Slant

Question 1

WHAT

Answer 1

In passage …, Dickinson presents the sombre experience of human mortality, as the speaker undergoes the trying epiphany that despair is engendered in the inevitability of our own death.

Question 2

certain Slant of light

Answer 2

Opening with a disconsolate tone, the speaker notes the ‘certain Slant of light’, paradoxical in nature as it obscures their vision rather than illuminates it.

Question 3

‘winter afternoons’

Answer 3

Observed on ‘winter afternoons’, Dickinson creates a sense of melancholy around nature and light, suggesting that it is synonymous with death thus, destabilizing the romantic view of nature as purely regenerative.

Question 4

‘Heft/ Of Cathedral Tunes,’

Answer 4

This sombre atmosphere ‘oppresses’ the speaker like the ‘Heft/ Of Cathedral Tunes,’ the ponderous diction once agains challenging transcendentalist tenets about religion as a comfort to humanity, therefore accentuating the speaker’s growing sense of dislocation.

Question 5

internal difference EV

Answer 5

This is reinforced by the ‘internal difference’ the speaker experiences, ‘where the meanings, are’

Question 6

internal difference AN

Answer 6

Characterised by sharp assonance and ungrammatical comma to represent the speakers internal suffering, Dickinson presents the alienating experience of despair in a protomodern depiction as a result of our humbling reality, death.

Question 7

‘seal of despair

Answer 7

As the speaker descends into mental turmoil, they can find ‘no scar’, for the ‘seal of despair’ is an internal experience, which cannot be released, thus evoking the speaker’s sense of entrapment

Question 8

‘imperial affliction

Answer 8

Continuing, the speaker despairs over their ‘imperial affliction’, adopting imperial diction to suggest that the pain of death is excruciating and is the work of a callous God who creates his children only to have them die.

Question 9

‘shadows – hold their breaths’

Answer 9

Returning to imagery of nature, God’s conduit for despair, the speaker notes that ‘shadows – hold their breaths’, the medial caesura reflecting this quickening breath, as the ‘landscape listens’, personifying nature to reflect Death’s imminence within it, ultimately reflecting the speaker’s lamentation of death’s inevitability and consequential despair over it.

Question 10

WHY

Answer 10

Thus, the speaker’s isolating experience reflects Dickinson’s broader protomodern view that despair is a debilitating experience of humanities.