something that may have been generated by Dickinson when copying her poems from draft form into their final incarnation. When copying a line of poetry into her fascicles that included a word with the letter t followed by a dash, it would only be natural to cross them one after another. This observation is also true about the mark above “Emily” and the mark following her autograph. If there is no t in the word, the dash following the word is still commonly aligned with the slant of the word. Examples of each are presented below:

The dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, their slants specifically, are a natural progression of her handwriting. When focusing on the dashes, this may not seem apparent, but when focusing on Emily Dickinson’s script in entirety, it is obvious. For instance, observe the word “Divinity” in the following image. The dots for the three i’s, the crossing mark following the letter t, and the dash following the word represent the slant of the word perfectly:

As for where the dashes appear in height above or below the line, it appears this is also a result of handwriting and not a purposeful mark generated by Dickinson for one reason or another.

Dashes often act as a device that connects the progression of writing from one word to the next. The finishing point of a dash is commonly at the same level as the bottom of the first letter of the following word. If the letter following a dash is a letter whose stroke begins on the bottom of the line, it generally begins from the same level as the finishing point of the dash. The following image shows how the bottom of the word following a dash generally sits on the same line as the dash itself:

This shows that Dickinson moved quickly from one word to another, from a dash to the following word. Since the paper Dickinson wrote upon was not lined, perhaps this is another reason the word after the dash appears on the same line as the following word. If the writing of a letter starts higher than where the finishing point of the dash is, the letter commonly finds its way to the finishing point of the preceding dash at its bottommost point. What is interesting is that Dickinson then slants the word down, so that the dash appears at the center of the word when looking at the two together, even though the dash ends at the bottom of the first letter of the following word, as evidenced by the example below:

Notice how the word “on” slopes down after following the dash after the word “Dots.” Dickinson is trying to keep the dash where it conventionally belongs, in the middle of the line. It is as if the dashes themselves become points of reference for Emily Dickinson during handwriting, something not entirely unbelievable considering she wrote on unlined paper.

As for dashes that are beneath words, they are indicative of the ends of lines when Dickinson is quickly moving from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. When she runs out of space in a line, the dash is placed beneath the last letters of the last word of the line. The following image shows what Emily Dickinson does with a dash when she runs out of space:

Dickinson does not move a dash to the following line when she runs out of room, and no line in her poetry ever begins with a dash. This shows that a line never begins with a breath, but the breath is already taken before the line begins. Every line in the poetry of Emily Dickinson begins with enough air to carry it to the next dash, punctuation mark, or end of a line.

Different lineation appears in different versions of Dickinson’s poems, even in those poems that were written to correspondents and scribed in the fascicles around the same time, approximated by Franklin. Corresponding dashes used in different versions of poems, even those that are identical, do not regularly appear to be the same: they are angled differently, have different lengths, and even different positions above or below the line of writing. Dickinson did not carefully copy the same dashes from one text of a poem to a counterpart. Those that do match, almost always fit into the convention mentioned above about being angled the same as the preceding word. Unfortunately, current scholars generally read the poems of Emily Dickinson in ways that literally take away from their aural quality. The aural quality of a poem can never be replaced by a lens of visual acuity; poetry is written with the intent to be read out loud.

Emily Dickinson’s dashes represent the rhythm of her breath—orchestrating the words of her verse. The trends in her use of dashes, the handwriting that scratched them across the page, and even the page itself and its effect on lineation all signify the natural phenomenon responsible for the visual stimuli that attract modern scholars into misrepresenting the purpose and origin of the dashes of Emily Dickinson. Beethoven wrote his 9th Symphony deaf, perhaps relying on the rhythm of his breath. The vibrations he felt upon the floor, reverberate masterfully still. Hopefully sometime soon, once again Emily Dickinson will conduct her own poetry—when scholars learn to listen to her breath with their ears, instead of smothering it with visual interpretations of her autograph. The dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson must not be emphasized as unique from one another, because this practice only further confuses the understanding and interpretation of her poetry.

CHAPTER THREE: Breathing as Topic and Trope

A final interesting area of connection between Dickinson’s poetry and the possibility of her having been a mouth breather appears in the unusual presence of issues of breathing as topic and figure of speech in her letters and poetry. The natural phenomenon of mouth breathing not only generated Emily Dickinson’s need to employ such a unique form of punctuation as her dashes, but it also provided an interesting understanding of the world through the subject of breathing. Breath is a very important concept for Dickinson, a fact that further reinforces the effect that her mouth breathing might have had on her writing. Breath and breathing very often appear as topic and trope in the writing of Emily Dickinson. The fluidity of breath allows it to be literally manipulated into many forms, expressing a variety of ideas. Emily Dickinson takes great advantage of the concept of breathing in her writing, especially its connection to the fundamental issues of life and death.

