‘There’s a certain Slant of light’
Explore how Emily Dickinson presents pain/a sensory/inner experience in ‘After great pain, a formal
feeling comes -’ and make connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
In ‘There’s a certain Slant of Light’ rapidly fading light in winter induces feelings of despair at the
meaningless inevitability of darkness and death. She expresses the inner experience engendered by
the ordinary moment of time of day and years.
Dickinson uses the sense as a means of communicating an inner spiritual experience. She begins by
observing a ‘Slant of light’ that has a direct correlation to her internal psychological state of mind. In
the simile ‘like the heft of Cathedral tunes’ creates the image of a weighty burden, a synaesthetic
attribution of weight to sound, with the the anglo saxon monosyllable and fricative heft’. This is
emphasised by the lexical choice of ‘oppressed’. ‘Cathedrals’ has connotations of God which may be
related to her sceptical questioning of her devout puritan surroundings, and her image of God as an
oppressor through the verb ‘oppresses’. This suggests that she saw God and religion as an
unavoidable, hugely powerful force that she could not ignore - like the full ringing sound of a
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