The idea that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poem to the melody of the traditional American folksong “The Yellow Rose of Texas” is an old saw. Everyone has heard it, repeated it and generally believes it to a be true.
The standard explanation for this is that Dickison usually wrote in hymnal or ballad meters, which makes her easily adaptable to singing aloud in well known melodies structured the same way. But if it is just a matter of form, then why don’t we also find this true for other American poets who wrote in these forms as well?
If you look around on YouTube, you find that there a lot of other renditions of her poetry into other song melodies as well. Why is it that? I’m going to take a leap and argue that the dashes splashed through out her poetry turn her diction into something that is easily rendered into song because it forces a natural vocalization into her words.
The people who don’t sing can having trouble realizing there is a distinct but separate relationship between the music of a song and the lyrics of a song. Usually, there is direct one to one correspondence between one quarter note of music and one syllable in the words that being sung, but the sung melody of the song lyrics never can perfectly fit the rhythymical beat structure of the music because both the singer and the musicians playing melody need rest pauses, unlike the rhythm sections who can play indefinitely.
Thus, songs will have places where the melody will elongate syllables to fit a beat structure, and there will be pauses where the melody stops so the singer can get more air, which also gives the lead musicians playing along with the singer the ability to finish their phrasing and reload for the following bars of music they will physically play.
This line from a famous Beetle’s song is an example: the line of “Yesterday all my toubles seemed so far away” is a phrase of 12 syllables, but when the Beetles sing it the third syllabble of “yesterday” and the second syllable to “away” are elongated to half notes which expands this phrasing out to 14 syllables, since the rhymical time of this song is 4/4, that means there still is a space of two quarter notes where the singer pauses to let the music fill out it’s natural 4 bars of 16 beats.
The best way to understand the effect of all the dashes in Dickinson’s poetry is to read her poems by ignoring them. In doing so you’ll find that her cadence will run quicker, is a bit more choppier, can turn a bit sing-songy at times, and her end rhymes bang together a little more harsher than they do when you read with the dashes as she wrote them.
So, the use of dashes are conscious inclusions to modify and buffer the language by making the reader elongate words in the same way that a singer on a stage or in a music studio does. It’s gives the poems a lilt and a pace that is not in the words themselves, which is the art of signing.
Indeed, now with the internet giving everyone the ability to see Dickinson’s manuscripts, the dashes that are in the printed books really aren’t dashes because they don’t lie half-way up the words they are placed between. Rather they are place at the bottom of the words which make them seem more like dots that you’ll find after musical notes to indicate where you hold the note a little longer than normal.
I’m not saying that Dickinson wrote her poems to be sung aloud, but the dashes create spaces that make the poems read in a natural sort of way as if she was across the desk from you saying her poetry aloud. This immediate presence of personal voice in her poetry is a quality which makes her unique.
And, linguistically at least, the use of the dash makes her a modernist for she is writing in the language of common speech that do“create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods—and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moodsand does create poetry where“a new cadence”does “mean a new idea; quotes taken from an article written by Amy Lowell 29 years after Dickinson’s death.
The dash allowed Dickinson to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” and “In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music”and come out with poems where “Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning;”quotes being advice that Ezra Pound proffered in explanation of how to write a new 20th century style of poetry.
Pound’s “sequence of the musical phrase”is different from Dickinson’s because he was taking inspiration from instrumental music rather than vocal music. Pound was infamous for being tone deaf and a terrible singer, so he would never have had an understanding of the breathing patterns you need to sing. But, being someone who studied music, he did understand how instruments make rhythmic lines.
An “musical phrase”( a riff, a solo, etc.) is a musical expression that ends with a musical punctuation called “cadence”. Cadence is the place where the phrase ends being played. Pound wrote his poems to musical cadence, meaning he made most of his lines either end stop or have breath pauses at the end of them.
Any musician knows rhythm means cadence because they are counted by beat patterns that automatically have end points, and musicians who can play lead are well aware where rhythmic phrasing will take them to, the art is in how you get to the end and what you do with it at the end as well.