Breathing Letters

Breathing is something distinct in the life of Emily Dickinson, and its many effects on her life are highlighted through her frequent direct mention of it in the letters she wrote to others. At the age of twenty-one, for example, Dickinson wrote a letter to her brother late in October. In the letter, Emily Dickinson wants to make sure that her brother’s eyes are well. It is as though she worried that the same eye troubles that would afflict her in the early 1860s also caused problems for Austin. Even though Amherst was ravaged by the “mortal perils” mentioned in the chapter one, Dickinson often mentions Amherst as a place of health, although her longing for her brother to return from Boston may have also been an influence on this fact. In this letter, she tells Austin: “I hope this year in Boston will not impair your health, and I hope you will be as happy as you used to be before” (Letters 150). What is most interesting is that Dickinson then relates health to the air that is breathed in Amherst, as opposed to the air breathed in Boston:

I dont wonder it makes you sober to leave [this] blessed air – if it were in my power I would on every morning transmit it’s purest breaths fragrant and cool to you. How I wish you could have it – a thousand little winds waft it to me this morning, fragrant with forest leaves and bright autumnal berries. I would be willing to give you my portion for today, and take the salt sea’s breath in it’s bright, bounding stead. (Letters 150)

Emily Dickinson even wished she could give the Amherst air to her brother in Boston. It almost seems that the Amherst air is a panacea for all the ills encountered outside of the town. Dickinson often writes about the connection between breathing and health. Notice, also, how Dickinson uses the word “fragrant” in connection with breath. Fragrance must be delivered via breath or breeze, and when she talks about winds wafting, “fragrant with forest leaves and bright autumnal berries,” she is talking not about the sense of smell but about the sense of sight. “Fragrant,” in this letter, is quite possibly a synonym for “abundant.” Dickinson’s use of senses will be explored later in this chapter.

In another letter to Austin, six months later, Emily expresses the problems she herself has with breathing. She begins by telling Austin a story about a recent event in the letter:

Soon after tea, last night, a violent ring at the bell – Vinnie obeys the summons – Mr Harrington, Brainerd, would like to see me at the door. I come walking in from the kitchen, frightened almost to death, and receive the command from father, “not to stand at the door” – terrified beyond measure, I advance to the outside door – Mr H. has an errand – will not consent to come in, on account of my father’s sickness – (Letters 185)

In the kitchen, Emily’s mother and sister Lavinia have been hiding. They are laughing at the whole series of events taking place: Emily is not allowed to go outside and Mr. Harrington will not come in. What makes this passage interesting is how Emily Dickinson attempts to restrain herself:

having dismissed him hastily, I retreat again to the kitchen – where I find mother and Vinnie, making most desperate efforts to control themselves, but with little success – once more breathe freely, and conclude that my lungs were given me, for only the best of purposes. (Letters 185)

The last portion of the sentence is actually Emily Dickinson speaking to herself, writing to Austin what she was thinking at the time. She is in fact keeping herself from laughing as her mother and sister are. It is almost as though the reason she is suppressing her laugh is because her lungs cannot handle it, and laughing will charge directly into a fit of coughing. In order to overcome this problem, Dickinson can only let herself “breathe freely . . . for the best of purposes.” Something, more than likely her consumption, afflicted Dickinson in such a prominent manner that she was not even capable of laughing out loud like others in her family. The breathing of Emily Dickinson was not just something she was aware of, though.

The power breath had over the life of Emily Dickinson is further evidenced by the frequency with which she connects it to the issue of time. In her letters, Emily Dickinson has a tendency to refer to “a breath” as a unit of time. This gesture is quite interesting considering that the dashes that appear in her poetry literally pace the movement of the poems themselves. In a letter to her brother early in 1852, she begins the correspondence by writing:

I have just got your letter, Austin, and have read and sat down to answer it almost in a breath, for there’s so much I want to say, and so little time to say it, that I must be very spry to write you tonight at all. (Letters 169)

The next month, in another letter to her brother, she mentions: “I am in such a hurry that I cannot stop for breath” (Letters 174).

Dickinson even refers to breath as a place in at least one occasion. In a letter to an unknown recipient whom she called “Master,” Emily Dickinson laments their separation by writing: “If it had been God’s will that I might breathe where you breathed” (Letters 373). Dickinson may be relating the breathing of another’s breath to a kiss. If she were a mouth breather, she would have had to hold her breath during kissing, and the act of breathing another’s breath would have been abundantly apparent to her both before and after kissing—especially if the kissing was passionate and continued. Either way, to kiss someone you must be in the same place as them as well. Time and place are fundamental concepts to relate to with something as fluid and dissipating as breath, and her use of breath does not stop there.

In other places, Emily Dickinson actually refers to the sense of smell as a tactile quality related to the breath of some new scent, most often a flower. For instance, in a letter to her friend Abiah Root, she writes about spending time together:

Your joy would indeed be full, could you sit as I, at my window, and hear the countless birds, and every little while feel the breath of some new flower! Oh, do you love the spring, and isn’t it brothers and sisters, and blessed, ministering spirits unto you and me, and us all? (Letters 206)

Smelling is not a strong sense for Emily Dickinson; in fact, it is almost absent from her poetry entirely. The words “scent,” “smell,” and “fragrance” do not appear at all in her poems. The word “scents” appears once, and the word “fragrant” only twice, in the same letter, shown in this chapter, above. As mentioned there, the word “fragrant” quite possibly has very little to do for her with the sense of smell at all. What is even more telling than lack of words referring to the sense of smell, is the way Dickinson relates to taste. Emily Dickinson uses the sense of taste, but not to refer to the actual taste of anything. The words “bitter” and “sweet,” in all of their forms, never refer in Dickinson’s poetry, to the sense of taste itself; Dickinson never tastes anything in her poetry. In contrast, she actively sees, touches, and hears in her poetry (CP).

Instead, Dickinson transforms the sense of smell into breath. In one letter to a Mrs. Edward Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson cryptically remarks about such an animated breath:

Dear friend. Accept my timid happiness. No Joy can be in vain, but adds to some bright total, whose Dwelling is unknown –
The immortality of Flowers must enrich our own, and we certainly should resent a Redemption that excluded them –
Was not the “Breath of fragrance” designed for your cheek solely?
The fear that it was – crimsons my own – though to divide it’s Heaven is Heaven’s highest Half.
E. Dickinson – (Letters 597)

Such imagery accords with my speculation about Dickinson’s physiological condition. Had she been a mouth breather, the sense of smell would be the weakest of her senses. Those who breathe through their noses experience the sense of smell continuously. Mouth breathers, on the other hand, have to consciously attempt to smell many scents, unless the smell itself is delivered to them through, for instance, a breath or a breeze. The manner in which Emily Dickinson depicted to the scent of smell is only further indication of her possibly being afflicted by the phenomenon of mouth breathing.

Mouth breathers are often conscious of their breath because it is more audible than that of nose breathers. As I explained before, where a dash generates just a pause for most nose breathers, it allows a conscious space for breathing for mouth breathers. Dickinson is very aware of the space that exists between words. In a letter to Otis P. Lord in 1880, once thought to perhaps be Dickinson’s “Master,” she writes about the absence of words, explicitly associates that absence with breathing, and literally substitutes language with breathing:

I sometimes [have] almost feared Language was done between us – [if you grew] too dear, except for breath, then words flowed softly in like [some] a shining secret, the Lode of which the miner dreams (Letters 664)

Emily Dickinson mentions that she feared they were done communicating, and the only thing that remained between the two of them was breath. Dickinson is aware of every aspect of breath and breathing, even in endeavors she herself did not undertake. When Emily Dickinson looks at a pearl, she realizes what it costs to obtain: “To take the pearl – costs Breath –” (Letters 383).

To Emily Dickinson, breath itself seems to be everything, and at times is even associated with great emotion. When she thought of Susan Gilbert, Dickinson wrote to her: “my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still” (Letters 201). In a letter to Mrs. J. G. Holland, Dickinson recollects the night her mother died:

After a restless Night, complaining of great weariness, she was lifted earlier than usual from her Bed to her Chair, when a few quick breaths and a “Dont leave me, Vinnie” and her sweet being closed. (Letters 746)

Emily Dickinson is so aware of breathing that she quotes the breaths of her mother as part of the final words she says.

