Poetry's Rejoinder to the Hiddenness of God

An Excerpt from Word Made Fresh by Abram Van Engen

This article is adapted from Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church by Abram Van Engen.

When literature tells the truth, it does so on a slant. The way hikers manage to climb a mountain—switching back and climbing sideways and steadily ascending without seeing much of anything, until suddenly they summit the peak—that’s the way many poems work. They take the long way around.

This metaphor is not my own. The idea is ancient. Listen to John Donne, that Anglican poet-priest of the 1600s:

   On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

I love how this sentence winds around and around, imitating the path it describes—and ending with a suddenness: “win so.” The indirectness of so much poetry responds to reality itself. Truth appears on the slant, glimpsed just so, and it does so because, as James K.A. Smith writes, “the Creator of the cosmos comes at us slant. He shows up in a way that also hides.”¹ It is God’s good pleasure to do so and poetry’s good pleasure to imitate the ways of God. In winding about, we approach. To glimpse from here and there is, quite often, the only way to see. God is so much more than can be asked or imagined. Poetry moves on the slant in order to remind us of that truth.

Smith pulls his language, as do I, from a famous poem by Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
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—

This poem is easy to memorize and fun to speak—so much so that I used to chant it to my children. (I’d turn on the light in their bedroom and say, “Too bright for our infirm Delight the Truth’s superb surprise!” I don’t think they are fans of Dickinson.) The poem itself is delightful. And part of the delight comes from its meter. The poem is written in common meter, meaning it has four stressed beats in the first line (“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”) and three in the second (“Success in circuit lies”), then four and three again. That’s 4-3-4-3. Common meter is a popular choice for ballads, those songs you sing with a pint in your grip, lighthearted and fun. Dickinson dances through her discussion of truth.

Except here’s the thing: the meter sung in the pub is also the meter of most hymns. Hymns took the ballad to church. You can sing this poem perfectly to “Amazing Grace,” like a great many hymns, runs 4-3-4-3. By choosing this meter, Dickinson hangs her discussion of truth between the secular and the religious: something lighthearted, something serious. She winks as she talks of deepest things.

What are those deepest things? Nothing less than the truth and how to tell it. At first, it seems like she’s mimicking, even mocking, a teacher or parent—”tell all the truth,” she says. Be a good little child. Don’t lie. You might think she’d hedge the claim, or squirm away from it, but she never actually backs down from that commitment. Tell the truth, she says. All of it. And she means it. But how?

The writer and minister Frederick Buechner wondered over the same questions. His book Telling the Truth admits up front that words often fail to tell the truth, even when we try:

A particular truth can be stated in words—that life is better than death and love than hate, that there is a god or is not, that light travels faster than sound and cancer can sometimes be cured if you discover it in time. But truth itself is another matter, the truth that Pilate asked for, tired and bored and depressed by his long day. Truth itself cannot be stated. Truth simply is, and is what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God, the swollen eye, the bird pecking the cobbles for crumbs.²

If we have to deal in words, then, the how becomes all the more pressing. How do we capture the fullness of reality in a crafted set of lines? This feeble thing, this woven language, these words resonant with meanings and connotations and histories—how can language possibly give us not just a truth, or some truth, but the truth?

That’s what Dickinson wants to know. And she offers us an approach: tell all the truth, she says, but tell it slant. “Slant indicates a divergence. Dickinson tells us to head off in a different direction, somewhat askew. Something on the slant will be untrue to the right angle, neither vertical nor horizontal. Readers and teachers of poetry often look for “slant rhymes” in poems, which are rhymes that almost match but not quite. That’s slant. Dickinson wants all the truth, but to get there, we have to move at it indirectly, in ways that don’t quite ring true.

The second line expands on the statement of the first. For what is “success”? Dickinson seems to mean the discovery of truth and the ability to convey it, a way of language that enables others to see and experience what we have seen and known. To achieve that, says Dickinson, we must do something strange: we must go “in Circuit,” traveling indirectly, circling around, spiraling in and out, arriving from a direction no one saw coming. Don’t go straight, Dickinson says: success in circuit lies. In the line itself, Dickinson does what she says. The grammar winds its way to the verb. Normally, we would say: Success lies in circuit. Dickinson doesn’t do that. Instead, she moves “in Circuit” to the verb.

As a result, readers land hard on that last word: “lies.” In the most obvious sense, Dickinson means that truth lies down one path, not another. But the word “lies” has other meanings, of course. A lie is the opposite of truth. Tell all the truth, Dickinson says, even when it requires you to lie. Indirectness may take someone so far from truth that what they have to say will become, in effect, its opposite. Yet, says Dickinson, eventually the circuit will circle back. Success in circuit lies.

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If the first two lines of this great poem establish a point—tell all the truth, but tell it slant—then the next two lines begin to explain why this is so. “Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise.” The problem, Dickinson says, is not with the truth. The problem is with us. It is the same problem that Richard Wilbur identified when he tried to praise a summer day: our inbuilt capacity for delight too often sickens and stales. We don’t see the truth when we look at it directly, and all too often the truth exceeds the power of our naked eye to see. We can’t look directly at the sun.

Dickinson’s poem reminds me of a biblical tale she would surely have known—that time when Moses wanted so badly to see the fullness of the glory of God. At Mount Sinai, as he is about to receive the Ten Commandments, Moses says, “Show me your glory!” And God responds, “I will make my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ …But,” he declares, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exod. 33:18–20). So God hides Moses in the cleft of a rock and passes before him, his hand shielding Moses’s eyes. God covers his prophet until the fullness of his glory has passed. Only then does God lift his hand and let Moses take a peek.

That scene, for me, acts as an image of poetry. It serves as the point of Dickinson’s poem. It lies behind “satire 3” by John Donne. It takes up and depicts what so many poets inherently know: “Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise.” God constantly accommodates himself to our senses, our experiences, our hearts, our delights. But he does so indirectly, through a thousand different meditations. When Dickinson talks of a truth too bright for our infirm delight, I can’t help thinking of a God whose radiance could not be looked at in the face. He hid in a burning bush and clouds and pillars of fire and tents with heavy curtains. The high priest, who entered the holy of holies once a year, did so with trepidation and a rope tied around his waist so that the people could pull him out if he died. “The Creator of the cosmos comes at us slant. He shows up in a way that also hides.”

How could it be otherwise? We are finite. God is infinite. To approach God from one path will be to experience and reveal only one dimension of the Truth. As Madeleine L’Engle once told an interviewer, “I have a point of view. You have a point of view. But God has view.”³ Poetry reminds us that the best way to get a glimpse of the whole is to wind around it, poem after poem, perspective after perspective, in metaphors and similes and stretches of the imagination that bring us to a whole new view. God is more than all we can ever say of him, and poetry revels in that plenitude.

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—Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor of the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (2020) and Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (2024), named Best Book of 2024 in Culture, Poetry, and the Arts from Christianity Today. Van Engen co-hosts a popular podcast called Poetry For All.

1. James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2022), 82.

2. Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), 16.

3. Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Convergent, 2016), 142.