Winter afternoons with Emily Dickinson
Telling all the truth but telling it slant
There’s a certain slant of light
This winter marks my 20th year in serious study and conversation with American Literature. Twenty years since I enrolled in graduate study at NYU and declared my intention to do research in this field, in this batch of books. Lately, I find my seminars and lectures end abruptly, with so much left over to talk about. Personal connections we have to these texts. Unbridled fandom. New ideas that I don’t have footnotes for yet. Remembrances of other lectures, in other places, running through my lecture notes. Considerations about what got left out, and my reasons for what got selected for further discussion. I won’t have all the answers or have everything right. But I promise more truthiness than is appropriate for the lecture hall.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a poet of abrupt endings, and her poems attempt to open a space between when one moment ends and the next begins. Her poems help us locate an antechamber in the mind “Where the Meanings, are.” I thought I would begin with her poem “There’s a certain slant of light” to give us access to that moment.
So today I am launching this newsletter, to capture the afterglow of two hours spent in a classroom with a great piece of text. Each Friday at noon (Central European Time), I’ll post a short study on a selected work, and assign a reading for the next week. Mine is an expanded canon of new and old classics, from every genre and style, and we will not be reading it chronologically.
If you are also an enthusiastic reader of literature, whose mind wanders as they read, who delights in the sentence or the phrase, who is looking for new voices and experiences, and whose hopes are pinned on the future while reading the past, I hope you will join me in this conversation. No marks will be given, no attendance will be taken. Come back to class for the pleasure of it.
In the coming weeks, I hope to add a few more bells and whistles (a chat group? a read-aloud for the listeners?) but for now, let’s jump in.
Winter Afternoons
Let’s look at today’s poem.
I’ve included the original handwritten item here because that is how Emily Dickinson published many of her poems, in fascicles or letters. She arranged poem sets, by gathering individual poems, re-inscribing them in pencil and stitching them together with two short pieces of string, in an order that she alone understood. We have about 40 of these in the archives, containing some 800 poems of the total 2500 or so. (I say “or so” because many of the poems are outside the norm of poetics, and could be poems in progress, and many of the scraps are lost, and another couple hundred were mailed away.) It wasn’t until 1955 that we had all of Emily Dickinson’s extant poems in print. The manuscripts were exceedingly fragile, and it wasn’t until they were published as manuscripts (handwritten versions) by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981 and then online in the 1990s, that we got to read Dickinson by hand.
See the manuscripts collected over at: http://www.emilydickinson.org
A study of this handwritten version shows us the dots where we might expect other punctuation, in print rendered as dashes. We can also see more clearly the wonky capitalizations and short lines. Is the line “Where [space] the meanings, are” or “When the Meanings, are.” And the word “slant” — it actually slants.
The word “slant” appears in another famous poem from ten years later, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”
This poem shows us a different, later handwriting. There are places where two words are used in one place, as if she was hedging her bets on transmitting their meaning. It is not from a fascicle, but came to our archives loose. It resembles a grocery list, or a note to oneself, but it sounds like a poem — a perfect quatrain. Try to read it aloud: you will sound like you're reading a nursery rhyme. It has been called an Ars Poetica, or a statement of the poet’s mode of writing. In it she asserts that we must learn the capital T truth slantwise, in a roundabout, circuitous way — not straight on. Like children, we need a little explantation, a parable or a poem, to get the Truth across.
If we read this as a poetic manifesto, then she is the one who has the Truth to tell, and she offers the explanation. Kind of a power move.
Back to the winter afternoon.
Many of Dickinson’s poems engage in the poetics of definition, or the attempt to lay down in words what we feel inside. This subjective stuff that makes up our inner landscape resists transformation into the exterior world, as these are the parts of ourselves that are the hardest to express to others, even those we love and hold close. To communicate this feeling across space time, from 1860 or 1862 Amherst, Massachusetts to the here and now is a miraculous feat. In this case, the subjective experience she is trying to define for us is Existential Despair.
So winter!
