There's a certain Slant of light, (320)
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 –
Emily Dickinson’s singular genius as a poet is not formally associated with the American transcendentalism of the 1830s through the 1850s. Born in 1830, the movement, fostered by Emerson’s ideas of American cultural distinction in self-reliance, is a particularly apt philosophy in understanding Dickinson’s life and work. Much is made of the complex intellect found in the poems, but they seem representative of a wholly poetic self rather than an overwrought mind reconfiguring itself in short, clipped verse. Her poems communicate the moments when she was able to synthesize and recreate existential clarification. Dickinson may have had an overwrought character resulting from an active, searing intelligence, but her poems, active and searing, are coherent, figurative compositions. The imagery she uses is simple, in effect; it is the colossal metaphors she makes of those quotidian images that produce the peculiar sensation of being present to her visions, visions that are also felt and heard. This is her originality. She produced work which transcends what is typical and typically present to us in daily life and reproduces familiar images with profoundly individualized associations. There is no cliché. We read her poems as a view of Dickinson living and speaking through or above her “self” for herself, regardless of our response.
It is the transcendental nature of her punctuation and diction combined with her applied subjectivity, the layers she adds to the central image, that signify her poetic excellence as a solitary (not singular) great American poet of this period. Her work is emblematic of the self-reliance built into American transcendentalism. She lives through herself for herself whether good or bad, whether her visions were harrowing, startling, mollifying, or all three, like the shaft of light in poem 320.
It begins with the line, “There’s a certain Slant of light”, and centers on this soothing vision of light, sunlight, which is temporarily witnessed. This is one of the more outward-opening openings of her poems, not least of all because of the physical distance between the speaker and the landscape which holds the image (and we are looking out toward the expanse). It is also sort of an open gift to its reader, a compassionate extension of her arms with this glorious image framed in the interstice between her palms: a simple image from regular life given transformative properties meant to transform, not just the image in the poem or its reproduction in our lives, but the inner experience of life altered by thought and feeling. One may imagine the light shaft, her “slant”, shooting between a cluster of thick and heavy winter clouds. It is light from “winter afternoons” and the sun is in its downward slope; so, it is a paler light, not yet setting – the solemn white light of perhaps 4 pm. What surrounds the light is for readers to supply, but it is a transporting light, a light which wants to move its poet and its poem beyond itself. The slant quickly loses its physical properties and becomes metaphor, figuration, abstraction; it dematerializes into ideas and sharp feeling, which Dickinson audaciously begins to reconstruct for us as a series of meanings. It (the response to the light) is the “heft” or heaviness of a cathedral tune, not the tune itself (no longer the slant of light), but the emotional and exquisite visitation that music produces. The speaker realizes something too potent, too significant to articulate in the plain language of landscape so metaphor must be its carrier, carried through the vessel of Dickinson’s instructive but intimate, not yet precious, voice. Whatever sentimentality may line the margins of the poem’s tone is offset by attitude-amplifying language and syntax which cuts through with something approaching disturbance.
Dickinson’s flitting spirit is detained by the image, agitated to a poetic response and the quiet beauty of the opening alters; the outward reaching arms have fallen to her sides though her head is still raised toward the heavens. It is an “imperial affliction”. Moral rectitude appears to be its remedy. The “us” in “Heavenly Hurt” is not just any intelligent person who might appreciate this vision, but Dickinson talking about and to herself perhaps in an effort to move beyond the disturbance provoked by a natural beauty so totally out of the control of its viewer that all one can do is reform the putty self: that enormous thing that she could not create but only recreate in order to transcend the non-being it disturbs within her – the despair of losing beauty, losing inspiration, losing life.
Dickinson’s conscience is the poem; her spirit only commanded it be written, and it is a temporary look into her most intimate apprehensions. She is the poet who has viewed and remembered this landscape; we are outside of it, being told of it, instructed about its potency and the wisdom it conveys about our mortality. Mostly, we must allow nature to influence us in this instructive way so that we can re-see and realize the transcendental necessity of life experience. This is the poem’s “internal difference”, which will somehow help to make life better to live – this is “Where the meanings, are” and since there are many meanings and they cannot be objectified (because they are internalized), they can only be felt and understood by those ideas which the image provokes. Finally, however, these meanings can only be metaphor for the one meaning of the initial image: an appreciation and preservation of the goodness that intelligent life inspires.
A union of thought and feeling produces sensation and Dickinson’s original sensation evaporates quickly so the poem must be reread. It is art, so it is not ours but simply a proxy from which we are expected to learn how to instruct ourselves because “None may teach it – any”. We are individual once more and this individuation (of the light, of ourselves) is the “seal despair”; no one can help us or save us from the despair of life; we must do this all ourselves; we must at least try and this is one bold attempt. Dickinson is not pedantic, she is productive. Another “slant” of light in another season or a different age will confront us in new ways and the old ways used for understanding it might be cast away. In fact, they still exist but beneath us. We have already confronted innumerable shimmering oddities since, which have worked upon us, but now we can look back in appreciative distance upon those antique revisions and cling to them again though the distance between us and the first reading (or first sight) might be like the ending’s “look of death”. The poem, however, is more about the process of transcendentalism, the making of meaning from the actual moment of change. What we do with this meaning is not her or the poem’s concern. It is merely an example of how life experience and – more importantly – our response to it might (should) be understood.
It is when the poem returns to its original foreground in the last stanza that the landscape is reimagined and the light is a flash in time, having passed (the simple present “comes” modified for past or future time by adverbial “when”). The landscape, in retrospect, is personified; perhaps our individual selves have finally merged with it, a wish embedded in the original, breathless response to it, because we are hushed, listening as it “listens”. The breathlessness of the initial stanza (oppressing like the heft on our chests) is given to the shadows to hold. And since there is nothing farther away than an image of death, it is the final metaphor for an image never again to be: a feeling, an experience of selfhood never again to express itself candidly. What is left is with us for good as memory, as poem, and what is gone was never important. Both the poem and the image strip the frivolous complexities of selfhood down to the simple, transcendent truths of nature.
This isn’t the objective character of Shakespeare or Milton but the objectification of the individual self. Like Whitman, Dickinson is uniquely American, depicting self to get beyond it. Shakespeare’s art was craft (and distinct genius); this is art for personal indulgence (Dickinson was never really published, lived an almost solitary life, and wrote her poems on random pieces of paper), but with Whitman and Dickinson, it works because the images are so vivid, so friendly to us, so common in an American life that we are engulfed by them. We can see the light well. We understand her delight and her awe and finally we have an articulation of the feelings we had when we last saw some striking natural spectacle. But, most importantly, this poem succeeds because these self-indulgences (if that’s what we can call her work) open out and up. Dickinson wrote poetry to move beyond the mere ego-indulgence to capture intelligent experience and into a self able to see itself seeing, itself being, to recognize an individual who has lived and seen.