The seasons of light

Abstract

The selection of Emily Dickinson's three poems "A Lightexists in Spring" (812), "As imperceptibly as Grief" (1540) and"There's a certain Slant of Light" (258) as texts which portrayprimarily the significance of the presence/absence of "light"coincides with Yvor Winters' choice of them for differentreasons: he sees them as poems in which "seasonal change" isemployed "as a concrete symbol for (...) moral change" and,further, he considers this a "legitimate and traditional formof allegory, in which the relationships between the itemsdescribed resemble exactly the relationships between certainideas or experience."' This is also Roy Harvey Pearce's opinion,who almost repeats Winters' argumenta twenty years later: