SAMPLE RESPONSE TO DICKINSON POEM (considerably longer than a response needs to be, but note the analysis of nuance! Some parts have been elided.)

  

It is difficult to read “There’s a certain Slant of light” and not immediately seek psychological reasons for the poet’s emotional fluctuations . . ..  Sigmund Freud . . . would surely define Emily Dickinson as suffering from some type of Manic-Depressive disorder, compounded with a major depressive episode. From the beginning, physical phenomena induce a particular state of mind on the speaker. The environment-dependent affect extends far beyond the first lines and ultimately evolves into introspective contemplation. That seasonal changes-like those described in the first lines- influence an individual’s emotions is a medical certainty, but the degree to which these phenomena affect Dickinson is beyond the realm of all science. It was at this point, having found a cognitive dead-end, that I turned to metaphysics.

With almost obsessive compulsion, Dickinson echoes that “winter” and “afternoons” are oppressive and suffocating. But the physical effect of winter is not “oppressive”, environmentally speaking, summer is a far more torrid period. Winter, then, refers to a different type of season, one not bound by physical conditions. Here Dickinson begins the vertical ascent into her essence. Winter looms at the dusk of the year, much like afternoons are the Decembers of a day. . . .  It is true that “cathedral tunes” could be interpreted as funeral sounds, perhaps some rendition of a requiem, or the ominous bells of a procession carrying a sarcophagus. But the word “tunes” leads me away from this idea. The connotation of “tunes” is far more positive than suggesting music of last rites. Perhaps it is that the sounds simply seem sepulchral, in which case the funeral is an extrapolation from her own mind.

. . .  Her oppression finds home with the Meanings, and the archetypes of things, and the esoteric realities of Minds. And permanent and terrible it is. None can bind it to understanding. This force knows not of reason, and it cannot be possessed. Stanza 3 witnesses Dickinson’s plunge. Her suffering is irrevocable and relief is a stranger companion. Because it is sent “of the Air”, no material remedy will give her respite. So are the intonations of mortality. So unfathomable the experience and awareness of our own extinction. In the winters of the end of days she has seen her fatality. From Air the hour comes, fallen from providence, to the end of all moments, to end all moments. The time of Death cannot be challenged, the fabric of our intellect has not the strength to will away the Requiem for the human. We cannot grasp it, nor educate anyone as to its nature. It has always existed, always will, and now, it comes to end her life.

Dickinson does not commit the poetic fallacy to attempt an explanation for the experience of Death –one that her contemporaries all too willingly devised. She does not provide logic, or claim that the event is part of some more profound plan. The episode is terrifying precisely because it escapes logic. Dickinson sacrifices reason in favor of experience. She exalts the tragic serenity that descends when we come to realize that all things are finite, and that, we too, will die. Nor should it be said that Dickinson fears the experience of dying. She refers to a deeper, more pervasive calamity. That her ordeal transcends the mundane has already been established; we must therefore believe her despair is not caused by the awareness of physical death. I believe the poet does not refer to death as the suspension of corporeal functions, not the conventional rigor mortis, but to death as the suspension of the state of existence. It is emotional extinction what oppresses her, the possible moment when the construct of the human simply ceases to be. . . . It isn’t mortality of the body, but mortality of the mind. . . .