A few months later, Dickinson, still upset by the death of her mother, expresses her grief by describing its effect on her physically:

All is faint indeed without our vanished mother, who achieved in sweetness what she lost in strength, though grief of wonder at her fate made the winter short, and each night I reach finds my lungs more breathless, seeking what it means. (Letters 770)

In an early letter (1852) to Susan Gilbert, Dickinson even expresses how the emotion of friendship and love steals her breath, a figure that also reverberates through her poetry. The letter begins with Dickinson’s wishing that Susan, who is currently not in Amherst, were with her:

Sweet Hour, blessed Hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper Good bye, again. (Letters 201)

The letter continues with Dickinson’s describing what an effect the physical distance between them is having on her. Even the divine itself proclaimed in church is unable to suppress the longing Dickinson has for Susan. Toward the end of the letter, Dickinson proclaims:

I think of ten weeks – Dear One, and I think of love, and you, and my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still. (Letters 201)

This issue of breathlessness also appears in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. In a poem scribed into an early fascicle in 1859, Dickinson expresses the breathlessness she has for another woman. Could this woman be Susan Gilbert, now the wife of Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin?

So bashful when I spied her!
So pretty – so ashamed!
So hidden in her leaflets
Lest anybody find –

So breathless till I passed her –
So helpless when I turned
And bore her struggling, blushing,
Her simple haunts beyond!

For whom I robbed the Dingle –
For whom betrayed the Dell –
Many, will doubtless ask me –
But I shall never tell!
(Fr70)

Breathing in Poetry

Breath also occurs as a topic and trope in many other Dickinson poems. While the dashes themselves have long lingered in the minds of both readers and scholars attempting to understand their significance, it cannot be easy to understand something that is not experienced. I am suggesting that breath and breathing had a prominent influence on the life of Emily Dickinson, precisely because breath was so often stolen from her by illness or exhaustion. The poetry of Emily Dickinson is riddled not only with the breath of dashes, but the concept of breathing as well. Topics and tropes of the poetry also correlate with trends I discussed in the previous chapter as well.

The word breath, and its many forms (breathe, breathes, breathed, breaths, breathing, and breathless) appear in the poetry of Emily Dickinson sixty-one times (CP). At the same time, of these appearances, only ten times does breath or its other forms appear after 1865, and another fifteen prior to 1861. This means that some form of the word breath appears thirty-six times from 1861 to 1865, during the period of time when Emily Dickinson was most likely copying the majority of her canon into her fascicles, perhaps to prepare for her believed impending death. Thus, breathing seems to have affected the poetry of Emily Dickinson far more earlier in her life than later. In addition, her language also suggests that Dickinson was often “breathless” in the years before she began scribing poems into her fascicles.

A Breathless Dickinson

The word “breathless” appears in five different instances, only before 1861, in Dickinson’s poetry. The word is only used one other time and only as a variant word choice, in the poem “To flee from memory” (Fr1343), recorded in 1874. One of the first instances of the word breathless appears in late 1858, in the poem “There is a word” (Fr42). The poem itself is a prime example of many of the different attributes present in the early poetry of Emily Dickinson. Two manuscripts of the poem exist. The first was sent to Susan Dickinson enclosed with a letter and the second was copied into one of the first fascicles Emily Dickinson created (Franklin 93-4). The first version of the poem is below:

There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man –
It hurls it’s barbed syllables
And is mute again –
But where it fell
The Saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted Brother
Gave his breath away!

Wherever runs the breathless sun –
Wherever roams the day –
There is it’s noiseless onset –
There is it’s victory!
Behold the keenest marksman –
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul “forgot”!
(Fr42)

The first stanza of the poem is about the last word of a fallen soldier and, even more, the silence that follows that last word. The word itself can pierce an armed man with its “barbed syllables,” and where the word was said, a soldier of some rate or rank “Gave his breath away!”—is, in effect, breathless. The soldier is not directly referred to as dead by Dickinson. Instead, she uses the symbolism provided by the absence of breath. She compliments this image by expressing the sun as “breathless” in the final stanza. The sun has some sense of raw power and energy because it has no need to breathe, even when running. The first half of the final stanza emphasizes the diurnal cycle of the sun, something that is victorious from day to day. The ending of the final stanza points out how even the best soldier neglects the lessons of life learned from the sun. Life comes in cycles that are interrupted by death in war, and the soul “forgot” in the end is not the soul of any soldier, but the soul of the sun neglected.

