certain slant of light :: essays research papers

How Nature Brings Emotions of Solemnity The chief characteristic of this feeling drawn by the slant of light is its chafed oppressiveness. "Oppresses," "weight," "hurt," "despair," and "affliction" convey this aspect. A large component in it is probably brain of the fact of death, though this is probably not the whole of its content nor is this consciousness necessarily fully formulated by the mind. Yet here we see the subtle connection between the hour and the mood. For the season is winter, when the year is approaching its end. And the clipping is late afternoon (winter afternoons are short at best, and the light slants), when the day is failing. The suggestion of death is caught up by the weighty cathedral tunes (funeral music perhapsbut hymns are also much concerned with death) and by "the distance on the look of death." The stillness of the hour ("the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath") is also suggestive o f the stillness of death. But besides the oppressiveness of the feeling, it has certain impressiveness too. It is weighty, solemn, and majestic, like organ music. This quality is conveyed by "weight of cathedral tunes," "heavenly," " legal tender" (suggesting the seal on some important official document), and "imperial." This quality of the mood may be partly caused by the stillness of the moment, by the richness of the slanting cheerfulness (soon to be followed by sunset), and by the image of death, which it calls up. The mood gives "heavenly" hurt. "Heavenly" suggests the immateriality of the hurt, which leaves "no scar" the reference point of the sunlightthe sky the ultimate source of both sunlight and deathGod. The hurt is given internally "where the meanings are"that is, in the soul, the psyche, or mind-that part of one which assigns "meanings"consciously or intuitivelyto bread and butter and to phenomen a like this. "None may teach it anything"Both the sunlight and the mood it induces are beyond human correction or alleviation they are last(a) and irrevocable"sealed." There is no lifting this seal this despair. "When it goes, tis like the distance On the look of death"The lines call up the image of the stare in the look of a dead man, not focused, but fixed on the distance.