The dashes; the sparks

Hinging the moment from slumber to stir is a tittering dash—a horizontal slash of the kind that clinches the sky and the land: an elusive, penumbral half-line; a twilight of mind; a movement unfurled and distinctly defined.

This is the dash: the most visceral of the perishing punctles, its aim: to attach. Sentimental, so sentient, the dash marks a pause of delight—one that tickles the mind in quickening rhyme. It is the punctle of dreams: devoid of the logos of colons, the machinations of the subliminal mind rely on the pathos of our most feverish sign. And isn’t it the most ambiguous of our punctative sprites, this frolicking line that billows in roving recline the contents of a diction sublime? Oh, Dickinson knew it!-- when in lonesome concealment she sequestered her mind within the boundaries of these limitless lines; she sings:

The Brain—is wider than the sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

The pauses of the dash are tempered in movement; they itch to prolong a climactic caesura of restless delay; a tension lax; a furl of electric delight positioning combinations of lexeme amid springing, uncontainable, sparks.

A ghoul in relics

Following this ardent apology succeeds an argumentation vested in logic’s design:

Whitman’s use of the dash generates a quick movement of breath that mirrors in form the “speeding . . . unreeling” spider’s silken thread. The dash makes the poem, looming thrice at pivotal moments of movement—carrying the momentum of the creative mind in hasty pause. The Speaker imagines Whitman a diligent spider, endlessly weaving his Leaves of Grass in some cottage cranny, eight arms at full length, “ceaselessly musing”—birthing fine linen in ringlets of elegant line; forging and shaping an impulse of soul: a means of design meant to build “till the bridge you will need be formed, Till the ductile anchor hold”. Indeed, Whitman did mark where on a bluff a delicate spider perused its surroundings through lurches of silk, but arguably he did more than this:

“A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding”

To mark; to etch on paper: to write—who is this spindling spider? Is it perhaps a vision of our pouncing poet, himself settled neatly in a seat off of a certain wooden (oak) desk—indeed a kind of little bluff? Our spidery poet—your silk has found crevice in the nooks of my moods: the threads of your “O my soul”, silver in substance, still fling in the winds of this gossamer ghoul.