Emily Dickinson Poetry - There’s a Certain Slant of Light Analysis

Mortality is one of the largest, most important things associated with the human experience. Each person that passes is at a different level of self-awareness that ranges from blissful ignorance to painful realization. Philosophers have been processing and theorizing about life and death and what comes after our time on Earth for centuries. American poet Emily Dickinson wrote several works surrounding the topics of mortality, afterlife, and uncertainty about the two. In Dickinson’s work, she uses subtle metaphors and vivid imagery to portray her ideas and experiences with the notion of her inevitable end and thoughts on the possibility of an afterlife or higher power.

In the poem, “There’s a certain Slant of Light,” Dickinson drops the reader into a winter landscape, and in this context winter represents death, such as how everything is in decay and barren in the winter. By the end of the first stanza she has the reader trapped in a feeling of heaviness and an almost suspenseful emotion. She writes, “That oppresses like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes–” (3-4). This was a controversial statement to make during Dickinson’s time, as the Church was very highly regarded and going against the church was seen as rebellious and shameful, and this could allude to the possibility that she was an atheist. She continues in the second stanza talking about “Heavenly Hurt” (5) that comes with the discovery of one’s own awareness of their mortality. “Heavenly Hurt” can refer to God and the hurt she may feel because he will eventually end her life, or she may be using “Heavenly” as an adjective for the hurt and the quantity of pain she feels because of this discovery. “We find no scar, / But internal difference / Where the Meanings, are–” (6-8). In these lines she’s referencing the pain one feels constantly inside when faced with their own mortality. This feeling can only resonate with a reader who has had this experience gnaw away at them from the inside, and it does leave an internal scar that’s always waiting to be reopened. She also writes, “None may teach it –Any– ,” meaning that self-awareness cannot be taught, but only found through deep thought.

It can be argued that a time when one thinks most deeply, and at the same time frantically, is that before their time of death. “I heard a Fly Buzz” is a piece that paints the speaker as a person on the cusp of death and commenting on their final sights and sounds they hear before their life ends. In the second stanza, Dickinson makes reference to a King being witnessed in the room where she is dying, as she is dying. This reference to a King is most likely talking about God entering the room with her and the people mourning her loss, and this observation would contradict the previous theory that Dickinson was an atheist. When studying Emily Dickinson’s life one would find that she was a very private individual who had very little material belonging, and in the third stanza of “I heard a Fly Buzz,” she writes,

“I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away

What portions of me be

Assignable – and then it was

There interposed a Fly –”

(9-12). She is reflecting on the physical things she has left to the few people involved in her personal life, that is, assuming she is the speaker. She’s telling herself that she’s signed the last portions of herself away to those close to her, and then states that it was only the parts of her that were “assignable” which seems to be a question masked inside a statement. Can you assign any part of yourself, physically or emotionally, to anyone?

She continues through the end of the poem talking about the fly that has come between her and her final thoughts. She finishes the last stanza with the line “and then / I could not see to see,” (15-16). This is stating the scientific process of dying and that you lose your sight before your sense of hearing, causing the buzzing of a fly to be the last sound she hears before finally dying. Her deep thoughts during her death are interrupted by something as small as a fly, and she is cut off quickly by death, or The King in the room.

Death being an interrupter is another common theme in Dickinson’s