After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes - Poem - Emily Dickinson
About Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a major American poet of the nineteenth century, lived all her life as a recluse at Amherst in New England. She led a secluded life within the quiet and peaceful environment of her household and had little formal education. Brought up in a stern New England Puritan family, she rebelled against Puritanism in her poems. She remained unmarried and scarcely travelled beyond Amherst. But her poetic soul wove a sensitive and imaginative world of her own in her poems, which were not published in her lifetime. Perhaps her claim to immortality as a poet rests on her response to sensations of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell which enabled her to view her lonely existence in all its breadth as also in all its minutest particulars. Because of her unique poetic style and its linguistic experimentation, she is regarded today as a poet of the first rank. She has been named 'an existentialist in a period of transcendentalism' and praised for her tragic vision. When TW Higginson, a critic and family friend, criticised her poems adversely, she decided not to publish any. What she wrote to him in a letter is worth noting: 'If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her-if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me then-My Barefoot Rank is better- (Vitelli, An Amazing Sense, 1966).
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes' presents all the characteristic distinctive features of Dickinson's poems. Thematically, the poem deals with an abstraction, the physical and psychological feeling that is associated with great pain. Structurally, the uneven formal features of this thirteen- lined poem are obvious: it is neither a sonnet, nor a poem with three regular stanzas, nor has it the rhythmic regularity offered by its rhyming pattern. The irregularity of its rhyming couplets in the first and last stanzas is highlighted by the odd five lines of the central stanza. If the first two stanzas 'describe' the physiological effect of great pain, the last one gives expression to its psychological effect. But the real Dickinsonian touch lies in communicating the role of human memory: something that the poet remembers 'after great pain' in the first and the last stanzas: the memory of Christ's pain 'centuries before' and the recollection of snow remembered after great pain. Thus the pattern hidden in the asymmetrical formal features makes this poem a great poetic achievement.
'After great pain, a formal feeling comes' Poem
After great pain, a formal feeling comesThe Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought-
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone
This is the Hour of Lead-
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow
First-Chill-then Stupor then the letting go
Glossary
Line 1. great pain physical pain, anguish; mental sorrow, tragic crisis
Line 1. formal feeling controlled sensation
Line 2. Tombs also corpses in tombs
Line 3. He the heart; Jesus Christ
Line 3. bore bore the Cross
Line 7. Wooden sensationless, paralysed
Line 9. Quartz crystallised silica, a hard mineral
Line 10. Lead heavy, soft metal
Line 13. Stupor a near unconscious condition
Line 13. let go give up
Explanatory Notes
Stanza 1. The first stanza expresses how 'a formal feeling', i.e., a feeling of a loss of sensation occurs after great pain, whether it is physical or psychological. Though the first line presents a universal truth, it is shocking because the mind's numbness is described as 'a formal feeling'. In a way all formal feelings are day-to-day, routine, blunted and so are not acute. Using a metaphor from füneral services, the poet compares nerves to a group of mourners keeping a solemn wake around a corpse-like 'stifl Heart. Lines 3 and 4 suggest that the heart loses a sense of time and place-yesterday and centuries ago are the same for the heart obsessed with pain. The reference to Christ's bearing the Cross suggests that suffering is an unavoidable and inseparable aspect of human life. Mark the ingenious use of capital letters for 'He' and 'Heart.
Stanza 2. After great pain, human activities become mechanical, puppet- like, frustrating. Feet grow wooden and go round, on the ground or air or anything, aimlessly and carelessly. The image of 'A Quartz contentment associates numbness of grief with the stoniness of quartz. The lack of a satisfactory or agreeable response from the human mind and heart is suggested by the word 'contentment', which means rest or quietness of mind. The word, like the phrase 'formal feeling' of the first line, is, however, shocking.
Stanza 3. This is a great memory poem because the painful feeling. which was present, has now become past. The present is the 'Hour of Lead', heavy and unbearable. But after having outlined that heavy pain, it becomes a memory. The poet uses the metaphor of 'freezing', which is both a 'state' and a 'process'. Anguish is like death by freezing in the snow. Freezing is neither life nor death but, simultaneously, it could be both. The last line is very effective in its combination of shock, growing insensitivity and final relief, which parallels the overall structure of the poem. Thematically, the poem moves from pain to resignation: note the three stages (perhaps paralleled in the three stanzas in a consequence): chill, stupor then the letting go.
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