The trochaic meter in this poem is much more skillfully handled than the majority of
Emily Dickinson’s meters. Even in the terse /79/ seven-syllable, five-syllable lines there
is present much subtle metric variation, as reading the poem aloud will verify.
The simplicity of the organization of this poem is art which conceals art. The stanzas
are self-contained, precise units, each one an extension of the basic meaning. The poem
ends with the symmetrically balanced phrases "when it comes . . . when it goes . . .
" and the final images of sound and sight complete in reverse the pattern created by
the sight and sound imagery of the first stanza.
This poem exhibits none of the childishness, the self-conscious mannerisms, which mar
some of her poetry. The characteristics which are present—the introspective analysis
of the second stanza, the mystical implications of the third, and the supreme mastery of
words and imagery throughout—contribute to make this poem one of the best products of
Emily Dickinson’s unique poetic genius. /80/
from Emily Dickinson’s Approach to Poetry, New Series, No. 13 (University of
Nebraska Studies, November 1954), pp. 76-80.
THOMAS H. JOHNSON
[Emily Dickinson's] dread of winter [is] expressed in one of her remarkable verses,
written about 1861 [,"There's a certain Slant of light"]. It is, like the
somewhat later "Further in Summer than the Birds," an attempt to give permanence
through her art to the impermanent; to catch that fleeting moment of anxiety which, having
passed, leaves the beholder changed. Such moods she could catch most readily in the
changing seasons themselves. . . . /89/ Winter to her is at moments intolerably dreary,
and she here re-creates the actual emotion implicit in the Persephone-Pluto myth. Will
spring never come? Sometimes, winter afternoons, she perceives an atmospheric quality of
light that is intensely oppressive. The colloquial expression "heft" is
especially appropriate in suggesting a heavy weight, which she associates with the weight
of great bells or the heavy sound that great bells create. This might be the depressing
chill and quiet preceding a snowfall. Whatever it is, it puts the seal on wintriness.
Coming as it does from heavens, it is an imperial affliction to be endured ("None may
teach it—Any"). Even the landscape itself is depressed. When it leaves, she
feels that whole body. The strong provincialism, ‘Heft’ (smoothed away to ‘Weight’ by
former editors), carries both the meaning of ponderousness and the great effort of heaving
in order to test it, according /216/ to her Lexicon. This homely word also clashes
effectively with the grand ring of ‘Cathedral Tunes,’ those produced by carillon offering
the richest possibilities of meaning. Since this music ‘oppresses,’ the
connotation of funereal is added to the heavy resonance of all pealing bells. And since
the double meaning of ‘Heft’ carries through, despair is likened to both the weight of
these sounds on the spirit and the straining to lift the imponderable tonnage of cast
bronze.
The religious note on which the prelude ends, ‘Cathedral Tunes,’ is echoed in the
language of the central stanzas. In its ambiguousness ‘Heavenly Hurt’ could refer to the
pain of paradisiac ecstasy, but more immediately this seems to be an adjective of agency,
from heaven, rather than an attributive one. The hurt is inflicted from above, ‘Sent us of
the Air,’ like the ‘Slant of light’ that is its antecedent. In this context that natural
image takes on a new meaning, again with the aid of her Lexicon which gives only one
meaning for ’slant’ as a noun, ‘an oblique reflection or gibe.’ It is then a mocking
light, like the heavenly hurt that comes from the sudden instinctive awareness of man’s
lot since the Fall, doomed to mortality and irremediable suffering. This is indeed
despair, though not in the theological sense unless Redemption is denied also. As Gerard
Manley Hopkins phrases it in ‘Spring and Fall,’ for the young life there coming to a
similar realization, ‘It is the blight man was born for.’
