adopt nature’s indifference to the self (with the consequence of immortalizing the self)
and an inability to adopt that indifference which results in death’s personification. But
what shall we further say about the proximity of these poems? Is one a repudiation of the
other? Does the second more neutrally correspond to the other as an opposite point of
view? And how can these poems so closely identified be read as anything but retorts to
each other? Or would it be more accurate to say that they are in effect two parts of the
same poem? For as distance is experienced in the first of the poems, distance and hence
immortality, distance is denied in the second of the poems. Hence death is regarded. In
the context of the whole fascicle, the poems reiterate in various ways the questions: Can
loss be naturalized or always only personalized? How is the recompense for loss to be
conceived? From the vantage of "Of Bronze—and Blaze—," there is no
recompense and no necessity for recompense, nothing—or nothing worthwhile—being
understood to be lost. From the vantage of "There’s a certain Slant of light,"
everything is determined to be lost, as anticipation or anxiety determines it, even as
what exactly is feared lost is unspecified, and impossible to specify. It is impossible to
specify since there is no distance on the experience as well as no specified distance on
the look of death. Thus in some crucial way, clarified only by the fascicle context, the
poems in proximity illuminate distance, making distance the subject—as it is achieved
by the speaker in one poem, as it fails to be achieved by the speaker in another—a
subject that can only be seen to unfold across the space of two poems no longer understood
as discrete. For the poems represent different understandings of what distance
is—when it is achieved and when it fails to be achieved—making everything that
follows (the experience of loss, the anticipation of death, internality itself)
functionally, and therefore radically, subordinate to this subject which it is the task of
the poems in conjunction to redefine. Such a redefinition is no small accomplishment, for
it transforms the poems taken singly—as Romantic "insight" poems—into
representations that probe the conditions and consequences of perception, giving
conditions and consequences governance over all. Then perception itself and the celebrated
"internality" of "There’s a certain Slant of light" are only a
consequence of a certain way of seeing, of a certain vantage, that can in fact be
regulated and that, when regulated, (savingly) dehumanizes. With reference to such
regulation, the mechanistic rhetoric of the fascicle’s last poem (P 292), "If your
Nerve, deny you— / Go above your Nerve . . . Lift the Flesh door—," can no
longer be seen as enigmatically self-annihilating. For, like "Of Bronze—and
Blaze—," it proposes an escape from the mortal position seen in both cases to be
a diminutive position to which there is a real alternative. So a rereading of two poems in
proximity within the fascicle, poems no longer quite discrete, requires a rereading of all
the poems in the fascicle and of the fascicle as a whole.
from Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. Copyright ? 1992 by The
University of Chicago
Paula Bennett
With its exquisite use of sound, its disjunctive grammar, and mixed levels of diction,
‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ is a formidable performance. But the reason for the
poem’s extraordinary popularity (it is among Dickinson’s most consistently reprinted
and explicated works) does not lie in technique alone . It also lies in our familiarity
with the experience Dickinson describes. Not only has the poet captured the oddness of
winter light (its thin, estranging quality), but she has also caught the depressed or
sorrowful state of mind which this light biochemically induces. Despite the poet’s use of
terms like ‘Seal’ and ‘imperial, affliction,’ that key into her private mythology of
self–her self-designated role as ‘Queen of Calvary’–’There’s a certain Slant of light’
engages its readers directly.
Yet at the same time, ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ is, obviously, a highly
subjective poem, dealing with an intensely personal state of mind. In it, the speaker’s
mood takes over from the light, the presumptive focus of the text, and is generalized to
the entire landscape. The world becomes a partner in the poet’s depression. The depression
becomes the lens through which the world is seen–and, even more important, through which
its ‘meanings’ (whatever they might be) are understood.
When Dickinson uses nature imagery in this way, she is appropriating it, as Joanne Feit
Diehl says, for the aggrandizement of the mind. In such poems, the natural phenomenon ‘becomes
the self as the division between identity and scene dissolves.’ To that extent,
‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ may be said to be solipsistic. That is, unlike the
nature poems discussed in the preceding chapter, it is explicitly a projection of the
poet’s inner life, a massive transference to the landscape of her inner state of being.
