The Full Text of “There's a certain Slant of light”
1There's a certain Slant of light,
2Winter Afternoons –
3That oppresses, like the Heft
4Of Cathedral Tunes –
5Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
6We can find no scar,
7But internal difference,
8Where the Meanings, are –
9None may teach it – Any –
10'Tis the Seal Despair –
11An imperial affliction
12Sent us of the Air –
13When it comes, the Landscape listens –
14Shadows – hold their breath –
15When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
16On the look of Death –
The Full Text of “There's a certain Slant of light”
1There's a certain Slant of light,
2Winter Afternoons –
3That oppresses, like the Heft
4Of Cathedral Tunes –
5Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
6We can find no scar,
7But internal difference,
8Where the Meanings, are –
9None may teach it – Any –
10'Tis the Seal Despair –
11An imperial affliction
12Sent us of the Air –
13When it comes, the Landscape listens –
14Shadows – hold their breath –
15When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
16On the look of Death –
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Introduction
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"There's a certain Slant of light" was written in 1861 and is, like much of Dickinson's poetry, deeply ambiguous. Put simply, the poem describes the way a shaft of winter sunlight prompts the speaker to reflect on the nature of religion, death, and despair. Perhaps, the poem suggests, such feelings are in fact part of a message from God; in any case, seeing this "Slant of light" utterly transforms the speaker's understanding of the world itself.
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Summary
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There's a particular angle of sunlight that comes through the window on winter afternoons and weighs down on me, much like the heaviness of hearing organ music in a big church.
It prompts a feeling of divine pain in people. This pain doesn't leave any visible marks, but rather a sense of inner confusion about the very meaning of things.
No one can teach other people this feeling, nor does the feeling itself have anything to learn: it's the mark of Despair itself, which is a punishment sent from the air, like an order sent by an emperor.
When this feeling comes, the landscape is so still it's as if it's listening, as if shadows are holding their breath; when this feeling lifts, one feels as distant as the look in the eyes of a corpse.
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Themes
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The Nature of Despair
“There’s a Certain Slant of Light” can be thought of as a meditation on the nature of despair—where it comes from, what it feels like, and how it affects the mind, soul, and even the landscape. The poem begins with the speaker noticing “a certain Slant of light” that appears on “Winter Afternoons.” While light is usually associated with positive things (hope, warmth, and so forth), this “Winter” light “oppresses” the speaker. In other words, seeing this cold sunlight makes the speaker feel down, unhappy, and constricted. The poem goes on to explore the origins and effects of this mysterious, melancholy feeling—a feeling that the poem ultimately implies is an unavoidable part of being human.
This feeling is first described as heavy, like a weight pressing down on the speaker's soul. This, the speaker says, is much like the heaviness a person may feel when listening to “Cathedral Tunes,” or somber church organ music. This is an interesting comparison: going to church might remind people of their tenuous, temporary place in the world, and of the fact that they are subject to forces beyond their control (that is, to the will of God). Perhaps, then, the despair that the speaker feels is connected to a feeling of helplessness or smallness in relation to the rest of the universe.
Taking this a step further, and building on the common symbolic associations between winter and death, maybe the speaker's despair is tied to an understanding of the inevitability of death. That is, maybe the winter sunlight filtering down to the speaker as the day wanes makes the speaker think about the fleeting nature of life, and this awareness is what causes the speaker to feel both pained and trapped. (For more on this, see this guides theme discussion of "Truth and Transformation.")
Adding to this idea, the speaker says this “Slant of light” brings “Heavenly Hurt.” This seems like an oxymoron, because heavenly things are supposed to be pleasant—to feel good, not to hurt. But the poem might be suggesting that if God breathed life into human beings, then God also created this sensation of despair, because with that life comes death. This despair then can be thought of as a poignant mix of joy and fear, of gratefulness and pain.
The speaker goes on to emphasize the deeply personal and inescapable nature of this feeling, saying that “None may teach it”; instead it is an “imperial affliction” “Sent” to people from “the Air.” Heaven was often described as an empire during Dickinson’s lifetime, and these lines again suggest that the “affliction”—the despair—the speaker feels comes from God, or at least something far greater than the speaker themselves. This, in turn, again emphasizes the speaker’s powerlessness in the face of despair, which, like an emperor’s order, cannot be countered. The use of “us” here and throughout the poem further implies that this despair is shared by all of humanity—indeed, it’s just part of being alive. At the same time, however, it is only ever experienced individually, suggesting a sense of isolation and loneliness even within this broadly-felt emotion.
