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("Tell All The Turth But Tell It Slant–") Essay, Research Paper

Anthony Hecht

Again, this poem has been read as an instance of Emily

Dickinson’s deliberate tact and poetic strategy "in a generation which did not permit

her, without the ambiguity of the riddle, to ‘tell the truth’ . . . she early learned that

’success in circuit lies.’" I cannot disprove that notion, nor do I feel obliged to;

but the poem seems to me to have a good deal of religious significance that such a

statement inclines altogether to flout:

And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and

lightening and thick clouds upon the mount. . . . And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down,

charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.

(Exodus 19:16-21)

The blinding effect of direct access to the Godhead, which is to say the Truth (except

in the case of selected few, and Moses one of them), has been a commonplace of religious

poetry from long before Emily Dickinson to our own century. And there is what might be

called a New Testament version of the same idea. Jesus has just told his followers the

parable of the sower and the seed:

And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And when he was alone,

they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.

And he said unto them, Unto you is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but

unto theem that are without, all these things are done in parables. (Mark 4: 9-11)

Christ himself has been seen as that human manifestation of the Godhead which allows

all men to look upon that Truth which would otherwise be blinding. Milton clearly has such

a meditating notion in mind in the "Nativity ode."

That glorious form, that light unsufferable,

And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,

Wherewith he wont at Heaven’s high council-table

To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,

He laid aside; and here with us to be,

Forsook the courts of everlasting day,

And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

The same idea is, as I understand it, somewhat blasphemously paralleled by John Donne

in "The Extasie," in which, like Christ undergoing human incarnation, the Truth

and the Word becoming flesh, so must the pure lovers’ "souls descend/T’affections and

to faculties," and he continues, "To our bodies turne we then, that so/Weak men

on love revealed may look."

I am not asserting an influence of either Milton or Donne on Emily Dickinson. I am,

however, convinced that the success that lies in circuit, that dictates that all the truth

must be told, but told slant, has behind it the authority of both the Old and New

Testament: that parables, riddles, the Incarnation itself are, but aspects of a Truth we

could not comprehend without their mediation.

From "The Riddles of Emily Dickinson." Obbligati (Atheneum, 1986)

Gary Lee Stonum

As directly as any poem Dickinson ever wrote, this one posits a message. The gist of

the poem is clearly a recommendation that truth be stated obliquely, lest sudden or direct

exposure to it damage us. Furthermore, the poem is organized as a serial repetition and

amplification of the single central theme. Dickinson less develops her theme than rewords

it. Each of the poem’s four complete but unpunctuated sentences (line 1, line 2, lines

3-4, and lines 5-8,) advances a self-contained variation of what the first already states

with reasonable fullness. The second line, for instance, parallels and reiterates the

first mainly by altering the linear "slant" to a curvilinear

"Circuit," thereby advantageously suggesting circuitousness as well.

Repeating a single theme in several vivid and rather direct versions makes the poem

itself strikingly uncircuitous, it would seem, particularly in comparison to the

elliptical, periphrastic, and catachretic extravagances of many Dickinson poems. The

repetitions work to limit what more extravagant poems license, attention to any

waywardness, equivocality, or recalcitrance in a poem’s details. In details, however, is

where Dickinson usually finds the cherished wildness of language. "Superb," for

instance, must primarily be taken as a word of praise, representing the worthiness of

truth and the desirability of our being dazzled by it, though the word can have more

negative connotations: pride, haughtiness, even cruelty. Similarly, "infirm"

mainly signifies a regrettable but forgivable weakness we are all said to have, our

irresolution about bearing truth. However, the term can also suggest a more thoroughgoing

incompatibility between truth’s brightness and our delight. The legal meaning of the world

is "invalid," as of an infirm title to a piece of property; that meaning would

ascribe the incompatibi

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