Today’s Poem: There’s a Certain Slant of Light
Emily Dickinson on the oppressive, despairing quality of winter light
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-bu…