We are powerless in the face of this despair. It oppresses us. It comes from the air, from nothing, from a slant of light. We feel it as a kind of pain, a “heavenly hurt,” that stretches across the landscape. There is a before and an after, and afterwards we cannot shake the despair that has left its mark on us, its seal remains upon our hearts, forever. It is what anxiety feels like, shot as an arrow from the anti-cupid.
That was your quick paraphrase, your thumbnail sketch of “There’s a certain slant of light.” I can stop there and call it cliff notes, but no. Let’s look in more closely.
We are dropped into this poem from a place of shared knowing — “there’s a certain slant of light,” the poet seems to say, “do you know it?” And the fact is, I do. I see it in the room now, the light of 4:05pm in early January in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun has dropped to the edge of the rooftops, and it lowers a triangle of orange golden light onto my floor. In the second half of the first stanza, the word “oppresses” neatly personifies that light, giving it the agency to oppress me. And then, a simile (a like/as comparison) finishes the work of characterizing this slant of light: "That oppresses, like the Heft/ Of Cathedral Tunes.”
The word “heft” is so heavy, right? But sound has no weight, and neither, for that matter, does light. The Cathedral gives the light another space for us to visualize, the slant of light created by the high cathedral windows. I hear organs playing. (On the other hand, the word “tunes” for me feels light.) I feel Catholic.
Staying with the space created by “Cathedral,” she tells us what it feels like to be oppressed by this heavy light, that makes a heavy sound:
Is there a divine source for this despair? Isn’t feeling despair a shortcoming of the faithless? The scar would be (if she could find one) a healed over place where there was a rent, a trauma, a cleaving of one thing and the other, a sin that separates the speaker from God. Once, now. Before, after. Now, after this moment, there is an “internal difference.” Something inside me has changed irrevocably.
It is an awareness that shifts our internal climate, and it does leave a scar, “Where the Meanings, are.”
And to make it all worse, this Despair is uncommunicable. Others cannot explain it to you. Funny she should say that, since we are reading a poem that attempts to do just that — to teach us about Despair.
In the last stanza we learn that this is also a poem about the in-between, the gap I spoke about earlier, which tries to stretch and be radically present in the moment right before something happens. In a surface reading of this poem, we learn that the poet is lamenting the early close of day in the winter, the dying of the light. The slant of light clearly demarcates the threshold between day and night. When the light goes, the landscape goes with it — without the sun it is unable to be seen, the shadows too, become meaningless without light — all is shadow. This personification of the landscape, as listening, and the shadows, as holding their breath, gives us a crowd of friends to witness this moment with.
The last two lines deliver the blow. The light is extinguished, the last slant of light disappears and we are in darkness. What we feared above all has happened. The light has gone out.
The last light gives us one last complicated personification. We learn that death has a look, or that is it looking. This distant look is that of the person who has just died. We started with cathedral tunes and ended up next to a deathbed. This poem becomes a “memento mori” — a remembrance that we will someday die — and the slant of light a dagger. We are looking at the face of death at the end of the poem. One moment the person was there, and the next moment, the light has gone out. We are sitting in the darkness of grief.
Once you know it, once you know grief, and have lost someone close to you, you wear the seal, you have the scar. You cannot see life the same way.
It’s now 4:30pm and my son just emerged from his room to say, “when did it get so dark?” In class the other day, a joyful young man told me that he disagreed with the premise of the poem, because the last light of the winter’s afternoon is a beautiful thing that brings about another beautiful thing just behind it: the cosy dark of evening, a time to relax, have a beer with friends, make dinner. The Dutch word for this is gezellig, and I can appreciate its optimism. Not everyone sees despair in darkness, or even, in death.
We switch on the lights, and the remembrance passes. Tomorrow the landscape reappears, and the shadows too. And tomorrow, thanks to Dickinson, we will have a small window of time, when that slant of light reappears tomorrow at 4:05pm, when the antechamber reopens for a moment, the old scar hurts, and we return to the place “where the meanings, are.”
For next week, please check out the 1555 edition of La Relación, available here. It’s okay to hop around on this text to get the gist.