Emily Dickinson's 'A Certain Slant of Light' Analysis Essay

When people think of Emily Dickinson, they think of a white dressed, ghostly woman hidden in the corridors of home, writing poem after poem. They do not think of the actual person Emily was. Emily Dickinson grew up in a rich, social, scholarly environment. She could have chosen many paths that would have led her to a completely different life, but because of circumstances, the social, high energy girl with a sense of humor became isolated by her own choice. Though Emily Dickinson’s depression is romanticized, sickness, social life, and death led her to seclusion and deep poems.

    Figurative language plays a key role in the poem, as well. The best example is  The Morning after Death,  which sounds a lot like  mourning after death.  In fact,  mourning  could even replace  morning  and the poem would still make sense. Another example occurs in the second stanza, when Dickinson uses the words  sweeping  and  putting.   By using such cold, unfeeling words when describing matters of the heart, the author creates a numb, distant tone. She really means that after someone dies, one almost has to detach oneself from the feelings of love that once existed for the deceased.

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean” (Socrates). What does it mean to be this type of poet? How can someone accomplish such success in poetry, the answer is just two words Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of her life in isolation, not because she was forced to or because she was ill, Dickinson simply wanted to be alone and because of her isolation she became one of the greatest female poets of all time. Emily Dickinson set the bar high for other female poets and created some of the most renowned poems in the world. The two poems “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant” are drastically different poems that tell two different stories, but there are some aspects that cause them to be similar: Imagery, tone, and the statement that the two poems make.

Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within

Emily Dickinson lived a large period of her life isolated from the outside world, surrounded by her close family and friends. It is apparent that with most of her spare time, she wrote poems and letters. Dickinson’s poems were heavily influenced by the gothic movement in the 19th century of America, and her fascination with nature that is exposed through her continuous theme of nature being the source of joy or pain in your life. Both Dickinson’s curiosity about nature, and the gothic movement, influenced the recurring theme in her poems, which is displayed in the analysis of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”.

In “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant” Emily Dickinson talks about the truth and how commonly it is to avoid the truth. We as humans at times never tell the whole truth and sometimes we use the phrase “the truth hurts” loosely to justify the actual I told you so. Most of us would rather tell a lie, before we tell the truth because it’s less stress and less commotion. Emily Dickinson uses the term “truth” to illustrate the manipulation of lies through religion and theoretical viewpoints.

Emily Dickinson is perhaps one of the most intriguing American poets studied. The remote look in her eyes mirror her life, which she mostly spent secluded in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. While leading an outwardly reclusive life, she unleashes the faculties of her mind in her powerful poetry. She addresses compelling themes such as death, depression, human despair, individual capability, and the art of poetry. Her feelings on these subjects emerge in her poems, but her exact thoughts are difficult to uncover since her poetry is so highly enigmatic. Likewise, the subject matter of Christianity in her poetry remains one of the most inconsistent of Dickinson’s recurring themes. Emily Dickinson posses an uncanny ability to wrestle down the perfect diction, thus creating worlds of hope, despair, faith, and endless questioning.Through her use of imagery, Dickinson displays her linguistic prowess and the intricacies of language.

Emily Dickinson lost her father on June 16, 1874 (Sewall 69). The sudden loss of her father stunned her and she wrote in a letter that she was “wondering where he is. Without any body, I keep thinking. What kind can that be” (Letter, 471). When Dickinson’s mother passed away in November of 1882, Dickinson also wrote in a letter about her “wonder at her fate” and she was “seeking what it means” (Letter, 815). The “wonder” in both letters shows that Emily Dickinson is a person who looks inward for the mystery of death. Many of her poems convey her preoccupation with death, concern with immortality and doubts about fulfillment beyond the grave. I will analyze “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (591) and “Because I could not stop for Death” (479), both of which deal with the death and eternity. These two poems reflect the conflicting attitudes of Emily Dickinson towards afterlife.

Dickinson's poem focuses on the speaker's relationship with death as being more complex than some might feel inclined to imagine one's connection with it. It appears that the poet wants her readers to acknowledge that death is imminent and that it is

Emily Dickinson also wrote plenty about nature, seeing as she was constantly around it rather than actual humans. Her views of nature vary from optimistic and intoxicating to frightening and threatening. In her poem “There’s a certain Slant of light”, she carries a holy and amazed mood throughout it. Using words like “Heavenly” and “Cathedral” support the holiness in the text. The narrator is amazed at the

Have you ever wondered what it Feels like for someone that lived with their sight then became blind? Well Emily Dickinson did that in two of her poems. She made you imagine that you were the person that got your eye poked out and start to get used to living in the dark. These poems are called “We grow accustomed to the dark” and “Before I got my eye poked out.” Emily Dickinson lost her eye sight late in her life but wrote these two poems about living your life in the dark. These poems tells you that you will have to deal with problems living in the dark.

The first thing that stands out is the word stillness. When I first read through this poem imagine that this was used to portray death as very calm or subtle. After reviewing the poem multiple times, Dickinson uses stillness to shows that the speaker is actually waiting for something more to happen to him/her. This can be shown in the last two lines when Dickinson says, “Was like the Stillness of the Air—Between the Heaves of Storms” (974). Dickinson was trying to state that the calm between two storms is short lived because people are already anticipating the next storm.

Dickinson uses elements of nature to lay a harsh but true insight to our own inevitable deaths. That is, God has a plan and the world will continue to spin. The first stanza of the poem is clearly a snapshot of the fall months, this is extremely effective as we see the theme of death all around us annually. As the trees shed their leaves and the flowers wither away we can see beings die. Winter comes leaving a trail of destruction in it’s path, while in most places of the world the sun continues to rise right on schedule. This would have been even more noticeable in the 1800’s when Dickinson wrote the poem, as many would freeze and go hungry during the winter. Slowly as the weather gets warmer we start to see the ice and snow, that has just killed many plants, bugs, animals and so on, melt away. Even though the world is filled with these subtle hints at death “The Sun proceeds unmoved” (Dickinson, 6) meaning the world will go on, and Sun will again rise tomorrow. The indirect comparison between nature and death assists to provide a visual to this view.

A poet who challenged poetry’s role in religion, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. Although Dickinson’ was poetically prolific during her life, her work was neither published nor acclaimed until after her death in 1886. Similar to most poets, Emily Dickinson wrote about what she understood and what intrigued her. One of the major themes that Emily Dickinson often explored in her poems was the conflict between science with religion, specifically, her “individual struggle with God”. Many of her works describe defiance towards religion, because of how religion subjugates human identity. Dickinson is unique because unlike other religious poets who follow and encourage the path to God, she talks about challenging God’s dominion throughout her life, and refusing to submit to divine will at the cost of herself. In “There’s a certain Slant of Light”, Dickinson uses light that carries spiritual connotations to explore her relationship with God. Though the word “light” suggests weightlessness, Dickinson uses the word “light” as a heavy burden. Dickinson expresses her internal struggle with God who she views as subjugating human identity.

We are immediately made aware at the beginning of the poem that there is nothing out of place about this day except that they lost a family member. Dickinson was letting it be known that while the rest of the world continued as usual, they sat there in a room watching one of their suffering family members take her last breath. Death makes life different somehow. As Dickinson states, “-this to Us Made Nature Different” (lines 3,4), she tells us that when her family member died it changed them. This poem shows the raw emotion of sadness and the effect of grief overtaken her in just 6 short stanzas.