Overall, this gives a sense of hopelessness to the poem: nothing that the speaker, or indeed any human being, does can temper this despair. The response to this grim idea is a sense of passivity: even the landscape can do nothing except “listen” while “Shadows ‒ hold their breath.” It is as if the world can only wait for God's/the universe's will to be done. And even when despair lifts, it is compared to the expression in a corpse’s eyes; just as death is unavoidable, so is any hope of combating this despair.
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Religion and Nature
The poem begins with a natural image—“a certain Slant of light” on “Winter Afternoons.” This leads the speaker to a kind of religious reflection, as the speaker attempts to understand the strange feeling the sunbeam evokes and what its presence means. Though the message of the "Slant of light" itself remains vague and mysterious, the poem does suggest that, whatever this message/feeling is, it comes from God. What's more, the poem seems to imply that religion needs nature, because God’s will cannot be expressed directly; instead it filters down to humanity through the natural world, which acts as a heavenly messenger of sorts.
Light is often associated with religious truth (think of the phrase, "I saw the light"), and the speaker makes this divine connection explicit in the first stanza by comparing the sensation this light evokes to the "Heft / of Cathedral Tunes." This simile evokes the deep resonance of organ music, which is strong enough to fill up an entire cathedral—just as, perhaps, God’s truth encompasses the whole world.
The phrase "Heavenly Hurt" in the second stanza further implies that this message—and the pain it causes—is coming from God. The third stanza is then even more concrete about the idea of nature as God's messenger. Here God is presented a kind of emperor, sending messages to subjects from afar. The idea of nature as a messenger of religious truths is reinforced by the word “Seal,” which refers to wax used to seal envelopes, as well as by the phrase “Sent us of the Air,” in which the “Air” delivers, so to speak, heaven’s “imperial” decree. To describe heaven as “imperial” is to imagine it as an empire, with God its emperor, which was commonplace in the 19th century and earlier. The “Despair” God sends the speaker in the form of a sealed message is therefore like an emperor sending an order to one of the empire's subjects.
The final stanza returns to the natural imagery with which the poem opens. As a good messenger should, “the Landscape listens” and “Shadows ‒ hold their breath”; in other words, they don’t speak. However, this personification also conveys a sense of nature being afraid of heaven’s decrees, since both listening and holding one’s breath are actions undertaken by someone who is afraid. As such, the poem as a whole depicts the relationship between heaven and nature as one of co-dependence, but also of “Distance”—since heaven has far greater power than nature.
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Truth and Transformation
The poem is ambiguous and multiple interpretations when it comes to why, exactly, this angle of light feels so oppressive to the speaker. What is clear, however, is that this strange, unnerving sensation is utterly transformative, shaking up all "the Meanings" inside the speaker's mind. If this light is thought of as representative of truth or knowledge, as light so often is, then the poem might be saying that truth has the power to change the way the people see and understand the world itself.
The speaker begins by focusing on the heavy, painful feeling evoked by seeing a certain angle of sunlight on "Winter Afternoons." Sunlight, as previously noted in this guide, is typically something associated with pleasantness and warmth, while winter is associated with coldness, darkness, and death. As such, this unnerving, paradoxical winter light prompts strange, uncomfortable feelings in the speaker.
But light is also closely tied to knowledge and truth; it illuminates things and brings people out of the metaphorical darkness of ignorance. The speaker's discomfort, then, might be related to a sudden moment of clarity afforded by this winter light. That is, perhaps this winter light reveals an essential truth to the speaker, and this truth is what unravels the speaker's world.
What exactly is this truth revealed by this "Slant of light"? It's open to interpretation, but we'd argue there are plenty of clues in the poem that it is related to human helplessness and the fleeting nature of life. Winter, again, is closely associated with death—the year is ending, trees are bare, animals hibernate—and winter light thus might suggest being forced to look at, to confront, the reality of death directly. The winter light thus brings knowledge—a sudden painful clarity about life—but not warmth or comfort to accompany that cold, hard knowledge. (As noted in this guide's prior theme discussion, the poem further suggests that this truth is in fact a message from God, conveyed through nature.)