It’s that performance that makes the music come alive. That, in essence, is what Lowell and Pound put into their poetry, by knowing that each line will give a breath pause at the end of itself, they are able to build up rhythm to cadence in a single line and then create off that with following lines.
Amy Lowell was less sublime explaining it: “By ‘cadence’ in poetry, we mean a rhythmic curve, containing one or more stressed accents and corresponding roughly to the necessity of breathing”which is technical explanation of how to run out breath at the line of a line.
She evens goes to openly write “Cadence is rhythm,…..Modern vers libre, far from being non-rhythmical as some people have supposed is entirely based upon rhythm. Its rhythms differ from those of metre by being less obvious and more subtle, but rhythm is, nevertheless, the very ground and root of its structure.”
Pound and Lowell’s revolution in poetics turned poetry into an act of oration, by having end cadence built into almost every line the reader/speaker unconsciously understands that they already have a reservoir of breath to spend and can play with coloring and accents within the line because you rarely have to breathe outside of it.
Pound’s poetry has such a strong sense of rhythm that he didn’t do much vocal coloring while reading his poems aloud because the internal beat of his lines are constant, but Lowell’s isn’t so regular so you’ll see people who recite her poems make many self determined adjustments to build up poetic tension that doesn’t exist within the words on the page. This is true for any poetry reading you attend where the poet on a stage will gussy diction up. Louise Gluck is an excellent example.
This is the opposite of singing, a singer knows how to control breath flows and is able to elongate and navigate through lines without having to come to complete stops at the end of them which unbinds them from “rhythmic curves” because they are never truly square to one from the get go.
To go back to the Beetles’ song “Yesterday, if you just read the lyrics aloud you naturally you will make pauses at the end of each line in the song, but singing them means you can change how you navigate the ends of lines because you’ve changed your breathing patterns.
This is a video spotlighting Paul MaCartney singing “Yesterday” on stage making it easy to see how he actually sings this song. He starts by singing the first line to cadence by taking a breath pause at the end of it and repeats this same pattern with the following next seven lines, exactly as you do when you speak these lines aloud.
But coming to the four line chorus, McCartney changes the pattern and instead of stopping at the end of the first line he breathes through it, thus breaking cadence, to take the expected end of line pause at the end of the second line. Hereafter his breathing really escapes cadence.
Going on, he breathes through the end of the third line and when he comes to the end of the fourth line, rather than pausing as you would expect, he breathes through it and sings right through into the first line of the next stanza where he finally takes a breath pause at the end there. So, in a single breath he was able to get in three lines that spanned two stanzas.
I don’t know if you would call this escaping cadence, or creating a new cadence, but it is an understanding of cadence beyond what Pound and Lowell knew of it.
Emily Dickinson mainly wrote in stanzas of four lines, even when she didn’t structure it on the page that way. Just by checking to see how she dealt with cadence, it easy to see what effect the dashes have on it: they make you read all the four lines of her stanzas without a pause in a single breath.
To say as much as possible with as little breath as possible is the whole idea behind natural speech patterns in any spoken language. Which is why her poetry speaks to the reader as if she was in conversation with us.
If you want to understand the true genius of her use of the dash just start consciously putting them into Pound’s poems as you read through them. Instead of the thrumming to layered cadence in the original lines, you are able to glide through all the end pausing quite easily and there are times when you seem like you are actually singing.
We know Dickinson studied singing and playing piano when she was a young teenager, and since her personally collected binder of sheet music (every musician has them) still exists we can see she had a wide repertoire of styles. Let’s just say that she was more musically inclined than Pound or Lowell.
As for“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” it’s a song of four line stanzas where each line has two phrases to it. The word at the end of every phrase gets elongated, there are some variations of course, but this structure makes it very adaptable for poems that have a lot of elongated words in the middle of, and at the end of, lines. So, sing away!!
The Haiku Experiment 