This was recorded on a super windy day in Moab. I didn't realize just how much it had affected the recording until I tried to listen to it at home. I tried to make it listenable in Audacity and GarageBand, and even still it sounds pretty lousy.
Which is really too bad, because the poem is great and the locale was spectacular. There are few things more pleasant than sitting on warm slickrock when the day turns cool and breezy. There's such a lovely radiant heat from the stone.
What I didn't actually get to in my analysis is a discussion of the word "circuit." What Dickinson means here is not a circuit in the electronic sense, but in a circular sense. That second line means that success comes from taking the long, perhaps meandering path. Don't just spit out the truth, but draw it out slowly, deliberately, intentionally.
Part of what's fun about this poem is that it is so short. In contrast with her message, this poem just kind of dumps it out in just 41 words. There's not much circuit here, not much "gradually" -- and yet it dazzles.
### TEXT OF POEM
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant" by Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Episode 4.17 Kay Ryan’s “This Life”
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
Episode 309: Karl Shapiro's "Interlude III"
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