Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, May 3rd, 2024.

Today's poem is by that lovable shut-in, Emily Dickinson.

And it's called Tell All the Truth, but Tell It Slant.

It's probably one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

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.

Like so many of Dickinson's poems, this is such a tight, compact little poem, and it's so delightful.

What's great about it is that it can be true of both truth with a little T and truth with a capital T.

There are little truths that you might want to unfold to someone, and you have to do so diplomatically, gradually, for them to hear it or receive it.

But so to capital T truth. I think of Plato's analogy of men who have

not yet come to know the truth dwelling in a cave where they see only shadows of the real things that exist up on the surface in the real world.

And when one of these men escapes and makes his way up to the surface and sees for the first time

the light of the sun, it is blinding to him. And then when he descends back into the cave to try and bring others with him, they are so put off by the idea that they fight him violently.

They won't even go.

So perhaps there is this sense in which we resist the truth because we know that the truth calls us to greater things and because

our capacity for receiving the truth often has to grow over time. Maybe a parallel example is

in the Old Testament, the Hebrew people come to the mountain of God and Yahweh descends upon that mountain in fire and cloud

and lightning and when he speaks to them they begin to weep and wail and they beg that

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