Winter in Dickinson’s Poetic Landscape
Emily Dickinson maintained a complex, somewhat ambivalent relationship with winter, the solstice, and end-of-year celebrations. Her poetry reveals that while she found winter oppressive and challenging, she also recognized its transformative power. Dickinson wrote approximately 500 poems about seasons, but interestingly, only about 100 addressed winter and autumn, while approximately 400 focused on spring and summer. This imbalance suggests her preference for seasons of growth and renewal.
For Dickinson, winter was deeply connected to existential contemplation. As scholar L. Edwin Folsom explains, “winter for Dickinson is the season that forces reality,” often linked to death and eternity.Living in Amherst, Massachusetts, where winters could last six months, Dickinson incorporated this harsh reality into her identity. She saw “New Englandly” and that “Without the Snow’s Tableau / Winter, were lie—to me—”.
The Winter Solstice and “A Certain Slant of Light”
One of Dickinson’s most famous winter poems, “There’s a certain Slant of light,” is widely interpreted as referring to the winter solstice. She writes:
“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –”
Literary scholars believe this “Slant of light” refers to the winter solstice, with its shortest daylight hours of the year. The poem creates a symbolic representation of life’s brevity compared to death’s eternity, where “Shadows — hold their breath” in anticipation of darkness. The word “slant,” which Dickinson also used in “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” suggests that this winter light carries hidden meaning. It goes beyond mere illumination.
Christmas and Religious Contemplation
While not extensively writing about Christmas specifically, Dickinson approached the holiday with philosophical depth. In her poem “The Infinite a sudden Guest,” often referred to as “On the Paradox of the Advent,” she contemplates the Christian celebration with characteristic philosophical questioning:
“The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be —
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?”
This poem reflects Dickinson’s ability to question religious orthodoxy while still engaging deeply with spiritual concepts. She characterizes Christ as a “sudden Guest.” This implies the stress associated with unexpected visitors. It simultaneously questions the paradox of God’s omnipresence versus incarnation.
In another poem that references Christmas, she writes:
“Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!”
This suggests an anticipation of transcendent experiences that precede the conventional celebrations of the season.
Controversies and Historical Context
The interpretation of Dickinson’s views on winter, Christmas, and the year’s end is complicated by controversies. These surround the publication and editing of her work after her death. When Thomas Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd published her poems in 1891, they significantly altered her unconventional punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks to conform to 19th-century literary standards.
These edits fundamentally changed the meaning of her winter poems. For example, in “There’s a certain Slant of light,” the original version included dashes that created emphasis and rhythm crucial to the poem’s meaning:
When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —
In contrast, the edited version removed these dashes, flattening the poem’s impact:
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.medium
Additionally, personal letters between Dickinson and her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert were altered or censored to remove intimate expressions. These letters contained valuable insights into Dickinson’s personal thoughts about seasonal celebrations and winter contemplations.archive.emilydickinson
Cultural Attitudes and Influence
Dickinson’s complex relationship with winter and end-of-year festivities was influenced by the cultural attitudes of her time. Living during the Victorian era in New England, she was surrounded by Puritan traditions that approached Christmas with religious solemnity rather than the commercialized celebration we know today.
The concept of “despair” had particular religious significance in Dickinson’s time, especially among Puritan revivalists. It meant “the sin by which a person gives up all hope of salvation or of the means necessary to reach heaven.” Dickinson’s resistance to conventional religious dogma and her exploration of despair in her winter poems can be seen as a quiet act of protest against the religious orthodoxy of her community.
Scholarly Interpretations
Modern scholars view Dickinson’s winter and solstice poetry as central to understanding her philosophical approach to mortality and eternity. The literal darkness of winter served as a powerful metaphor for her explorations of spiritual darkness, doubt, and existential questioning.
Literary critic Per Winther suggests that early editors like Higginson and Todd altered Dickinson’s work specifically to “cushion the blow and minimize the shocking effect her unconventional verse was bound to have on the reading public.” This editorial sanitization obscured Dickinson’s true perspectives on seasonal transitions and religious observances for decades.
Scholar Ellen Louise Hart has examined how Dickinson’s “letter-poems” to Susan Gilbert Dickinson often explored seasonal themes, noting that in one such communication, Dickinson pairs “opposites that are actually complements, morning and night, faith and doubt, eternity and memory.” These pairings appear frequently in her winter and end-of-year writings.
What’s Next?
Emily Dickinson’s take on Christmas, winter solstice, and the end of year was multifaceted and deeply philosophical. While she recognized winter’s oppressive qualities, she also embraced its role in forcing confrontation with reality. Her approach to Christmas combined religious contemplation with philosophical questioning of traditional doctrine. Through her unconventional poetic style, she created a unique winter vocabulary. It continues to resonate a we try to understand the complex emotions associated with darkening days and year’s end.
The controversies surrounding the editing of her work remind us that what we read of Dickinson today is the product of both her genius and the cultural filters through which her work has passed. Her winter poems, with their restored dashes and capitalizations, continue to provide insight into her singular vision of seasonal transition. These poems also reveal the profound contemplations it inspired.