Breathlessness is even used in Dickinson’s poetry to express the concept of eternal life. In the summer of 1859, Dickinson wrote such an intriguing poem:

Soul, Wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost indeed,
But tens have won at all –

Angels’ breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee –
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul! \ (Fr89)

The poem itself deals with the afterlife and how things might proceed once one is dead. She is wondering if her soul will try again, even though the odds are against it, or accept its fate. Above in Heaven, Angels wait to reward those going to Heaven with a “breathless ballot,” as Imps in Hell gather around to raffle off the impending soul they will capture from the gamble of life. The ballot itself expresses the acceptance into Heaven and, in this manner, “breathless” is used to express eternal life, much in the same way it was used to express the power of the sun in “There is a word” (Fr41).

However, “breathless” is also used by Dickinson to express more than strength and the emotion of passion. Breathlessness is also a term she used to refer to the dead. In Emily Dickinson’s “Flees so the phantom meadow” (Fr27), she imagines what it must be like to die, but not just as herself. This short poem exposes the struggle Dickinson had with life, death, and the afterlife:

Flees so the phantom meadow
Before the breathless Bee –
So bubble brooks in deserts
On ears that dying lie –
Burn so the evening spires
To eyes that Closing go –
Hangs so distant Heaven –
To a hand below. \ (Fr27)

The “breathless Bee” is dead in this poem. Not only is it dead, but its Heaven, the “phantom meadow,” flees from it as some dissipating image merely in the mind of the dying bee. She acknowledges this by representing other beings watching as their dying hopes of Heaven fades from their visions with their deaths. Both the senses of hearing and sight are represented in the poem, but of course the sense of smell is not. Mouth breathing, as mentioned before, suppresses the sense of smell. In the end, Heaven is something out of reach to all beings longing for it. The poem even questions the existence of Heaven itself, something not uncommon in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Death was something she constantly coped with and attempted to prepare herself for. The connection between breath and death in the poetry of Emily Dickinson simply cannot be one of coincidence.

Breathing Death

Nearly every poem in the canon of Emily Dickinson that has the word breath, or one of its forms, is about death. Most of these poems even have the word “death” itself included in them. In one of the most revealing poems about her physical condition, Emily Dickinson writes about breath parting from her:

Three times – we parted – Breath – and I –
Three times – He would not go –
But strove to stir the lifeless Fan
The Waters – strove to stay.

Three times – the Billows threw me up –
Then caught me – like a Ball –
Then made Blue faces in my face –
And pushed away a sail

That crawled Leagues off – I liked to see –
For thinking – While I die –
How pleasant to behold a Thing
Where Human faces – be –

The Waves grew sleepy – Breath – did not –
The Winds – like Children – lulled –
Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis –
And I stood up – and lived – \ (Fr514)

The poem begins with breath parting from her. Dickinson even treats “breath” as something separate from her, something that comes and goes when it pleases. She compares the situation of her struggle to breathe to the waves of water swelling in the fluid surges, or billows as she writes, of a sea. The billows throw her up and catch her, like a ball on the surface of the sea. Emily Dickinson is struggling to breathe. She imagines herself turning blue because she cannot breathe. The image of her own face and the faces of others fade from her, like a boat sailing away. In the end, the waves (perhaps of coughing) settle, and her breathing continues in peace. She falls asleep breathing calmly and awakens as the sunrise strikes her cocoon of rest. In the last line, Dickinson emerges as a butterfly from her bed, alive after the previous night’s tribulation of near death.

“Three times we parted – breath and I” is important because it exposes the physical issues Emily Dickinson was experiencing. The breathing problems Dickinson endured emerged in her poetry in many ways, most noticeably through her use of dashes. However, the content of many poems also exposes the unfortunate experiences with which Dickinson was forced to live. Her exposure to illness was so prevalent that the themes of death are often associated with her breathing problems. Yet, like many of the concerns that run through the poetry of Emily Dickinson, they are often soft and subtle.

In the poem “She died – this was the way she died” (Fr154), Dickinson simply explains the path taken by a girl who has died:

She died – this was the way she died
And when her breath was done
Took up her simple wardrobe
And started for the sun –
Her little figure at the gate
The Angels must have spied,
Since I could never find her
Opon the mortal side.
(Fr154)

The girl died “when her breath was done.” She walks toward the sun, once again a symbol of power, timelessness, and, even more so in this case, the entrance to Heaven. The angels see she has come, and since Dickinson cannot find her anymore, she believes the girl was let into Heaven. The poem is simple and straightforward but shows the connection between the issue of breath and life. That direct connection occurs again many times. Yet another poem begins: “Looking at Death, is Dying – / Just let go the Breath –” (Fr341).

