First, I want to say that hearing this poem as a song helped tremendously with trying to understand it.

This poem has a lot of religious language, talking of crucifixion, faith, a pulpit, and "hallelujahs." This gave me the impression that "truth" in this poem is about doubt in the existence of God, and "This World is not Conclusion" refers to the afterlife. She paints the image of men who have held hatred for generations in search of God, which made me think of the Crusades. She also seems to say that faith will take any evidence it can get, plucking at a twig. The lines that hit the hardest are the closing ones, saying that pain relieving drugs can't relieve the incessant curiosity of whether or not the church tells the truth.

Another definition for "slant" is angle, and to angle is to give a specific perspective, so it seems that Dickinson is saying not to give the whole truth. The rest of the poem escapes me, but the end reminds me of a line in Kevin's Heart by rapper J. Cole. "They tell me 'What's done in the dark will find a way to shine'/ I done did so much that when you see you might go blind" It means that the truth will blind you if not revealed properly, or "gradually" as Dickinson says, and I think she is getting at the same idea in this poem.

Cullen spends this poem questioning God's decisions to deliver suffering, even if a mortal mind like his, so concerned with things that God would consider to be petty, could never understand those decisions. By the end, he seems to equate being a Black poet to a cyclical struggle. There is the blind mole who continues forward regardless of sight, the human who will eventually pass away despite being created in God's image, and the punishments of Tantalus and Sisyphus who will respectively starve and labor forever. It seems that the struggle lies in Cullen being compelled to "sing," which can be defined as as celebration as in "to sing the praises of." Perhaps being a Black poet full of hope and joy was difficult for him when met with the reality of living as a Black man in the 1920s. All of this aside, Cullen marvels at this struggle. He seems to appreciate that God has ordered him to express his thoughts through poetry.