The Experience of Light

Sunrise Photograph by Mary Kay Roth

In Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” she artfully expresses the way winter light transforms the snow-filled world: “When it comes, the Landscape listens—Shadows —hold their breath.”

Experience of Light
Writers have chosen to write about the variants of light for a long time. For many, it’s not so much the color, but the experience of light. Poet Jane Richardson wrote “…light loves searching out/what is hidden/what is lost/what is forgotten…” Consider Shakespeare’s famous lines, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?”  Washington Irving in Old Christmas said, “Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven… .”  Or lines from “Meditation in Sunlight,” May Sarton wrote “The sky looks down and meets the mountain range where time is light not shadow.”

A Light Show
To experience winter light, as Thoreau suggested, one must walk. All year long, Thoreau loved walking, strolling long distances by himself, often fifteen to twenty miles a day. In “A Winter Walk,” he wrote “At length we awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the windowsill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light.”