Emily Dickinson: Sense and Slant

Emily Dickinson lived her entire life in Massachusetts, but her mind was often somewhere else.

We might say the same of the writers who give us novels, stories, films, and TV shows of fantasy and science fiction, but Dickinson is different.  She did not so much create imaginary worlds, but report on one that most of us cannot see.

Take, for example, this enigmatic poem:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -

Untouched by Morning - 

and untouched by noon -

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, 

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - 

Grand go the Years, 

In the Crescent above them -

Worlds scoop their Arcs - 

and Firmaments - row -

Diadems - drop -

And Doges surrender -

Soundless as Dots, 

On a Disk of Snow.

There’s something provocative and powerful about sketching out the ineffable in this way.  It’s one thing to see the fairies or aliens right before your eyes (even if you have to imagine them), quite another to sense that they are there, but distant, faint, or invisible. 

We might accuse Dickinson of being vague, but many of her images are quite precise, just unnatural—or they are isolated, like pixels on an otherwise dark screen.  We assume there actually is a picture, but we cannot see it in its entirety.

Take, for example, this marvelous poem:

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 –

Why would someone write in this way?

Dickinson actually provided an answer in one of her best-known poems:

Tell all the Truth, but tell it Slant—

Success in Circuit lies—

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb Surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually—

Or every Man be blind.

A number of Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries seemed to believe that humans could perceive only a fraction of what actually exists. 

Coleridge, Keats, Poe, Melville, and others alluded to strange supernatural forces and phenomena in works such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and Moby-Dick.  Dickinson seems to have written out of belief in—even fascination with—such things.

Many centuries earlier, in Ancient Greece, Plato provided an allegory that can help us to understand how such forces and phenomena could exist beyond our perception.  In his so-called "Allegory of the Cave,” people chained in a cave see only what’s in front of them, but what they see are actually shadows of objects behind them.  The objects are the real things, but the flames behind them make them visible only as shadows to the people looking in the opposite direction. 

If philosophy is a little too abstract or fanciful for you, consider all the things that you probably regard as real even though you can’t see them: atoms, viruses, electricity, gravity, magnetism.  Science has helped us recognize and understand all of these things, but we cannot actually see them with our naked eyes.  What else is out there, perhaps not yet discovered by scientists?

Dickinson, like her fellow writers, seems to have sensed such mysterious phenomena and sought to reify them, if only in words.  In doing so, she told the truth, as she saw it, but told it “Slant”—that is, indirectly, with provocative, but faint, incomplete, or enigmatic poems that can tickle and tantalize, but also transport us.