Because of this it is beyond human correction, ‘None may teach it—Any .’ Though it
penetrates it leaves ‘no scar’ as an outward sign of healing, nor any internal wound that
can be located and alleviated. What it leaves is ‘internal difference,’ the mark of all
significant ‘Meanings. ‘ When the psyche is once stricken with the pain of such knowledge
it can never be the same again. The change is final and irrevocable, sealed. The Biblical
sign by which God claims man for his own has been shown in the poems of heavenly bridal to
be a ‘Seal,’ the ring by which the beloved is married into immortal life. But to be
redeemed one must first be mortal, and be made conscious of one’s mortality. The initial
and overwhelming impact of this can lead to a state of hopelessness, unaware that the
‘Seal Despair’ might be the reverse side of the seal of ecstasy. So, when first stamped on
the consciousness it is an ‘affliction.’ But it is also ‘imperial . . . Sent us of the
Air,’ the heavenly kingdom where God sits enthroned, and from the same source can come
Redemption, though not in this poem. /217/
By an easy transition from one insubstantial image to another, ‘Air’ back to ‘a certain
Slant of light,’ the concluding stanza returns to the surface level of the winter
afternoon. As the sun drops toward the horizon just before setting, ‘the Landscape
listens’ in apprehension that the very light which makes it exist as a landscape is about
to be extinguished; ‘Shadows,’ which are about to run out to infinity in length and merge
with each other in breadth until all is shadow, ‘hold their breath.’ This is the effect
created by the slanting light ‘When it comes.’ Of course no such things happen in nature,
and it would be pathetic fallacy to pretend they did. The light does not inflict this
suffering nor is the landscape the victim. Instead, these are just images of despair.
/218/
from Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University, 1955), pp. 189-190.
Sharon Cameron
How does "light" come into relation with "Despair—" and
"Despair—" into relation with "Death—"? What are the
generative fusions of the poem and why is the grammar of its concluding lines itself so
confusing? We note that light is a "Seal" or sign of despair and we remember
that Dickinson was much too conscientious a reader of the Bible and particularly of the
Book of Revelation not to have intended "the Seal Despair—" to point to an
experience that was, if a secular experience can be so, both visionary and apocalyptic. In
the Bible, however, while the self is "not worthy to open the scroll and break the
seals" that will reveal divine agency, in the speaker’s world meaning must be deduced
within the privacy of a solitary consciousness. Thus "None may teach it [to] any [one
else]"; "None may teach it any [thing]" (it is not subject to alteration);
"None may teach it—[not] any [one]." But the "Meanings" of the
event are not self-generated; if this is a poem about the solipsistic labor of experience,
it is not about autism. To be credited as vision, despair must also seek its connection to
the generative source outside itself. For light may seal despair in, make it internal and
irrevocable, but the irrevocability, by a line of association that runs just under the
poem’s surface, prompts the larger thought of death.
In fact, the poem is about correlatives, about how interior transformations that are
both invisible and immune to alteration from the outside world are at the same time
generated by that world. The relationship between the "Slant of light" in the
landscape and the "Seal Despair—" within may be clarified by an analogy to
Erich Auerbach’s distinction between figure and its fulfillment, for the "Slant of
light" and the "Seal Despair—" are not in this poem merely
premonitions of death, but are, in fact, kinds or types of death. Indeed it could be
asserted that in the entire Dickinson canon, despair is often a figura for death,
not as Auerbach uses the word to specify related historical events, but rather as he
indicates the word to denote an event that prefigures an ultimate occurrence and at the
same time is already imbued with its essence. Figural interpretation presupposes much
greater equality between its terms than either allegory or symbol for, in the former, the
sign is a mere form and, in the latter, the symbol is always fused with what it represents
and can actually replace it. While it is true that figural interpretation ordinarily
applies to historical events rather than to natural events, and while the "Slant of
light" and the "Seal Despair—" are indeed natural and psychological
events not separated by much time, they have a causal or prefigurative relationship to
each other that is closer to the relationship implicit in the figural structure than to
that in the symbolic one. Certainly it would be incorrect to say that they are symbols.
"Light" and "Seal," however, are in relation to
"Death—" as a premise is to a conclusion. Auerbach, speaking of the
relationship between two historical events implicit in the figural structure, writes,
"Both . . . have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one
another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be
the actual, real, and definitive event." We may regard the "Slant of light"
and the "Seal Despair—" as having just such a signatory relationship as
that described above. For the light is indirect; it thus seeks a counterpart to help it
deepen into meaning. The "definitive event" in the poem to which
"light" and "Seal" point is, of course, "Death—." While
we would expect the departure of the light to yield distance from the "look of
Death—," instead the preposition "on" not only designates the space
between the speaker and the light but also identifies that light as one cast by death, and
in turn casting death on, or in the direction of, the speaker. The "Slant of
light," recognized only at a distance—its meaning comprehended at the moment of
its disappearance—is revelatory of "Death—", is
"Death['s]—" prefiguration. Figure fuses with fact, interprets it, and what
we initially called the confusion of the two now makes sense in the context of divination.
