[This post is a continuation of my previously posted text on the yogh sound in English https://paulwebb.blog/2023/12/19/the-yogh-of-truth-part-i-yogh/]

The phonetic subtlety of great poets such as Emily Dickinson never ceases to enchant me. Even when the sounds in question are silent!

Dickinson packs three words with silent yoghs (‘bright’, ‘delight’, and ‘lightning’) into the central three lines of her short poem Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.

There is perhaps here also a semi-intentional pun on ‘lightning’ ‘(en)lightening’.  

‘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—

Truth in this poem is deemed too overpowering for people to see or understand it directly. (‘Too bright for our infirm delight’) It is akin to thunder and lightning in its capacity to shock and blind and generate fear. It should, therefore, be explained gradually, as to a child. (‘As Lightning to the Children eased//with explanation kind’)

The odd-sounding phrase ‘infirm delight’ requires some unpacking. The spelling of ‘delight’ conventional today (as it was in Dickinson’s time) – with the silent -gh- in the middle – in  fact derives from a folk (and false) etymology connecting it with light. Dickinson may well have believed this to be true. The word here, however (juxtaposed as it is with the adjective ‘infirm’) retains a shadow of its true origin in Latin delictes, a term referring to crime and sin, as in the legal phrase in flagrante delicto [caught redhanded].

Sin is connected here—as indeed it should be, if it is deemed to be original—with innocence, ignorance, and the inexorable emotional shortcomings of the human psyche.

Dickinson’s linguistic theology accords here with that of Ancient Hindu philosophers, according to whom, at the beginning of creation, the gods tore up the truth into tiny fragments and scattered it about the world. Truth is picked up and put together bit by bit, not revealed in a blinding flash.

Truth must be brought fully out. But it can only be told aslant. It must, as Dickinson oxymoronically puts it ‘dazzle gradually’.

If we dig deeper into the phonetic subtleties of this little poem, we find other gems.

Three words containing the short ‘a’ vowel (called ‘ash’ and written /æ/ in phonetic script) frame the poem. The ‘ash’ in ‘slant’ in the first line is picked up by the ‘ashes’ in ‘dazzle’ and  ‘man’ in the last two lines.

The ‘ai’ diphthong with silent -gh- in ‘delight’, and ‘lightning’ and ‘bright’, which illuminate the central section of the poem, are also echoed by the same diphthong in yogh-less ‘kind’ and ‘blind’ in the final rhyming couplet. ‘Blind’ of course creates an ironic coupling with the light-bright-delight cluster of the central section. Dickinson’s innate feel for the phonetics of English and for its antiquity is, as always, impeccable. She creates a little phonetic symphony around a grand seemingly ungraspably abstract theme. Truth told slant indeed.