The speaker then continues that though the pain of this “Heavenly Hurt” leaves “no scar,” it still changes people. It creates “internal difference — / Where the Meanings, are —” While this line is, like much of Dickinson’s poetry, ambiguous, it might suggest how seeing this “Slant of Light”—that is, understanding the limits of being human—shakes up the “Meanings” of everything. In other words, this melancholy awareness alters how the speaker sees everything, as if a heavenly hand had reached into the speaker's soul and moved all the "Meanings" around. Perhaps this is why the speaker feels as though the very landscape is holding its breath, that even shadows remain still and silent as this light trickles down. It's like a cold splash of water, injecting the speaker with a sudden, sharp awareness that transforms the world itself.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “There's a certain Slant of light”
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Lines 1-2
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –The poem starts with the speaker noting a "certain Slant of light" that falls during "Winter Afternoons." "Slant" refers to an angle; think of the way beams of light might angle through a window or trees on a cold afternoon. The speaker will go on to talk about the poignant emotions this light evokes, but even now there's a sense of something being off; light is often associated with life, truth, hope, and warmth, but this light is slanted, at an angle. It's also notably coming through in the winter—a time typically associated with hopelessness, barrenness, and death (the afternoon is also associated with the latter half of a day). As such, there's immediately a sense of tension here. This paradoxical image anticipates the "internal difference," or confusion, that this beam of light prompts in the poem's later stanzas.
And, as is typical with Dickinson's poetry, even this apparently simple image introduces ambiguities: who is the speaker? Are they seeing this beam themselves, or are they generalizing about humanity? The first question is never settled; to the second, one can answer "both," since "There's" could mean both "there it is in front of me" and "there exists out there." The capitalization of "Winter Afternoons" treats the phrase like a proper noun, further suggesting that the speaker is talking about a general experience shared across humanity.
The meter of these two lines reflect the poem's tentative tone:
There's a certain Slant of Light,
Winter Afternoons ‒The meter is highly irregular. The most common foot is the trochee ("certain," "Slant of," "Winter" ), which gives a jerky, stop-start rhythm to these lines, mimicking the speaker's halting thought process.
Line 2 then ends with Dickinson's characteristic dash, which she uses instead of a variety of more typical punctuation, including semi-colons and full-stops. This dash gives a sense of incompleteness to the line, akin to the speaker's urge to drill deeper and deeper into each thought and emotion being experienced. These dashes also lead the reader down and on through the poem as well.
The unusual phrase "Slant of light" recalls another Dickinson poem, “Tell all the truth but let it slant” (1263). In this poem Dickinson writes, “Success in Circuit lies.” The association between light and truth is common, but Dickinson’s angle, that to get at truth requires going in a “Circuit”—that is, approaching it from an angle rather than head on—is her own. This idea ties in with the way that the beam of light in this poem acts as a messenger from heaven, which cannot deliver its truths directly, but requires nature as an intermediary (in a way requiring a circuitous path to reach humanity).
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Lines 3-4
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes – -
Lines 5-6
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar, -
Lines 7-8
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are – -
Lines 9-10
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair – -
Lines 11-12
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air – -
Lines 13-14
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath – -
Lines 15-16
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Symbols
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Light
Light traditionally has many symbolic meanings: truth, knowledge, goodness, hope, purity, and so forth. In this poem, the "certain Slant of light" observed by the speaker descends from heaven and prompts a feeling of oppression, confusion, and despair; it delivers these emotions like a messenger delivering a "Seal[ed]" envelope with orders from an "imperial" power. As such, while the light here can still be thought of as a symbol of truth, as a divine messenger, and as representative of knowledge itself, this light certainly doesn't convey a traditional sense of warmth or comfort.
To help understand the seemingly contradictory nature of light in the poem, it's useful to consider the symbolic importance of light in the history of Christianity. Light is depicted as a sort of divine message in early Christian art related to the Virgin Birth: the English medieval writer John Lydgate recalls Mary being impregnated by God in the form of a sunbeam—"As the sonne beame goth thurgh the glas, / The Sonne of God thurgh the did pas" (from Fall of Princes), while the mosaics in the 12th century Church of the Martorana in Sicily show God impregnating Mary as a beam of light entering her ear. The ear is an organ which receives messages, and Christ's conception was not a choice made by Mary but an order from God. Dickinson's use of light as an "imperial affliction" from heaven reflects this tradition.
However, whereas the Immaculate Conception is considered a positive event, the beam of light in the poem prompts negative emotions—above all "Despair" (one of the two sins which prevent salvation, according to 19th century theology). This subverts the traditional positive symbolic values of light. Instead, this light is, again, called an "affliction," a possible allusion to the biblical plagues in the Old Testament. The speaker is not receiving an honorable task from God, as Mary does, but a sort of punishment or test. Perhaps the light illuminates the reality of suffering and death for the speaker, and as such represents a sort of knowledge/awareness that tests the speaker's fundamental faith (the "Meanings" at the core of the speaker's beliefs about the world).
