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Emily Dickinson Dashes

Decent Essays

Dickinson's main forms of syntactical variation in the poem revolve around her use of dashes and enjambment. To elaborate, the second stanza of the poem, rife with rhyme, utilizes enjambment to further emphasize the seemingly endless investigation presented in the poem. The first three lines of the stanza, "I turned my Being round and round / And paused at every pound / To ask the Owner's name -", are devoid of any punctuation until the dash at the end of the third line. This emphasizes the feeling of disorientation noted in the previous paragraph, especially considering the rest of the poem is littered with dashes which force Dickinson's readers to slow their reading with no notice whatsoever. However, the use of dashes in "I felt my life

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