Today’s Poem: There’s a Certain Slant of Light

Emily Dickinson on the oppressive, despairing quality of winter light

A certain slant of light (via imagine.art)

In a northern climate, winter can feel like a standstill. It goes on seemingly forever. New snow falls on old. Bare trees stand motionless on the whiteness. Only the cold light moves, sliding across the frozen ground, shrinking the shadows into the things that cast them and rolling them out again. But even this movement, repeating itself exactly in an unending cycle day after day, is only another kind of stasis. The winter light warms nothing. It calls nothing to life. It simply rises, travels, and sinks again, drawing the shadows out long behind it, until they melt into an even colder night.

Just the other day I saw a parody of the old days-of-the-month rhyme. It began with the standard “Thirty days hath September.” It included the expected lines about February and leap year. But it ended, “And January has nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine days,” or words to that effect. We all know that feeling, the always-winter-but-never-Christmas blight of the long slog before the season turns.

But it’s the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) who, knowing from birth the bleak winters of Amherst Massachusetts, puts her finger on what it is that oppresses us: that “certain Slant of light,” fuguelike in its repetitions. Her trademark common- or hymn-metered quatrains, with their exact rhymes in the second and fourth lines, first make this assertion: It’s the light. They then proceed to examine what that sterile light, canting across the landscape, slipping across the wall of a room, does to us. 

Emily Dickinson in an 1848 daguerrotype (Wikimedia Commons)

And what does that light do to us? “Heavenly hurt, it gives us,” though like an enchanted knife it leaves no scar. The wound is in the soul, “where the Meanings, are.” It’s ethereal, “sent us of the Air,” but immovable: “the seal Despair,” like a stone rolled over a tomb and left there. There’s nothing hopeful about this light, nothing warm and friendly. Its withdrawal, as the night closes down, chills us “like the Distance / On the look of Death.” 

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There’s a certain Slant of light

by Emily Dickinson

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 —

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At a winter window (via imagine.art)

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