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The first simile in the poem compares the titular "Slant of light" to the "Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes," in the sense that both "oppress" the speaker. "Cathedral Tunes" refers to church music—likely to the swell of organ music as it resonates throughout a cathedral. Cathedrals, in turn, are the chief churches in a diocese, massive structures built as monuments. Hearing such grand music in this setting might cause a deeply emotional response in the listener— perhaps from a sense of closeness to God, or from a sensation or smallness and powerlessness in comparison to God. The "light" has the same heft—the same power and weight—as this music; it presses down on the speaker's soul, shaking the speaker to their core.
The second simile comes in the final two lines. It compares the "Slant of light" retreating to "the Distance / On the look of Death"—that is, to the distant look in a dead person's eyes. This comparison evokes one of the poem's main thematic concerns: death. The idea of distance suggests that human beings are cut off from what lies in store after death, their fate impossible to determine. Given this poem's engagement with Christianity, the significance of such ignorance is that people cannot be certain whether they will end up in heaven, hell, or purgatory; this produces intense feelings of doubt, an emotion that pervades the poem. Another significant aspect of this simile relates to the symbolic importance of light, which often is taken to represent life itself. When light disappears then, it is like life disappearing at the moment of death.
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Oxymoron
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Allusion
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Sibilance
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Alliteration
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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"There's a certain Slant of light" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Slant
- Oppresses
- Heft
- Cathedral Tunes
- Internal difference
- Seal Despair
- Imperial affliction
- Look of Death
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"Slant" means a sloping position, and here refers to an angled shaft of light. The beam of light acts as a messenger of truths from heaven, which remain ambiguous and must be interpreted over the course of the poem. This also recalls another Dickinson poem, "Tell all the truth but let it slant" (1263), which focuses on another aspect of the word: seeing something from an unusual point of view.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “There's a certain Slant of light”
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Form
Like most of Dickinson's work, this poem resembles a ballad. It is arranged regularly into four quatrains, each of which has an ABCB rhyme scheme. This is a recognizable form closely associated with folk tales and hymns, suggesting a sort of mythic importance to what is being described in the poem. The simple consistency between stanzas also allows Dickinson to elaborate on a select group of ideas, including the nature of faith, death, the cost of despair, self-confusion, and nature. Within this limit, the poem burrows down into the depths of these ideas, rather than casting a wide net and pulling in a larger number of topics. The final quatrain emphasizes such limits by ending with the same subject matter that begun the poem: nature and the "Slant of light." When that light leaves, the poem ends.
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Meter
Broadly speaking, the meter follows a pattern of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines—meaning lines contain four stressed beats, and then three stressed beats. This pattern is generally considered to be part of a "ballad stanza," although the only place this is rigidly maintained is in the final stanza:
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –These lines, like most in the poem, are based on a poetic foot called a trochee (DUM-da), with the final unstressed syllable on the second line excluded. As a rhythmic pattern, the use of trochees implies decisiveness, with the initial heaviness of the stressed syllable, followed by doubt, with the lightness of the unstressed syllable. As a combination this echoes the speaker's indecisive and confused state of mind.
It is vital to note that there are various ways one can read Dickinson's meter here. One reading leads to more variety in the stress patterns. According to this reading, the first line's meter is as follows:
There's a certain Slant of light,
It begins with an anapest (da-da-DUM), followed by a trochee and ending with a stressed monosyllable. However, the stricter reading would scan the line like this:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Here the line fits the 4-3-4-3 ballad stanza. Such dual readings are possible with many lines. To take one other example, line 5 can be scanned:
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
Or:
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
Neither is the correct way to read the poem, and students should be aware of each and receptive to the different effects they offer. The variety produced by the natural reading echoes the speaker's confusion, and the speaker's inability to settle the sense of "internal difference."
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Rhyme Scheme
Broadly speaking each stanza follows the rhyme pattern typical of the ballad stanza form, which Dickinson often uses in her poetry. This is:
ABCB
Throughout the poem, each of the B rhymes are full, clear end rhymes. In the first stanza, for example, "Afternoons" in line 2 rhymes with "Tunes" in line 4.
However both the second and fourth stanzas also use slant rhymes between their first and third lines. In the second stanza, "gives us" in line 5 chimes with "difference" in line 7; similarly, "Listens" in line 13 is echoed by "Distance" in line 15. The rhyme scheme of these stanzas might thus best be thought of as:
ABAB
What's more, all of these half rhymes chime with one another as well—"gives us / difference / listens / Distance" all contain assonance and sibilance that makes them sound quite similar. The gentle sound of these words mimics the calm demanded of one who "listens" over a long "Distance" for a message that has been "give[n]."
