1. There's a Certain Slant of Light
How does Dickenson convey ideas about despair?

2. How does Dickenson convey ideas about despair?
Task:
Come up with a list of synonyms for despair.
Write two topic sentences ready to respond to the Q

3. How does Dickenson convey ideas about despair?

4. Born in 1830, Emily Dickinson was an American poet raised in a Puritan New England household.
She wrote many poems during her life in letters to friends and acquaintances but her work was only ever published posthumously, that is, after her death in 1886.
Some of her poems were inspired by nature and are about moments which bring surprise or inspiration
Watch the video and make notes of anything about her life that may come through in her poetry…

5. Read through the poem and answer the following comprehension questions:
What kind of mood does the poet create?
What do you think is the overall message/idea in the poem?
What images/techniques do you find most effective and why?
What can you say about the consistent use of abstract ideas? What is the effect?

6. AO1 - Overview
The poem opens with the idea of there being a certain slant of light in winter afternoons that "oppresses." It kind of feels like the seriousness associated with "Cathedral Tunes." The speaker then compares the light to a kind of "Heavenly Hurt" that leaves no scar. It's impossible to define exactly what the light is or what it's like. But the speaker says it's everywhere, an "affliction" of sorts, that is sent from the air. When the light arrives, the landscape seems to listen and everything kind of stands still. When the light goes, there's something "distant" about it, kind of like death.

7. There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons –
Let’s read it together
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

8. AO2 AO1 Annotation time The slant – what does the ‘lean’ suggest
PMA unusual here
Pathetic fallacy
Dynamic verbs
NSC of Cathedral
Alliteration + NSC
Personification
End focus
Fronted conjunction
NSC of Meaning
The slant – what does the ‘lean’ suggest
PF mood that is created?
The sense of oppression – contextual links?
Religious allusions
Metaphorical pain
Internal difference – is the suffering ideological?
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

9. AO2 AO1 Annotation time None may teach it – Any –
None – pronoun use here is…
Use of hypens– parenthesis
PMA of dynamic verb
Foregrounded verb
Collective pronoun
NSC of Air
Abstractions
Alliteration
Personification
Dynamic verb
Alliteration end focus
Idea of reasoning
Internalises the struggle
Abstract ideas – thinness of air/wind
Physical representations of abstract concepts – romanticism
Painful to receive – painful to lose also
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

10. AO1 AO2 How does Dickenson convey ideas about despair?
Let’s create a list of AO1 techniques and AO2 inferences we could make for the question below. It can be bullet pointed like the INDICATIVE CONTENT
AO1
AO2
How does Dickenson convey ideas about despair?

11. Independent 10
Using your structure and your verbs for analysis respond to the question and draw links to ONE OTHER poem from the anthology

12. The connection between light and truth (in Literature/ Culture)?
Discuss in pairs – 2 minutes
etymologically, to despair means, to give up, lose or be without hope (Latin, spes); and De­spair, in this poem, is the last truth and the last lesson. No one can teach it anything.
The ‘Truth’ of Despair?
Discuss as a class
What do you understand by the word ‘Despair’?
The theological concept of Despair is less well known now than in the nineteenth century: it is one of the two sins that is said to prevent salvation (the other being Presumption—the belief that to be saved, one does not need to practise vir­tue).
In the Christian theological tradition Judas is condemned not because he betrayed Jesus but because he despaired.

13. Despair, in this poem, is the last truth and the last lesson
Despair, in this poem, is the last truth and the last lesson. No one can teach it anything.

14. Dickinson's words and images are unsettlingly disparate:
a Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons
oppression
organ music in a Cathedral
Heavenly
Hurt
scar
difference
Meanings
teach(ing)
Seal
De­spair
an empire
affliction
Air
Landscape
Shadows
Distance
the look of Death
Since until the last two lines there is no explicit narrative, we could try to group the poet's effects of diction and imagery
Discuss how you might group these terms into linked groupings – what words might be thematically linked together? – 3 minutes.

15. What about…?
Religion
Cathedral, Heaven, the (imperial) Seal, Air, and Despair
The Natural World
the Slant of light, Winter Afternoons, Landscape, and Shadows
“Damage caused by another"
Hurt, oppression, scar, and affliction,
Abstract ideas
difference, Meanings, Despair, Distance, Death.
For us to create such groupings is an artificial exercise, of course, but it serves to point out what diverse threads Dickinson can combine in her closely woven fabric of poetry.
Hey guys, I hope you spotted the figurative use of language here!!!!!! LOFL!!!!!!

