Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

"There's a certain Slant of light"

(1890)

 

Emily Dickinson

(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)



There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –


Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
 5
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –
 
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair – 10
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
 
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance 15
On the look of Death –

 

 

Notes


5  Hurt:


10  Seal:

11  imperial:

11  affliction:

 




What was the United States like that Whitman and Dickinson were born into?
Source: Ed Folsom, Selected American Authors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman



EMILY DICKINSON is born in 1830, the year President Andrew Jackson signs the Great Removal act, forcibly resettling all Indians west of the Mississippi; Jackson addresses the nation, "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?" The Sac and Fox tribes, over objections of chief Black Hawk, give up all their lands east of Mississippi River ; Choctaws do the same; other tribes like Chickasaws follow suit within a year or two. Only the Cherokees, literate farmers who wanted citizenship, hold out. In 1832, Black Hawk leads some Sac and Fox back across Mississippi into Illinois --they are eventually ambushed and massacred in the Michigan Territory , and Black Hawk is turned over to U.S. authorities by the Winnebago Indians. Major Congressional debate is over whether or not the sale of Western lands should be restricted; Western senators sense a plot by Eastern business interests to close the West so that cheap labor stays in the Northeast where factories demand low-paid workers. Joseph Smith publishes "The Book of Mormon", based on his deciphering of golden plates he claimed to have found on an upstate New York mountain, detailing the true church as descended through American Indians who were apparently part of the lost tribes of Israel (an idea quite common in early 19th-century America). The next year, 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville arrives in the U.S. and begins his journey around the country that would result in his massive book of observations, "Democracy in America ," including his analysis of “the three races in America ” (black, red, and white). Nat Turner, a Virginia slave who had visions from God of white spirits and black spirits engaged in bloody combat, leads a revolt with seven other slaves, killing his master and his family; with 75 insurgent slaves, he killed more than 50 whites on a two-day journey to Jerusalem, Virginia, where he was hanged along with sixteen of his companions (many other blacks are killed during the manhunt for Turner). The Turner Insurrection was the stuff of nightmares for white Southerners, who passed increasingly severe slave codes. The song "America" is sung for the first time in Boston on July 4.

 


 



Poetry


If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?
—"Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, August 16, 1870" The Letters of Emily Dickinson, eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge: Belknap, 1958)

 




Dickinson’s editing process often focused on word choice rather than on experiments with form or structure. She recorded variant wordings with a “+” footnote on her manuscript. Sometimes words with radically different meanings are suggested as possible alternatives. [...] Because Dickinson did not publish her poems, she did not have to choose among the different versions of her poems, or among her variant words, to create a "finished" poem.  This lack of final authorial choices posed a major challenge to Dickinson’s subsequent editors.
—"Diction," Major Characteristics of Dickinson's Poetry, Emily Dickinson Museum (2009)



page 74, Poems (1890)

 

from Poems (1890)

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons

That oppresses, like the Heft –

Of Cathedral tunes –


Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

When the meanings are –


None may teach it Any –

'Tis the Seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –


When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'its like the Distance

On the look of Death –




5





10





15

           




Paraphrases
 
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
 
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –
 
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
 
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'its like the Distance
On the look of Death –		 There’s a certain slant of light, winter afternoons – that oppresses, like the heft of cathedral tunes – heavenly hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar, but internal difference, where the meanings, are – None may teach it – any – 'Tis the Seal Despair – an imperial affliction sent us of the air – When it comes, the landscape listens – shadows – hold their breath – When it goes, ‘tis like the distance on the look of death –


There's a certain slant of light, in some winter afternoons, that oppresses, like the weight of church organ music. It gives us spiritual wounds. We can find no external or physical scar, but we can find internal difference, where the meanings, are. No one may teach it, any of it. It is the hopeless mark, a commanding burden, sent to us from the air. When it comes, the landscape listens, shadows hold their breath. When it goes, it is like the distance on the look of death.


There's a certain slant of light that happens on some winter afternoons that oppresses like the weight of music from the cathedral. It injures us spiritually. We cannot see any physical scar on our body, but we can feel a change inside of us, where the meanings reside. No one may teach it anything. It is the hopeless mark, an unavoidable curse sent to us on the air. When it comes, the landscape listens and shadows hold their breath. When it goes, it is like the distance on the look of death.

           




 

 

Study Questions

  • What is the difference between dictionary definitions and Dickinson's meanings?
  • In the paraphrases above, when the dashes are taken out and the line breaks removed, how do the lines read differently and to what extent does this change the meaning of the lines?

            



Vocabulary

fascicle
lyric
diction; denotation, connotation
ambiguity
circumlocution
definition; definition poem
riddle; riddle poem
irony
pathos
logos
form
stanza
meter; common meter
rhyme
repetition
punctuation; dash
imagery
tone
theme

 

 

 


Sample Student Responses to Emily Dickinson's "There's a certain Slant of light"


Response 1: 

 

           

 

 

 

Reference

 

Link
Texts Secondary Texts Textual Criticism
 Resources

 


 

Emily Dickinson

 


Reference

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. Print.


Further Reading

Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap, 1958. Print.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue, Stephanie Farrar, and Cristanne Miller, eds. Dickinson in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa: U of Iowa P, 2015. Print.


Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998. Print.


Griffith, Clark. The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964. Print.


Kirby, Joan. Emily Dickinson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Print.

Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.


Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.


Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Print.


Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. Print.


Mitchell, Domhnall. Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000. Print.


Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1974. Print.


Smith, Martha Nell, and Mary Loeffelholz, eds. A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Print.


Socarides, Alexandra. Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. Oxford: OUP, 2014. Print.


 



 

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Last updated April 24, 2016