Walking northwards along Dublin’s Dorset Street on Monday evening, I was struck by a succession of dramatic sunset views framed by the narrow, red-bricked roads to my left.
None of these quite translated into good iPhone pictures, somehow. But then I reached the Royal Canal where the spectacle stopped me in my tracks.
Standing near the bench on which Brendan Behan’s seated bronze figure listens forever to the old triangle going jingle jangle in nearby Mountjoy Prison, I shot a photo that looked like a painting and posted it on social media.
Soon afterwards on a group WhatsApp, a friend not normally known for a love of poetry – we’ll call her “Fiona” – was moved to quote Emily Dickinson:
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An ignorance a Sunset
Confer upon the eye –
Of territory – Color –
Circumference – Decay –
That of course is the slightly bleak opening verse of a short poem in which Dickinson moves towards a transcendent and uplifting conclusion.
So, not to be outdone by my friend, I shot back* the last of its three verses:
And when the solemn features
Confirm – in Victory –
We start – as if detected
In Immortality –
(*”Shot back” in the sense of “first Googled, then transcribed carefully”.)
A little later, I remembered a brilliant sketch another friend had shared from Instagram recently and posted a link to that on the WhatsApp with: “More from Emily Dickinson’s favourite punctuation mark here.”
The sketch, by American musician and comedian Elle Cordova, features a self-admiring Oxford comma and several lesser forms of punctuation hanging out in a cafe, chatting, when a hooded stranger enters.
This turns out to be “the mysterious middle dash”, as the OC calls her mockingly. There follows a trial of strength in which the OC challenges the newcomer: “What is it you do again, exactly?”
Whereupon the middle dash – now accompanied by ominous backing music – puts the upmarket comma firmly in her place:
“I signify every word and blank space in a page range; I am the infinite stairwell between integers; I am the bloody embrace of two countries at war; and on a gravestone I am the entire life lived between birth and death. Who are you?”
But wait! No sooner had I posted that than I began to wonder if the mark so beloved of Emily Dickinson was indeed the en dash, as it’s also known, or the longer em dash? Could it even be the shorter hyphen, which along with the em, confers the status of “middle” on the en?
And as I soon discovered, this has long been the subject of debate among scholars and publishers. More ink may have been spilt on it than on the missing apostrophe in Finnegans Wake and the hyphen in Moby-Dick combined.
According to one commentator, Dickinson’s dashes are “among the most widely contested diacriticals in the modern literary canon”.
Indeed, the debate has not always been confined even to the hyphen-en-em dash spectrum. One 1890s anthology of the poet’s work took most of her dashes out and replaced them with mere (gasp!) commas.
Consensus now seems to favour the middle dash, although the question of what exactly it meant to Dickinson has inspired great leaps of scholarship.
As collated in an essay by academic John Hay, critics have called the Dickinsonian dashes variously “a graphic representation ... of the presence of the creative impulse”; “vectors of implication where no words will do”; and symbolic of “a prostrate I, the punctuation mark of a fallen and discontinuous self”.
Anyway, whatever she meant by them, I’m sure Emily Dickinson would have enjoyed Elle Cordova’s sketch. She might even have enjoyed the view of sunset/eternity from Binn’s Bridge the other night.
I now like to imagine her sitting on the bench there discussing the subject with Behan, perhaps between drinking stories in which he recalls his times as a prostrate I, the punctuation mark of a fallen and discontinuous self.
Associations with Behan aside, Dorset Street is best known in literature as the scene of a stroll by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, similar to mine although not at sunset.
Around the same time Stephen Dedalus is “walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand”, Bloom is walking towards a Dorset St butcher’s shop to buy his breakfast, while the sun rises over George’s Church.
Later in my walk on Monday night, with darkness now falling, I retraced some of the steps of another character from Ulysses, Fr Conmee, at Summerhill.
That route took me past what used to be the Sunset House pub – a name presumably inspired by similar views to the west – until it became the scene of one of the fatal shootings in the Kinahan-Hutch feud in 2016.
Then it was briefly reinvented as the Brendan Behan, before reverting to its former name and closing again. The intervening period was an en-dash-length tribute to a writer who packed a lot of turbulence into his short life, inadequately summarised by the dates on his gravestone: 1923-1964.