16. As she veers from light to Hurt, from scar to Meaning, from Seal to Despair, and from Landscape to Death, the poet depends on our agility to move as she moves, from one plane to another.
After all, the poem itself tells us that for every outside phenomenon there is an inside equivalent: if a Slant of light, then Hurt; if a Seal, Despair; if Shadows, Death.
The impossibility of firmly separating the sense experience of landscape from the spiritual experience of Despair is a central point of the poem.

17. Is it a poem arising (as it seems to) from a natural perception which is then given symbolic importance, or is it a poem that arises from internal Despair and then looks around the landscape for an equivalent image ?
We cannot really say.
Sense experience is richly called up by the light, the season, the time of day, the heavy-to-lift weight of organ music, the scar, the seal, the landscape, and shadows.
The symbolic is equally richly summoned by the religious diction, as well as by the abstractions, which cluster around the governing one, Despair.

18. In assuming there is still a heavenly Empire that can deal out imperial afflictions to human beings, the poem seems to invoke a notion of God's plan, his providential decisions for our own good. He changes our internal conceptual universe by means of his imposed "affliction."
What is the big “but” with this explanation however?
Contains unintended humorous homonym
But this "providential" explanation of the purpose of the Heavenly Hurt is immediately negated by the word "Despair," which gives no credence to heavenly purposes of salvation. And the "internal difference" does not teach us anything meant to ‘improve’ us about perhaps how suffering is an aspect of God’s love for us. The change to Despair is unteachable; it is a permanent Seal set on life.

19. The ‘summary’ final stanza…
….in which the light comes and then goes (all in four lines), we learn that the Slant of light is prophetic of its own disappearance. As soon as that late-afternoon light is seen, the Landscape listens for the footstep of night. And the Shadows—whose very existence depends on the presence of that light—hold their breath in suspense, knowing that with their next exhalation they will vanish. And when this last light goes, everything sinks into visual unreachability—as if one were to look on the face of a corpse and receive no answering gaze, only "the look of Death," as the person is in an instant removed to an incalculable distance from life.
Dickinson's closing animation of both Landscape and Shadows gives a pathos to their coming extinction, as Despair, in existential parallel with them, extinguishes spiritual hope.

20. A word on the words….
Someone talk to me about her rhyming of "Breath" and "Death"
"Breath" and "Death" are so frequently rhymed in poetry in English because we lack an adequate supply of words containing the end-sound of "Death" (one can evade the problem, of course, by using a slant rhyme such as "faith"). Dickinson wouldn't claim originality in rhyming "breath" and "Death"—but by almost-rhyming "listens" and "Distance" in lines 1 and 3 of the closing stanza, she distracts us from the conventionality of "breath" and "Death" in lines 2 and 4.
She also uses rhymes in which one rhyme-word hides phonetically within its mate—as "Air" hides in "Despair," and "are" hides in "scar."

21. Although the poem begins with her usual ballad stanza ( ), the first stanza, naturally pronounced, does not fall easily on the ear - as one can hear by giving it four down-beats, in accordance with its theoretical trochaic prosody):
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
The more "normal" reading inserts anapests at the beginning of line 1, and at both the beginning and the middle of line 3:
…..

22. The next two stanzas of the poem observe a form of the ballad stanza that regularly truncates the first line, creating a considerably more abrupt effect: And the final stanza, as the light "comes" with its brevity and "goes" into final darkness, offers us a perfectly regular trochaic ballad stanza,
The first stanza of a poem usually sets its normative prosody, but only the last stanza in "There's a certain Slant of light" obeys the normative rhythm of a trochaic ballad stanza. Whatever we make of stanza 1, pronouncing it either with the possibilities delineated above or with some other, it does not introduce us plainly, as ordinary opening stanzas do, to a rhythmic mode that holds for the rest of the poem.
The rhythm of the last stanza, in the feminine end-words "listens" and "Distance," presents a dying trochaic fall, "caught" from the earlier trochees "gives us," "Any," and "affliction."

23. Dickinson avoids making the spiritual life a completely separate domain by tethering it so completely to a New England winter moment. In reading her, we need to be aware of the constant flicker between sense and spirit.