![]() ![]() Just as very small children do not understand lightning and where it comes from, so parents soften this truth to them, so Dickinson seeks to soften the ‘lightning’ power of truth. ![]() As Vendler puts it, ‘some truths must be told allegorically.’īut Dickinson’s motive for ‘slanting’ the truth is different from Jesus’: she doesn’t want to hide the truth from those who do not want to see it, but instead she wishes to make the truth more palatable to those who run the risk of being ‘blinded’ by it, as by the sun’s glare.Īs the famous line from the 1992 film A Few Good Men has it, ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ There are times in all of our lives when we would rather bury our heads in the sand and run away from harsh reality making reality a little less harsh is the sermon Dickinson appears to be preaching here. The moral ‘truth’ is thus communicated not through a direct message but via an oblique form, a story that represents something else. ![]() Dickinson doesn’t mention the sun in this poem, but this may be what she is hinting at in the final two lines of the poem.īut for Helen Vendler, in her brilliant book of close readings, Dickinson, telling the truth aslant or ‘slant’ involves indirection rather than misdirection: Vendler connects Dickinson’s poem with Jesus’ use of the parable to put across his moral teachings. (Compare, in this connection, a much earlier poem, by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney: Sidney also ends each of his lines with an i sound.)Īnd the words ‘dazzle’ and ‘blind’ in that second stanza call to mind the idea of staring directly at the sun. Indeed, the repeated open ‘i’ sounds in the words Dickinson chooses to end her lines – ‘lies’, ‘Delight’, ‘surprise’, ‘kind’, ‘blind’ – call to mind the eyes and the importance of the visual, of seeing the truth. ![]()
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