In the poem “Give little Anguish,” for example, Dickinson writes of the power of endurance. Again she represents living as breathing:

Give little Anguish,
Lives will fret –
Give Avalanches,
And they’ll slant,

Straighten – look cautious for their breath –
But make no syllable, like Death –
Who only shows his Granite face –
Sublimer thing – than Speech –
(Fr422)

Dickinson presents her experience in dealing with death and those around her in this poem. In the first stanza, she says that one facing death should not show her anguish because it will drastically change the lives of those around her. When Dickinson says “Straighten – look cautious for their breath,” she means to be aware of those around that are living. The living that surround the dying are presented as living because they are breathing. It is the job of the dying not to make any “syllable, like Death.” This syllable seems to imply any sign of death, but it also means that there is no need to talk about death. Death shows himself through the dying with “his Granite face,” a far loftier concept than speaking about him to others. It is the strength to live with death, to endure death, that Dickinson is championing in this poem.

In her poetry, Emily Dickinson even questions her existence—if she is actually a living person. The effect of death at the door at all times is something she endured for the entirety of her life. Death was all around Dickinson during her life as well, and she found little comfort in faith as many others did. In “I am alive – I guess” (Fr605), she attempts to convince herself she is living by examining not just the symptoms of life, but the symptoms of death as well:

I am alive – I guess –
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory –
And at my finger’s end –

The Carmine – tingles warm –
And if I hold a Glass
Across my mouth – it blurs it –
Physician’s – proof of Breath –

I am alive – because
I am not in a Room –
The Parlor – commonly – it is –
So Visitors may come –

And lean – and view it sidewise –
And add “How cold – it grew” –
And “Was it conscious – when it stepped
In Immortality”?

I am alive – because
I do not own a House –
Entitled to myself – precise –
And fitting no one else –

And marked my Girlhood’s name –
So Visitors may know
Which Door is mine – and not mistake –
And try another Key –

How good – to be alive!
How infinite – to be
Alive – two-fold – The Birth I had –
And this – besides, in Thee!
(Fr605)

The poem begins with Dickinson recognizing common signs of the living: the color in her hands and the warmth of blood in her fingertips. Then she observes: “And if I hold a Glass / Across my mouth – it blurs it –” While this was a common method used by physicians to check the dead for breath coming from either the nose or mouth, Dickinson focuses solely on breath coming from the mouth. If Dickinson were a mouth breather, she would obviously be aware of her normal breathing causing the glass of a window or a drinking cup to blur, especially in the cold climate of New England. Her awareness of her mouth breathing could explain the reason behind this line in the poem. The poem continues as Dickinson spends the next two stanzas explaining that she is not dead because she is not experiencing the path a corpse would take, from a viewing in the parlor and into the coffin, a “House . . . fitting no one else.” At the end of the poem, she rejoices in being alive, because she has convinced herself that she has none of the symptoms of the dead.

In a poem expressing the feeling in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” Dickinson imagines what the final moment of death is like in “He fumbles at your Soul” (Fr477) in lines that directly personify death. She shares the effect that piano music had on her, by expressing its energy within this poem:

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys –
Before they drop full Music on –
He stuns you by Degrees –

Prepares your brittle substance
For the etherial Blow
By fainter Hammers – further heard –
Then nearer – Then so – slow –

Your Breath – has chance to straighten –
Your Brain – to bubble cool –
Deals One – imperial Thunderbolt –
That peels your naked soul –

When Winds hold Forests in their Paws –
The Firmaments – are still –
(Fr477B)

The music itself, played by keeper of the afterlife, stuns her with varying degrees of music in order to prepare her for the final moment of death—“the etherial Blow.” The change in the sounds of the piano hammers moving back and forth signifies the moment of imminent death. At this moment, she shares “Your Breath – has chance to straighten –” signifying that she has a chance to prepare herself for death. Then, the keeper deals the final blow, the “imperial Thunderbolt.” The poem ends with a couplet that seems somewhat out of place, as if the poem has not really ended. However, this is not the case at all. The poem slows as it continues, because of the increase in the use of dashes as it progresses. By the time the reader gets toward the end of the poem, it slows nearly to the rate of the breath of the dead. If the poem is read as it should be, the final stanza of only two lines takes just as long to read as the first stanza of four lines. The final couplet, in the mood of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” expresses the world outside of the dead. Yet, in this poem, the winds are frozen, as the breath of the dead, and the firmaments above are still; everything stops moving the last moment before one dies, one’s view of the world extinguished in an instant.

