Slants, by Krishnan Venkatesh

There's a wonderful and immense website called The Emily Dickinson Archive, in which you will find photographs of all the manuscript versions of every poem, as well as a Dickinson lexicon:

edickinson.org

Here is one manuscript of "There's a certain slant of light":


Can you read it? Regarding the word "slant," the lexicon has some interesting shadings:



Some of you already know this famous Dickinson poem featuring the word "slant":

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 —

-- suggestions of "surprisingly," "subtly," "cleverly," "wittily," "hintingly..."? Our "slant of light" is also "certain," as in "particular," "determinate but inexpressible," and also "absolutely sure," "definite"?

Comments

  1. Maxfield FleishmanMarch 28, 2021 at 9:39 PM

    I love this poem (Tell all the truth...) too much not to write on it.

    A good friend just told me he considered suicide this weekend. He is safe now, thank God.

    It felt, at first, as if he had placed a burden on me. What do I say to something like that? I couldn't give him a hug for he was thousands of miles away; I couldn't in good conscious lecture him about how good it is to be alive. I know it isn't always, and for some people less than others. All I could say was "yeah, man. I'm sorry. I love you. I'm here, if you want to talk about it."

    But even that weight he placed on me, heavy as it was, wasn't the full weight of his sadness. It wasn't his truth, only a slant of it. Inside he was burning, or freezing perhaps, after a great pain, and he could only communicate to me a recollection. I fear that in communicating his pain, my friend desired me to feel it with him, really, and not simply to view a certain slant of it. I fear that that would have helped him most. But then, knowing my friend, he wouldn't have wanted me to be in so much pain.

    If I had truly felt what he felt, shared his burden directly and not circuitously, I suspect that I would have been of no use to him, being dazzled blind myself. I didn't feel very useful to him as it was. It seems necessary to communicate pain without putting others in the same pain, else they cannot assist you.

    The Truth must dazzle gradually
    Or every man be blind —

    I will write my friend a song, or a letter, or something like that, to let him know that he is important to me and that I cherish his existence in this world. What else can we do? I can't poke my own eyes out to comfort a blind man, for what the blind man really needs is a guide.

    But who's to say I'm any sort of a guide?

    Maxfield Fleishman

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