there's a certain slant of light
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Appreciation of There's a Certain
Slant of Light
There's a certain slant of
light,
On winter afternoons,
That
oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can
find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may
teach it anything,
'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,
't is like the distance
On the look of death.
This poem begins by noting the oppressive
sound of church bells heard in the
bleak
atmosphere of a winter give―Heavenly Hurt,‖though
they leave
no external scar. Within six lines,
Dickinson synthesizes a description of depression
in
terms of three senses: hearing, sight, and
feeling.
This depression is, however, more
than ordinary sadness. It comes from Heaven,
and it bears the biblical―Seal Despair.‖It
hurts the entire landscape, its nonhuman as
well as its human constituents, which listens,
holds its breath for some revelation, yet
perceives only the look of death.
Significantly, the poet nowhere implies that no
meaning exists; indeed, in other poems she is
certain that a divine being exists and
that
there is a plan. Even so, the implications of what
she writes are almost as
devastating, for the
apocalyptic seal of revelation holds fast,
yielding no
enlightenment to those below but
the weak afternoon sun of a New England winter.
Dickinson was a keen observer of her
environment, dramatizing her reactions in
poems. Her sense of melancholy informs her
observations of light on winter
afternoons.
This poem consists of four stanzas with the
rime scheme ABCB. The speaker
dramatizes the
intense feeling of spiritual intuition that is
brought on by the simple
―Slant of light‖ on a
winter afternoon. The light pouring in through the
window tilts in
a way that causes the speaker
to experience of sense of spiritual melancholy.
First Stanza: ―There's a certain Slant of
light‖
In the first stanza, the speaker claims
that on winter afternoons, the light that
shines through her window has a ―certain
Slant‖ to it that ―oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes.‖ Something as
weightless as ―light‖ feels heavy to the speaker.
The weight of ―Catheral Tunes‖ would be quite
profound, sound being heavier than
light, but
to the speaker that ―certain Slant‖ causes the
light to be as heavy as that
heavy sound
coming from the gigantic organs that deliver
church music.
Because church music is meant to
be uplifting, the speaker’s words become
paradoxical: how can an inspirationally
uplifting hymn be oppressive?
Second Stanza:
―Heavenly Hurt, it gives us‖
The profundity
of the ―Cathedral Tunes‖ causes the speaker to
experience a
―Heavenly Hurt.‖ She confirms,
however, that the ―hurt‖ leaves no scar, because
it is
inside; it is the soul that is affected
by the oppression or ―Heavenly Hurt.‖ The
speaker says that the pain is on the inside
―Where the meanings are.‖
―Meaning‖ is very
important to all human beings, whether they are
yet aware of
that fact or not. The speaker is
keenly aware of the soul’s sensitivities to the
―meanings‖ of physical things and events, and
she is aware that they are internal—
not
external.
Third Stanza: ―None may teach
it—Any‖
The speaker declares that no one can
teach another how to become aware of the
mystical attributes of the yearning for
meaning. While―Despair‖leads one in that
direction, and the desire is universal, it
comes to each one as simply as breathing.
One’s spiritual development has to be right
before one can entertain such divine
cravings.
Fourth Stanza:―When it comes, the Landscape
listens‖
When the strong spiritual desire for
understanding the nature of reality comes,
everything seems to stop and listen. She
speaker dramatizes that utter stillness by
claiming,―Shadows—hold their breath.‖The
quietness implied by―shadows holding
their
breath‖is astounding; it is a miracle of striking
awareness, undetectable to most
and
unceasingly secure to but a few.
Then the
speaker avows that when the sense of melancholy
goes, when
the―heavenly hurt‖ lightens into
understanding, it is―like the Distance On the
look of
Death.‖Of course, it is not death
itself, but merely like the blank stare that none
can
fathom, save those who can distinguish
that profound melancholy in the―certain Slant
of light‖on―Winter Afternoons—.‖
In this
poem, Emily Dickinson treats an irrational
psychological phenomenon
akin to those
recorded by Wordsworth in fits of passion have I
known
(
myself I cried, 'If Lucy should be
dead!
she loathed the hour When the thick-moted
sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and
the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.A certain
external condition of
nature induces in her a
certain feeling or mood. But the feeling is more
complex than
Wordsworth's or Mariana's. The
chief characteristic of this feeling is its
painful
oppressiveness.
aspect. A large
component in it is probably consciousness of the
fact of death, though
this is probably not the
whole of its content nor is this consciousness
necessarily fully
formulated by the mind. Yet
here we see the subtle connection between the hour
and
the mood. For the season is winter,
when the year is approaching its end. And the time
is late afternoon (winter afternoons are short
at best, and the light slants), when the
day
is failing. The suggestion of death is caught up
by the weighty cathedral tunes
(funeral music
possibly—but hymns are also much concerned with
death—
Irae,
landscape listens, Shadows hold
their breathis also suggestive of the stillness of
death.
But besides the oppressiveness of
the feeling, it has a certain impressiveness too.
It is weighty, solemn, majestic, like organ
music. This quality is conveyed by
of
cathedral tunes,
document), and This quality of
the mood may be partly caused by the
stillness
of the moment, by the richness of the slanting
sunlight (soon to be followed
by sunset), and
by the image of death which it calls up.
The
mood gives
hurt, which leaves —the sky; the
ultimate source
of both sunlight and
death—God. The hurt is given internally
are—that is, in the soul, the psyche, or the
mind-that part of one which assigns
—consciously or intuitively—to life and to
phenomena like this.
—Both the sunlight and
the mood it induces are
beyond human
correction or alleviation; they are final and
irrevocable—
There is no lifting this seal—
this despair.
—The lines call up the
image of the stare in the eyes of a dead man,
not focused, but fixed on the distance.
Also,
—part of
the implicit content of the mood.
Notice that the slanted ray and the mood are still
with us here, but are also going. The final
remarkable image reiterates the components
of
the hour and the mood—oppressiveness, solemnity,
stillness, death. But it hints
also at
relief—hopes that there will soon be a between the
poet and her
experience.
When it goes, it
is as distant from the thought of death. As, all
of us,
inexplicably assume that we are far
away from death.
This change cannot be induced
through teaching (―None may teach it – Any-‖);
instead, it must be experienced. Though it is
―Despair‖, it is an ―imperial affliction,‖
that is, a regal or royal affliction, that
although painful, leads to an uplifting.
All
in all, the whole poem closely describes a fairly
common theme of
Dickinson’s—that of change as
a fearful but illuminating process, both painful
and
essential.