If the light is indeed one of death, then we have the answer to why and how it
"oppresses" in the first stanza and to the earlier oblique comparison of it to
"Cathedral Tunes—." What Dickinson achieves in the poem is truly
remarkable, for she takes a traditional symbol and scours it so thoroughly of its
traditional associations with life that before we get to the poem’s conclusion the image
leans in the direction of mystery, dread, and darkness. By the time we arrive at the final
simile and at the direct association of light and death we are not so much surprised as
relieved at the explicitness of the revelation. It is the indirect association of
"light" and "Death—" (the "Slant" that pulls them
together at first seemingly without purpose) that prompts "Despair—." We
feel it indirectly, internally, obliquely. Were we to know it, it would be death. For
Dickinson, death is the apocalyptic vision, the straightening of premonition into fact,
figure into fulfillment.
The fusions I have been discussing either between literal reality and its metaphoric
representation (where literal reality permanently assumes those metaphoric characteristics
that seemed initially intended only to illuminate it) or between the more formal figura
and its fulfillment (where events contain in a predictive relationship the essence as well
as the form of each other) raise the question of whether we can ever know anything in its
own terms, and suggest perhaps that knowledge is not, as we might have thought, absolute,
but is rather always relational. If these fusions link the historical or natural world
with the divine one, the analogue with the real thing, they are predicated on a structure
of simultaneous correspondence rather than of linear progression. The truth that is
"Bald, and Cold—" is death, it does not lead to it. The "certain Slant
of light," although it prefigures death, also already contains its essence. The thing
in other words is saturated in the terms of its own figuration. Given the synchrony of
this relationship, we are not very far from those poems that strain to annihilate the
boundaries of time itself and to treat death as if its very reality could be cast into the
present tense, experienced, and somehow survived. The effort to know what cannot be known,
to survive it, is thus carried one step further in those poems in which the speaker
travels over the boundary from life to death to meet death on its own ground. Given the
presumption of the quest, figural structure often gives way to allegory or at any rate to
the acknowledgment of the inadequacy of simple analogue, for on the other side of death
true knowledge can find no correspondences.
from Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright ? 1979 by The
Johns Hopkins UP.
Sharon Cameron
. . . in "There’s a certain Slant of light" the human world is everywhere
apparent, as finitude is everywhere apparent. The consequence is oppression. The human
world manifests itself in the experience of division, the division of the heavenly from
the earthly as well as of the internal from the external. It further manifests itself in
the production of "Meanings," and in the concern with how meanings are produced.
And as division itself might be regarded as a master trope of the human world, division is
no less apparent in the indirectly voiced desire to make meaning visible—to
externalize meaning where it is imagined meaning could have form that might be recognized,
apprehended, even possessed, as objects are apprehended and possessed. Finally, the human
world is apparent in the serial manifestations of indirection, of affliction, of
personification, of death. In these various ways, the poem is saturated with finitude, as
the preceding poem was purified of it.
The personification of the landscape is an alternative, as it were, to the
naturalization of the self. And such an inversion of the previous poem, this rejection of
its terms, is apparent in the fact that light waves become sound waves, which become waves
of heaviness and pain. Thus everything is personalized, translated to the person, and then
confined or trapped there, as in the previous poem liberation from personhood was
precisely what was celebrated. Yet whatever invades the speaker is also perceived as alien
to her even as it is seen to penetrate her. So the indifference—the
"sovreign" "Unconcern" of the previous poem-becomes the "internal
difference" of this one. In fact, light is cast down and codified as the "Seal
Despair," which itself hardens further into "the look of Death." One way to
understand such causality is to say that the light, internalized, registers as despair and
is understood as death. Another way to understand it is to see that this figure in the
poem—this making of death into a figure that cannot be dispelled—is what death
looks like when it is personified, when it is made to have a meaning as small as a
person’s meaning. In line with the trivialization, "the look of Death" does not
quite displace the anthropomorphic "face" of death (as in the previous poem
"Competeless" does not quite displace "completeless"). For death in
"There’s a certain Slant of light," reduced to human size, is almost given a
countenance. Thus "the Distance" from death or from the "look of
Death" (from how death appears when it has a "look," almost a demeanor or
expression) is no distance at all.
I have noted that something is being worked out in the two poems about an ability to