Another especially interesting rhyme is that between "Despair" and "Air" in lines 10 and 12, since the word "Air" is actually contained inside the word "Despair." This stanza is talking about God sending a message to humanity, which is metaphorically compared to an envelope sealed shut with "Despair." This rhyme, then, seems to reflect the metaphor, in a way, of nature ("Air") as an envelope sealed shut by "Despair."
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a deeply ambiguous figure, whose gender, age, and appearance all remain unclear. It could even be argued that the speaker is a plural, as the only first-person pronouns used in the poem are "We" and "us."
Whether singular or plural, the speaker is someone who feels down and lonely, and who is intensely focused on their own reactions to the "Slant": these include "Hurt," a feeling of oppression, "internal difference" (confusion), and "Despair."
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“There's a certain Slant of light” Setting
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The setting, like the speaker, is ambiguous. Taken literally, the poem might be thought of as taking place on a winter afternoon with beams of sunlight angling down from the sky. But the poem doesn't even necessarily occupy this specific setting, since the poem opens with generalized language about "Winter Afternoons." These could be any or all winter afternoons, anywhere in the world. The only specific details one can glean is that the speaker's reflections are prompted by a natural setting that includes a "certain Slant of light" and a quiet "Landscape," with "Shadows." The speaker may be standing in such a place right now, may be merely remembering it, or perhaps even be imagining it from a cozy study.
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Literary and Historical Context of “There's a certain Slant of light”
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Literary Context
Scholars don't know exactly when Dickinson wrote this poem, since, as with all but a small number of her pieces, it was only discovered after her death in 1886. Along with 40 notebooks and disorganized loose sheets, it had been kept undated in a locked chest, without having been shown to anyone else. Her sister Lavinia carried out Dickinson's will, burning most of her correspondence; however, the poet didn't mention what to do with the contents of the chest. When Lavinia discovered the poems inside, she recognized their importance and went about seeking a publisher. With the help of her brother's wife and mistress, the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson, appeared in 1890.
Dickinson's style was highly irregular at the time, especially her syntax and use of punctuation (such as her characteristic use of dashes and idiosyncratic capitalization). This meant that the first edition of her work involved heavy re-editing of her manuscripts to better fit 19th-century expectations. Certainly her punctuation doesn't have a predecessor in western poetry. That said, much of her language, themes, and imagery derive from traditional sources. Chief among these is the King James Bible. Dickinson's poetry often adheres to the ballad stanza form and common meter typical of religious hymns and folk songs. Dickinson's writing also often focuses on themes related to death, mortality, and religion, all of which can be seen in this poem.
Another important influence on this particular poem was the Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writing preaches individualism and solitary communication with God through nature. These ideas can be clearly seen throughout "There's a certain Slant of light," although it lacks Emerson's optimistic viewpoint.
Historical Context
The poem is intensely focused on the individual experience of seeing this "Slant of light," and, as such, very little reference is made to historical context at all. Despite the fact that Dickinson lived through tumultuous times, which included the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, this poem is focused on a mix of personal, philosophical, and religious themes, and excludes any reference that could date it. This ahistorical approach lends it a kind of eternal importance: it is not concerned with narrow questions of the here and now, but deeper dilemmas experienced by the whole human race, by "us" all.
That said, there are thematic ideas in the poem that were influenced by the period in which Dickinson lived. For one thing, there was a widespread religious revival in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts in 1845. Dickinson embraced Christianity for a time, though her faith wavered greatly throughout her life. Dickinson was also obsessed by death, particularly after the death of her second cousin from typhus; such diseases were far more common during Dickinson's lifetime.
Finally, as an unmarried woman living in the 19th century, Dickinson was denied much of the freedom and influence of her male counterparts. She was infamously reclusive, often communicating with friends through letters alone, and considered eccentric by neighbors. Her sense of isolation can be sensed in much of her work, including this poem.
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More “There's a certain Slant of light” Resources
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External Resources
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The Original Manuscript — View the manuscript of the poem, as it was discovered locked in Dickinson's trunk.
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"In Our Time" Podcast — Listen to experts discuss Dickinson and her work on the well-known BBC podcast.
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Helen Vendler on Dickinson — Read an interview with renowned Harvard scholar Helen Vendler, in which she discusses this and other poems.
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Understanding Emily Dickinson — An article introducing students to some of the main aspects of Dickinson's poetry, from the Emily Dickinson Museum.
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"There's a certain Slant of light" Analysis — An academic analysis of the poem by a professor at the University of Nebraska, for students who want to push their understanding to a higher level.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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