Dickinson reveals the nature of this state through her comparisons, but its meaning is one
she refuses to disclose. For all its apparent familiarity, what happens in this poem is,
finally, as fragmented and inconclusive (as unknowable) as the light to which Dickinson
refers–or the grammar she uses.
The evasiveness of ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’–its multiple ambiguities and its
refusal to reach a firm conclusion–is typical of Dickinson’s psychological poems and the
source of much of their difficulty (as well as their fascination). Reading Dickinson’s
poetry, Adrienne Rich declares, one gets the sense ‘of a mind engaged in a lifetime’s
musing on essential problems of language, identity, separation, relationship, the
integrity of the self; a mind capable of describing psychological states more accurately
than any poet except Shakespeare.’ No poet seems closer to her readers as a result. It is
as if Dickinson laid out her most private thoughts and feelings before us.
But unlike the accessibility of Dickinson’s nature poetry, which is supported by the
external world to which the poems refer, the accessibility of Dickinson’s psychological
poetry is in many ways deceiving. Not only is the relationship between the voice which
speaks these poems and Dickinson herself problematic, but so, as a rule, is the
relationship between the poetry’s manifest content and the meaning which this content
presumably encodes. Thus, on the most basic level, it is unclear whether Dickinson
addresses her own feelings in ‘There’s a certain Slant of light,’ or those she believes
are people’s in general, and we may query whether the poem is about light or about the
depression which the light evokes. Finally, we may ask what ‘meaning’ this light (or this
depression) has, especially given its status as an ‘imperial affliction/Sent us,’ we are
told, ‘of the Air.’ This chapter will discuss the difficulties involved in reading
Dickinson’s psychological poems and the ramifications these difficulties have for our
understanding of the relationship between the poet’s life and her work. Like other
nineteenth-century women poets, Dickinson used her poetry to inscribe her ‘heart’s
record,’ but the ambiguities of her technique and the complexity and richness of her
inscription make the interpretation of this record a subject of intense (and at times,
perhaps, futile) critical debate.
From Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. Copyright ? 1990 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted
by permission of the author.
Jonathan Holden
We might first note that, beautiful as the poem is, the satisfactions which it affords
us are not primarily visual. Even though it is focused outward on a natural scene, it does
not mention a single color or describe a single form. Are we looking at woods, a lawn, a
grove, fields, hills? Is there snow on the ground? We are not sure. What is the weather?
Is it a bleakly clear, hard, dry afternoon? Or does the sun break through the clouds in
one brief, poignant slant? Is it early to mid afternoon, or later? Does the sunlight fade
because of sunset or because of cloud cover? My guess–which is only intuitive and based
upon my memories of growing up in northern New Jersey–is that it is not sunset, that the
day is mostly cloudy, very forlorn, that around three in the afternoon the sun appears
through a rift in the stratus, infinitely tantalizing, melancholy, like the reminder of
some other life, some other season, some other realm (perhaps heavenly) than the
claustral, futureless gray of winter. But this is pure guesswork, without a shred of
textual backing.
Despite its visual vagueness, however, the poem does in many ways resemble a painting.
Its attention is directed outward at a landscape, not at the author/speaker herself or
some other human protagonist. It is true that the implied author constitutes a definite
presence in this poem–a more pronounced presence than we feel a painter has in a typical
landscape painting–but she never refers to herself as taking action. She does not walk to
a window. She does not pour a cup of tea. She does not sigh or weep. She simply looks.
Where, then, is that action which distinguishes literature from painting and without
which neither this nor any poem can successfully compete with a good painting? Obviously
it is in the scene itself, and it is made possible by the fact that, although the poem has
the feel of a painting, the duration over which it scans its landscape is longer than the
instantaneous "duration" captured in a painting. Within this duration,
"When it comes … When it goes," different events take place, events whose
source is not human. Indeed, the protagonist of the poem is the landscape itself,
whose "Slant of light" does things ("oppresses,"
"comes," "goes"), a landscape which "listens" and whose
"Shadows–hold their breath." The poem, then, is, in addition to its other
implications, very much about time. It presents, to borrow Wordsworth’s expression, a
"spot of time."
