Syntax and Punctuation for Effect

Syntax is the order you put words and clauses in. Punctuation is the set of marks, periods, commas, dashes, quotation marks, that tell a reader when to pause, when to stop, and when a thought is finished. Together they are one of the quietest tools a writer has, because a reader rarely notices punctuation working on them directly. They just feel a sentence speed up, or catch, or run out of breath, without necessarily knowing why.

A writer controls pacing by deciding how long to let a sentence run before breaking it. Short, end-stopped sentences, ones that stop clean with a period, create a controlled, deliberate feel. Long sentences that keep adding clause after clause without much punctuation to slow them down create urgency, or the sense that a thought is spilling out faster than the writer can organize it. In poetry, the same choice happens at the level of the line. A line that ends with punctuation is called end-stopped, and it gives a reader a small rest. A line that carries a sentence past its own ending, with no punctuation to mark the break, is called enjambment. Enjambment pulls a reader forward before they are ready to stop.

Beth Cuthand, a Cree writer from the Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, builds almost the entire poem "He Told Me" out of these choices. Look at the opening lines: "He told me / when his father died / he felt him heave / his last breath." There is no comma after "me," no period after "died," nothing to slow the reader down. One line falls straight into the next, the way the news itself must have hit the speaker, all at once, with nowhere to catch a breath. A conventionally punctuated version of that same information might read: "He told me that when his father died, he felt him heave his last breath, and though he was miles away, he heard his father speak to him." That version is easier to process. It is also flatter. Normal punctuation would give the reader permission to pause, and pausing is exactly what this moment refuses to allow.

Cuthand pushes this further with a technique called parataxis, stringing clauses together with simple connectors like "and" instead of subordinating them into a tidy hierarchy. The bundle the father describes is listed this way: "a bone / from the last buffalo, / a stone / from the Assiniboine, / a small pipe and / tobacco pouch / and, / a feather." Notice that "and," sitting completely alone on its own line. A single connector word, one that would normally just link two items in a list, gets promoted to an entire line by itself. That is an extreme version of enjambment. It forces a small suspended pause exactly where a reader would expect the list to keep moving smoothly, so the weight of each item in that inherited bundle lands separately instead of blurring together.

For most of the poem's forty lines, only three periods appear: after "I transfer my bundle," after "of that bundle," and after "away." Each one falls at the end of a major section, at the heaviest line in that section. Everywhere else, the poem keeps running on breath and line breaks alone. Those three periods are not a grammar rule being followed. They are the only three places Cuthand lets the poem, and the reader, actually stop.

The clearest shift in the whole poem happens at the very end, when quotation marks appear for the first time: "'Evelene, I have been chasing my shadow ever since.'" Everything before this point has been reported secondhand, filtered through the phrase "he told me." The father's actual voice has been kept at a distance the entire poem. Quotation marks are usually just a formatting convention, but here withholding them for thirty-plus lines and then finally using them turns a small punctuation mark into the moment a reader hears another person's grief directly, for the first and only time.

As you read "He Told Me," track where a sentence keeps running past where you expect it to stop, and where it finally does stop. What does the poem's refusal to punctuate normally do to how the weight of the story feels to carry as a reader?

Further Reading

If you want to see a similar effect built in prose instead of poetry, look back at Beth Brant's "Swimming Upstream" from Lesson 8, where sentence length shifts mark the exact moment Anna May's composure starts to break.