Pathetic division within Modernity's Punctal Theory

Meistersinger Hans Sachs writes:

"My friend, just this is poet’s task:
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion’s truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation."

This sad translation from that most jubilantly biting of tongues reveals the oft noted link between the dream-world and the poetic inspiration: a link that Dickinson undoubtedly and (likely) relentlessly clutched to as she dipped her pen in the blue sinews of her ink-stained mind. No doubt, her use of the dash in light of this exhausted and slightly delusional Speaker’s discernments proves that the stringed series of her innumerable poems should be read as the relics of a haunting dream sequence. Indeed, pathos is the logos of dreams—in that world of moldy designs and distorted lines, only feeling can gift the accolade of sense; and is poetry not the billowing eccho of this innate incline? In poetry we find reverie, the day-light equivalent of our nocturnal speculations. And punctles, the bringers of sense; the heralds of logos amidst a fray of lexical strife, must vest themselves in the garb of emotional enterprise. Leading the pathetic division within the larger dimension of Modern Punctal Theory tiptoes the dash, slinking along like a snake through a darkening culvert, followed by the eager (!!!) exclamatory mark, finally skirted by the somber suspension of the ellipsian flecks.

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.

Pathos in marvel; marble in rhyme

The sentimental speaker slips into pathos (from logos to pathos) as she muses in rhyme, and can you (really) blame her literal lapse?—After all, is poetry not the ultimate pathos; the thought in feeling; the rapturous heart? And does it not befit she who it reads to dazzle in awe; to marvel at maniacal frenzy? Indeed, marvel is marked by an astonished wonder roused by the pangs of a passion, devoid of reason’s hegemony. Echoing the words of a great poet about a certain greatest of poets, she says: let the rhythms of rhyme marvel us to the point of petrification; let the marvel “make us marble with too much conceiving”—the marvel (n): the poetry; the marvel (v): the garnished effect of the reading—the emotion that binds found only in rhyme; the glittering rhetoric; the truth in mirage; let it remind that:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.”

And so, can we blame the ecstatic Speaker; the hapless romantic; for a truant reason, a pathetic incline?