From Style and Authenticity in Postmodern Poetry. Copyright ? 1986 by the
Curators of the University of Missouri.
Joanne Feit Diehl
Dickinson comes closest to Wordsworth when she tries to read the meaning of light
falling upon the land: . . .
Light, the element that bathes Wordsworth’s landscapes, casts its shadow on this poem.
The "certain slant" pierces the self, oppresses the spirit–it is not a seal of
affirmation, but an "imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air." True to
Wordsworthian dicta, Dickinson has responded to what she witnesses, but the light she
finds is the type of doom she most fears. The "internal difference" filters down
from Heaven through the landscape into the poet, and what for Wordsworth would be a
reflective if sober moment becomes the "seal" of despair.
From Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981. Copyright ? 1981 by Princeton University Press.
Gary Lee Stonum
Diminishing the authority of intentionality helps ward off the author’s dominion, but
to the extent that conveyed meaning is itself a threat the author is not the only enemy of
responsiveness. No authorial master appears in "There’s a certain slant of
light," for instance, but the scene certainly imposes "Heavenly Hurt" as it
inscribes upon the soul "internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are."
Typically such moments are spurned as painful, perhaps overwhelming, and also craved as an
intensity beyond the quotidian. In other words, they belong to an esthetics of the
sublime. And a chief issue, particularly in the wonderfully multivalent line "None
may teach it–Any," is the authority or legitimacy of the meanings written within.
If, as the tone of the poem suggests, the meanings manifest some natural or supernatural
order, then the self can only accede to them. If, however, as in other instances where
response is prolonged, the slant of light only marks or rearranges the internal
differences, which the self then as a separate act gives meaning to, a crucial freedom to
determine meaning is maintained. Indeed, we once again have a three-part process: the
stimulus of the light, the inscription of the internal differences, and the interpretation
of these signifiers by the no longer helpless soul.
The poetic and rhetorical issue broached by "There’s a certain slant of
light" is the possibility of natural symbolism. As a rule, romantic writers have
searched eagerly for some form of symbolism that might claim natural or supernatural
sanction, thereby transcending mere custom. . . .
By contrast Dickinson’ poetry regularly works to denaturalize the available
symbolic resources of our condition and culture.
From The Dickinson Sublime. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Copyright ?
1990 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Jane Donahue Eberwein
What slant of light is this? How low must the sun sink on the horizon to project its
pink, or gold, or silver ray across the snowy fields? The poet makes no attempt to
describe the sense impressions but only to register their emotional resonance. This is
done by the oxymoronic phrases "Heavenly Hurt" and "imperial
affliction" that link exultation with anguish. And the speaker, generalizing from her
reaction to that of a universal "we," personifies nature itself as attentive to
these promptings from beyond circumference.
Here, too, definition comes by negation. There is "no scar," "None may
teach it." When the speaker strains for an analogy to clarify her experience, she
characteristically hits upon one outside Emily Dickinson’s experience. Those
"Cathedral Tunes" stimulate the imagination with their "Heft,"
presumably that "weight of glory" Dickinson cited once from 2 Corinthians
4:17 when telling a friend about a morning landscape that awakened painful awareness of
her mother’s recent death. Never having been in a cathedral, except imaginatively in
"I’ve heard an Organ talk, sometimes–," Dickinson probably relied on the
memoirs of American Protestant travelers in Europe to discover how it would feel to hear
grandly complex vocal and instrumental music in a Gothic or Romanesque setting from whose
spell the visitor would constantly struggle to free himself. Perhaps she recalled Ik
Marvel’s report of Holy Week services in the Sistine Chapel when "the sweet, mournful
flow of the Miserere begins again, growing in force and depth till the whole chapel
rings, and the balcony of the choir trembles; then it subsides again into the low, soft
wall of a single voice, so prolonged, so tremulous, and so real, that the heart aches-for
Christ is dead!" The death of God, the death of a loved one, her own death: All these
things registered on Dickinson through this visual emblem of the dying day. And it was
fitting that she should reveal these awarenesses only gradually and by
indirection–foregoing natural exactitude for depth of psychological response to intuited
absence.
From Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1985. Copyright ? 1985 by University of Massachusetts Press.