Okay, so today I messed around with “dickinson suspended.” Sounds kinda weird, I know, but stick with me.
First, I dug around to even figure out what this was about. Turns out, we’re talking about that Emily Dickinson poem, “Because I could not stop for Death,” and specifically, how the punctuation – those dashes – create a kind of “suspended” feeling.
So, I grabbed my copy of the poem and read it aloud. Like, a bunch of times. I tried to really pay attention to how those dashes made me pause, or how they made the lines feel…unfinished, you know?
My Little Experiment
- I started by reading the poem super fast, ignoring the dashes. It felt…wrong. Like I was rushing through something important.
- Then, I went the opposite way. I made each dash a HUGE pause. That felt dramatic, but also kind of silly.
- Finally, I tried to find a middle ground. I let the dashes be little hesitations, like I was thinking about what I was saying as I went along.
I realized that the dashes are like little breaths. Or, its better to say, little moments where you have to stop and think. The poem isn’t just about death, it’s about the slow, thoughtful way we come to understand big things.
And about the “suspended” thing. I think that word means that the poem never really…ends. Each line kind of hangs there, waiting for the next one. The dashes make it feel like the journey is still going on, even after the poem is over. I think this what is so-called dickinson suspended.
It was a cool little experiment. It made me appreciate how much punctuation can change the feeling of,well,anything you read.