Breathing in Dickinson

The absence of breath does not always mean death in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. At times, awe of some divine magnitude forces Dickinson to stop breathing, sometimes so she can better listen to what is transpiring around her. In the following poem, Dickinson holds her breath as an organ plays inside a church:

I’ve heard an Organ talk, sometimes –
In a Cathedral Aisle,
And understood no word it said –
Yet held my breath, the while –

And risen up – and gone away,
A more Bernardine Girl –
Yet – knew not what was done to me
In that old Chapel Aisle.
(Fr211)

The poem grapples with religion. She is inside of a church, and the music of the organ imbued with faith has inspired her. It is not belief in God or the sermon that has inspired her, but the music itself. She leaves the church a more devout, or “Bernardine,” girl, even though she “knew not what was done.”

The poems containing the word “breath” in some form that do not deal with death cover a broad range of subjects. Often these poems include themes of inspiration, in literally the taking away of breath. One poem actually engages the act of breathing itself. The poem “I breathed enough to take the trick” (Fr308) tries to handle the fluidity of breath itself. The poem itself is actually about the struggle to breathe, much in the same way as Dickinson’s letter to her brother Austin, when she cannot laugh lest she break out in a bout of coughing:

I breathed enough to take the Trick –
And now, removed from Air –
I simulate the Breath, so well –
That One, to be quite sure –

The Lungs are stirless – must descend
Among the cunning cells –
And touch the Pantomime – Himself,
How numb, the Bellows feels!
(Fr308)

Dickinson is having trouble breathing in this poem, much in the same way she did in the poem “Three times – we parted – Breath – and I –” (Fr514). When she talks about touching the pantomime, Dickinson is actually referring to breathing so softly that she is getting life not from the air itself but from a character within her lungs that imitates the action of breathing without actually doing it. Emily Dickinson has such trouble breathing at times that “the Bellows,” her lungs, or perhaps her entire chest, feel numb from trying to breathe.

At times, it must have been painful for Emily Dickinson just to speak, especially if something truly caused her breathing to become irregular, be it passion or divinity. In these stanzas from the poem “I got so I could hear his name” (Fr292), she conveys such a struggle:

I got so I could hear his name –
Without – Tremendous gain –
That Stop-sensation – on my Soul –
And Thunder – in the Room –

I got so I could walk across
That Angel in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned – how –
And all our Sinew tore –

I got so I could stir the Box –
In which his letters grew
Without that forcing, in my breath –
As Staples – driven through –
(Fr292)

The struggle contained within the poem deals with the meeting of some creator, often referred to by many as “God.” The first two stanzas deal with the struggle to accept God as a part of herself, yet even when walking she and God turn different directions, “And all our Sinew tore –” The third stanza portrays her attempt to speak in the presence of such a divine power. She deliberately tries to talk “Without that forcing, in my breath – / As Staples – driven through –”

The poem “There comes a warning like a spy” (Fr1560) combines the idea of breath both as a quantitative measurement of time and the end to the season of summer:

There comes a warning like a spy
A shorter breath of Day
A stealing that is not a stealth
And summer is away –
(Fr1560)

“The shorter breath of Day” refers of course to the shortening of the day from the longer summer days. The “stealing” of the portion of that day means that summer has faded. The breath is used to measure the shortening of the day, showing that Dickinson was aware of breath as a measurement of time. The gesture could possibly also coincide with a difficulty to breathe during the winter months, when the cold would greatly affect her as a mouth breather or a sufferer of consumption.

In another poem about the fading of the day, Dickinson writes about the conflict between Death and Passion, the latter of which can only exist in Life:

Said Death to Passion
“Give of thine an Acre unto me”.
Said Passion, through contracting Breaths
“A Thousand Times Thee Nay”.

Bore Death from Passion
All His East
He – sovreign as the Sun
Resituated in the West
And the Debate was done
(Fr988)

The struggle in Emily Dickinson’s life was not just one between Life and Death—it was also one between Passion and Death. Passion refused to give Death any of its own, and Death retreated to its only domain, the only place where it has any sway at all – the end of Life, where Passion can no longer reside. The difference between Passion and Death, is one of Breath. Passion is the life that enabled Emily Dickinson to live. And, when faced with Death, Passion must speak through “contracting Breaths.”

