POEM THE DASH IN THE MIDDLE MANUAL

You can use it to indicate number ranges: 'The library is open 10:00–5:00.' You can use it in some other places you would use to: 'The Washington–Moscow hotline.' Professional editors, on the advice of such guides as The Chicago Manual of Style, use an en dash in place of a hyphen when making a compound with something that's already a compound, e.g., 'New York–based' or 'Coca-Cola–drinking.' In fact, this is one way you can tell a professional editor or typographer has been let loose on a text, because no one else ever does this. An en dash is supposed to be half the width of an em dash, but some fonts make it long and some make it quite short (in which case they may make it a little thinner and higher than a hyphen). Some people use it as a fancy dash, but its official use is to mean 'approximately,' as in 'I'll be there at ~1:00.' It has also been used in formal logic to mean 'not' (which, frankly, 'I'll be there at ~1:00' often really means), but now the angled dash is preferred for that. This looks just like a tilde (as in piñata), but in it's in the middle of the line.

Have you seen this thing? Sometimes if you view hidden characters in a document it will stand in for something else, but when it's being itself it's not. But if you're working with a book or article that has a lot of math in it, it can be very useful to be able to find all the minus signs and only the minus signs. And in Excel, a hyphen functions as a minus sign (an en dash does not!). Why not just use a hyphen or an en dash? They (usually) don't look the same, but the difference is not huge. This is the opposite of a soft hyphen: You always see it and it does not allow a line break right before or after it. This is a creature of the computer age: It's a hyphen you can insert in a word to tell it to break at that place and no other, and it only shows up if the word breaks at the end of a line. Microsoft Word has decided to be helpful in this: By default, if you type two dashes between two words, they become an em dash - unless you put a space on either side, in which case they become an en dash, same as if you just type space-hyphen-space.

POEM THE DASH IN THE MIDDLE FULL

Printed matter using proper full fonts is supposed to use the right lines in the right places. This is really Emily at her meter rebel best, because the shifting meters all jibe perfectly with the complex images she's throwing at us-from the stiff 'formal feeling' in the first stanza (1), to the chaotic images of the second, to the slow sinking into death at the end.The ancients among us who learned to type on actual typewriters were taught to use two hyphens to make a dash, and many people still do - but, like underlining for italics and double spaces after periods, that was only meant as an indication for the typesetter.

You can check out ' Form and Meter' for all the deets on this, but the meter highlights from this poem are that it starts out in standard iambic pentameter for the first stanza, goes all crazy in the middle, then lands us back in pentameter land at the end. She doesn't do this in every single poem, but she's definitely known for being a meter rebel. (Not sure if that's what we want to feel right now, but we appreciate the effort.) Metrical Maidenīeyond the usual capitalization and dash games that Emily always plays, we also see her getting funky with meter. The last line of the poem also does a cool thing with dashes:įirst – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – (13)īy breaking up the line, Emily slows down the pace, allowing us to feel the slowly beating heart of a person who's freezing to death. See how leaving out the dash speeds up the rhythm of lines 6 and 8? We wonder if this was meant to give the feeling of those mechanical feet stumbling forward at an erratic pace. The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – (5-9)

Many of the lines are followed by dashes, and she makes it count where she chooses to leave them out. Dashes on DashesĮmily is also as dash happy as ever in this poem. One of our favorite examples is where she capitalizes 'Nerves' and 'Heart.' Here the capitalization seems to help with the personification that's going on-both of these body parts are given human traits, and capitalizing their names makes them seem more like people than things. There is-as always-her use of creative capitalization. You'll find plenty of Emily's greatest hits in this poem.

Poem the dash in the middle