There's a certain Slant of light by Emily Dickinson
"There's a certain Slant of light" is a poem by Emily Dickinson that explores the complex relationship between light, nature, and human emotion. The poem emphasizes the idea that truth is best understood indirectly, a theme Dickinson often illustrates through metaphor and simile. The title highlights the word "Slant," suggesting that the angle of light—specifically during a winter afternoon—shapes the speaker’s experience and perception of the world. Dickinson describes this light as oppressive, akin to the weight of organ music in a cathedral, conveying a sense of "Heavenly Hurt" that alters one's internal landscape without leaving visible scars.
Throughout the poem, Dickinson employs unique stylistic features, such as capitalized nouns and dashes, which add emphasis and create a rhythm that invites contemplation. Her use of slant rhyme enhances the poem's complexity and reflects a departure from traditional forms. The poem also personifies nature, indicating that even the landscape is affected by the light's presence and absence, leaving behind feelings of distance and isolation. Overall, this poem encapsulates Dickinson's intricate exploration of how natural phenomena impact human consciousness, inviting readers to reflect on their own relationship with the world around them.
There's a certain Slant of light by Emily Dickinson
First published: 1890, in Poems
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
Emily Dickinson’s poetic strategy is governed by her belief that truth must be approached indirectly in order to be understood most fully. In “The thought beneath so slight a film” (poem 210), for example, she insists that the “film,” or embodiment in a work of art, allows the idea to be “more distinctly seen,” and she uses two similes (lace revealing breasts and mists revealing the Alps) as examples. In “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (poem 1129), she explains more fully why “success in circuit lies”: “the Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.” Again she uses a simile, this time the way adults explain the phenomenon of lightning to children (in a metaphorical and “kind” manner), to express a truth figuratively which cannot be expressed literally.
“There’s a certain Slant of light” is the fullest and most complicated rendering of this idea; in it, she uses dramatic metaphors and similes not only to suggest her own literary methodology but also to express the dynamic interrelation she sees between people and nature. One of the interesting aspects of her first line (as in all her poems, used by editors as the title) is that it is the word “Slant” which is capitalized, and no other, not even “light,” though there are fourteen internal capitalizations in the poem. The focus is not on the light itself, but on the angle it takes at a particular time of day (late afternoon) during a particular season (winter) in a particular place (rural Massachusetts). Stanza 1 shows that this angle of light “oppresses” rather than uplifts the poetic voice, and perhaps the reader as well, just as does organ music in a great cathedral.
Though this oppression is the chief characteristic of the angle of light, it suppresses and depresses as well. It gives “Heavenly Hurt,” which leaves no external scar, but makes a person internally different, for it changes what the world means to the person. These changes, wrought by nature, are to Emily Dickinson often more profound than those changes caused by other people, or by oneself.
In stanza 3, Dickinson indicates that this hurt, and the changes that come with it, cannot be taught, or learned from any human teacher, because it comes from the “Air” as an “affliction,” which brings with it the “Seal Despair.” In stanza 4, she extends the metaphor to indicate its effect on nature. When the slant of light comes, even the landscape listens, and shadows hold their breath; when it leaves, it leaves behind, for both human observer and nature, an experience of distance which is like “the look of Death,” or a sense of vacancy, absence, and isolation.
Forms and Devices
Dickinson is well known for her idiosyncratic use of capitalized words and dashes at the end of most lines, and both are used in abundance in this poem. The primary use of capitalized words within a line is for emphasis; it is Dickinson’s own way of indicating to the reader that one should pay especially close attention to a particular noun (nouns are capitalized much more often than any other part of speech). The dashes not only accentuate the rhythm of the poem, they also give the reader a sense of openness, extension, and ambiguity that is often less comfortable than the more traditional period. While not evident here, in other poems Dickinson commonly used exclamation points at the end of some lines for emphasis.
A more important and certainly much more influential device is that of slant rhyme (also called off rhyme, partial rhyme, or near rhyme). Slant rhyme (in which the final consonant sounds are the same but the vowel sounds are different) is frequently used when a poet wishes to negate, deny, or counter something, often a traditional value or idea. Here, for example, Dickinson uses slant rhyme in the first and third lines of each stanza (light/heft, us/difference, and listens/distance), and conventional exact rhyme to end the second and fourth lines (afternoons/tunes, scar/are, despair/air, and breath/death). Thus, what might have been a rather traditional poem of sixteen lines, divided into four quatrains rhyming abab, becomes a signature statement in free verse.
Dickinson uses a number of other poetic devices, including alliteration, assonance, and sibilant sounds, and her use of metaphor and simile is especially striking. In stanza 1, the visual perception of the light on a winter afternoon is compared with the sound of organ music in a cathedral; each has an oppressive weight and power in this particular situation that it would not have in any other. In stanza 2, she creates the metaphor “Heavenly Hurt,” an oxymoron perhaps, and certainly a paradox: It might mean that the hurt is sent from heaven, that it is a kind of delicious pain, or both. In the context of her other poems, one can guess that she means the reader to see both suggestions. There is a similar paradoxical ambiguity in stanza 3: Does the fact that despair is sent “of the Air” (not “from” the air) mean that it is sent from God or from nature? Perhaps for Dickinson, God and nature are finally so inextricably interwoven as to be inseparable. Personification is another common device in Dickinson’s poetry; here the landscape listens and the shadows hold their breath. All nature, it seems, not only the human part, is attentive to this awesome quality of light.
Bibliography
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