Breath and breathing as topic and trope in the poetry of Emily Dickinson further emphasize the prevalence of illness and possibly mouth breathing in her life. The use of senses in her poetry especially supports the theory that Dickinson breathed through her mouth. Regardless of whether she breathed through her nose or mouth, though, there is no doubt that breathing had a major effect on the manner with which Dickinson interacted with her world. Her affliction by consumption especially tied breathing to both life and death, as evidenced by her use of breath and breathing in her poetry and letters. Breathing in Dickinson and expelling her rhythm is central to reading and understanding her poetry.

CONCLUSION: Breathing Dickinson

I have in this project sought to explore my conviction that breathing is something that is literally central to the life, physicality, and writing of Emily Dickinson. Amid its notorious complexity, an innate simplicity exists within the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I have demonstrated that her breath itself is experienced through her writing, weaving in and out as a series of dashes uniquely contributing to her poetry. I have sought to emphasize that because of the grammatical affinity of the dash with rhetorical pause, in order to understand her entirely unique use of dashes and their effect on the pacing of her poetry, readers must also take Dickinson’s physical breathing into account. The dashes thus suggest that breathing was a lifelong struggle that presented itself within her poetry through both punctuation and theme, explaining why breathing is central to understanding Dickinson’s poetry. The dashes that represent the very breath of Emily Dickinson are almost as integral to the reading of her poetry as the very words themselves.

The script, lineation, punctuation, and spacing in Dickinson’s autograph manuscripts has become a central part of Dickinson scholarship in the last decade, and is, I believe, currently serving to confuse the understanding of Dickinson’s poetry and writing. The source of these confusions originates primarily from the absence of the known origin of the dashes within her poetry. The dashes of Emily Dickinson have led many scholars to interpreting every stroke of her pen as intentional and purposeful. The ink itself, however, is not the issue. The paper she wrote upon itself had more of an effect on her spacing and lineation of her manuscripts than any theory derived from the script scratched across the page. I have emphasized that the visual aspects of the poetry of Emily Dickinson cannot replace the aural qualities inherent in her language. A natural pace exists within all language, a pace that is manipulated through the use of punctuation. The breath of Dickinson’s poetry needs to be allowed to breathe.

Fluids can be contained, and breath itself is a fluid. However, with no container, breath, like any fluid, dissipates and spreads thin. Breathing is contained by punctuation, but Emily Dickinson could not contain her breath with the punctuation traditionally available to poets. I believe that her need to contain her unconventional breathing is the origin of the dashes in her poetry. The need to breathe in such a manner would logically stem from the physicality of Emily Dickinson herself: the struggles she had with illness and the physical phenomenon of mouth breathing.

I have tried to show that something directly affected the breathing of Emily Dickinson during the early 1860s. The visible trend of an increase in the frequency of dashes in her poetry was formerly believed to be associated solely with the increase of her production of poetry. However, this is not the case, and an increase in the use of dashes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson is the result of something independent of the anomaly of her poetic production during the early 1860s. I associate the elevated frequency of dashes with the physical breathing issues endured by Emily Dickinson during a period of her life when she was facing death on a daily basis. That she probably continued copying poems into her fascicles in 1865, after the decline in her use of dashes, shows that the practice of the preceding years continued until she had completed the tradition that began early in the decade.

The life of Emily Dickinson parallels the physical trends found in her poetry. The accounts of first-hand experiences with Dickinson only further associate the attributes of her language and writing with the manner in which she spoke and endured her problems with breathing. Illness was a central focus in the life of Emily Dickinson, and a preoccupation of all those around her. Her life and its connection to her writing cannot be dismissed. Dickinson scholarship cannot afford to ignore the facts present in the life of Emily Dickinson and their ties to the trends found in her poetry and script, simply to emphasize bastions of overinterpretation found in singular strokes of pen that ignore the handwriting around them. The effect that illness had on the life of Emily Dickinson is prevalent in both her letters and her poems, not only as the representation of breath but through the theme of breathing itself.

Nothing is more telling than what comes from the hand and mind of Dickinson herself. The theme of breathing throughout her poetry exposes how Dickinson both related to and interacted with her illnesses and struggles to breathe. Dickinson expresses the effect of her breathing more publicly through her letters, and far more privately through poems. The connection between breathing and life in her writing cannot be ignored. Emily Dickinson was acutely aware of the effect breathing had on her life, and this knowledge is expressed through the concerns and figures that run through her writing. The struggle between Death and the Passion of Life reverberate through the contracting breaths of Emily Dickinson. We must be careful when placing lenses over the poetry of Emily Dickinson because, as she writes, if we “hold a Glass / Across [her] mouth – it blurs it –” (Fr605).

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