This immediate presence of personal voice in her poetry is a quality which makes her unique.Īnd, linguistically at least, the use of the dash makes her a modernist for she is writing in the language of common speech that do“create new rhythms-as the expression of new moods-and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moodsand does create poetry where“a new cadence”does “mean a new idea quotes taken from an article written by Amy Lowell 29 years after Dickinson’s death. I’m not saying that Dickinson wrote her poems to be sung aloud, but the dashes create spaces that make the poems read in a natural sort of way as if she was across the desk from you saying her poetry aloud. Rather they are place at the bottom of the words which make them seem more like dots that you’ll find after musical notes to indicate where you hold the note a little longer than normal. Indeed, now with the internet giving everyone the ability to see Dickinson’s manuscripts, the dashes that are in the printed books really aren’t dashes because they don’t lie half-way up the words they are placed between. It’s gives the poems a lilt and a pace that is not in the words themselves, which is the art of signing. So, the use of dashes are conscious inclusions to modify and buffer the language by making the reader elongate words in the same way that a singer on a stage or in a music studio does. In doing so you’ll find that her cadence will run quicker, is a bit more choppier, can turn a bit sing-songy at times, and her end rhymes bang together a little more harsher than they do when you read with the dashes as she wrote them. The best way to understand the effect of all the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry is to read her poems by ignoring them. This line from a famous Beetle’s song is an example: the line of “Yesterday all my toubles seemed so far away” is a phrase of 12 syllables, but when the Beetles sing it the third syllabble of “yesterday” and the second syllable to “away” are elongated to half notes which expands this phrasing out to 14 syllables, since the rhymical time of this song is 4/4, that means there still is a space of two quarter notes where the singer pauses to let the music fill out it’s natural 4 bars of 16 beats. Thus, songs will have places where the melody will elongate syllables to fit a beat structure, and there will be pauses where the melody stops so the singer can get more air, which also gives the lead musicians playing along with the singer the ability to finish their phrasing and reload for the following bars of music they will physically play. Usually, there is direct one to one correspondence between one quarter note of music and one syllable in the words that being sung, but the sung melody of the song lyrics never can perfectly fit the rhythymical beat structure of the music because both the singer and the musicians playing melody need rest pauses, unlike the rhythm sections who can play indefinitely. The people who don’t sing can having trouble realizing there is a distinct but separate relationship between the music of a song and the lyrics of a song. Why is it that? I’m going to take a leap and argue that the dashes splashed through out her poetry turn her diction into something that is easily rendered into song because it forces a natural vocalization into her words. ![]() ![]() If you look around on YouTube, you find that there a lot of other renditions of her poetry into other song melodies as well. But if it is just a matter of form, then why don’t we also find this true for other American poets who wrote in these forms as well? The standard explanation for this is that Dickison usually wrote in hymnal or ballad meters, which makes her easily adaptable to singing aloud in well known melodies structured the same way. Everyone has heard it, repeated it and generally believes it to a be true. The idea that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poem to the melody of the traditional American folksong “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is an old saw.
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