18 pages • 36 minutes read
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
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Themes
The Alienating Elements of Trauma
Emily Dickinson’s poem opens with a “great pain” (Line 1) that alienates the person from themselves, and the separation between the person and their trauma manifests in the absence of a specific person. There’s a speaker, but they don’t identify themselves. There’s no “I” in the poem. There’s also no “you” or personal pronouns. The lack of a discrete emissary and addressee reinforces the claim that intense suffering produces disassociation. A person who’s deeply suffering—in their “Hour of Lead” (Line 10)—is not a whole, intact person but an amalgamation of other things and figures. They become “Nerves” (Line 2), a “Heart” (Line 3), a “mechanical” toy (Line 5), a “Wooden” puppet (Line 6), or “stone” (Line 9). Pain breaks a person into parts, and the fragments reassemble into something else—something other than what they were before the pain began.
While the speaker and the audience don’t have a palpable place in the poem, there are two humans—or human-like—figures, Jesus Christ and the people suffering from hypothermia. Christ advances the theme of alienation. The person in pain compares their suffering to Christ, but they’re presumably not Christ—the son of God. More so, Christ represents alienation, as His identity is the subject of debate, with people making the complex claim that Christ was an incarnation of a human but truly a god. Like a person in pain, Christ experienced a sundered state. Similarly, the appearance of the “Freezing persons” (Line 12) distances the person from themself. The person is experiencing an unnamed pain, not hypothermia, so people who nearly freeze to death serve as another iteration of otherness.
Alienation is not necessarily a negative occurrence. By leaving their body and personality, the person can distance themselves from their pain and face it. They can “sit ceremonious” (Line 2) and analyze it. Eventually, “if outlived” (Line 11), the person can move on from their alienation. The “letting go” (Line 13) signals that the person has confronted their distress and can return to their body and personality.
The Dignity of Pain
The elevated, stately diction gives pain a dignified status. The speaker states, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (Line 1). Pain isn’t abject but “great” (Line 1), and the feeling that follows isn’t lowly but “formal” (Line 1). Thus, pain is magnificent and decorous. The royal presentation continues when the speaker says, “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” (Line 2). Once again, the Nerves are not frayed but majestic, and the speaker doesn’t compare them to a common, simple grave but to an elaborate, ornamented vault. The image turns pain into a splendid proceeding, with trauma becoming royal or honorable personages, as glorious as tombs.
The speaker undercuts the dignified presentation of the pain when they describe the “mechanical” (Line 5) and “Wooden” (Line 6) movements of a person in distress. The image is zany and clumsy. The person is not aware of their movements, nor are they acting with intention. However, the person recovers their grace. “Regardless” (Line 8) of their cartoonish conduct, the person grows into a “Quartz contentment, like a stone” (Line 9). They become self-composed, and they take on the appearance of an elegant rock.
Dignity relates to “the letting go” (Line 13). The person who experiences pain and survives it can, presumably, let go of it. They can process the trauma and remember it, but they don’t have to let it dominate indefinitely. In other words, the dignified person knows how to absorb pain and live. At the same time, the dignified person can grasp when the pain can’t be “outlived” (Line 11). Rather than wage an impossible battle, they let go. The “letting go” doesn’t represent defeat or weakness but a sober calculation.
The Finite Quality of Suffering
Through imagery and similes, Dickinson continually gives pain a finite presence. In other words, her speaker transforms the intense intangibility of suffering into a series of palpable objects and figures. As the person in pain experiences alienation, they leave their suffering and attach it to something specific, like “Tombs” (Line 2) or a “Quartz” (Line 9). Since suffering receives a dignified portrayal, pain becomes measurable in terms of grace and composure. A person in pain can be alienated and fragmented, but they’re not automatically breaking down or out of control. The poem ties pain to fixed entities, allowing the person to observe it, grasp it, and then separate themselves from it.
The speaker summates the specific three-part process of experiencing pain when they write, “First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -” (Line 13). The succession makes the pain legible and imposes order on it. The person can feel the “Chill,” move on to “Stupor,” and then they can let go of it (Line 13). The “letting go” (Line 13) reinforces the tangible quality of pain. To let go of something, a person must possess the ability to hold it, so a person holds pain the way they would a definable object. As “letting go” (Line 13) can arguably allude to death, the poem indicates that, sometimes, a person can live and let go of pain. Put another way, the only way to separate themselves from the pain is through dying.
The image of the “Freezing persons” (Line 12) illustrates how a person can let go of pain through life and death. From one reading of the poem, the person doesn’t freeze to death. They manage to survive the snow and live, and they can now remember the snow as a painful memory that they “outlived” (Line 11). In another reading, the person experiencing hypothermia can let go of the snow by dying. Once they’re dead, they can’t feel the cold, nor can they remember it. They didn’t outlive—the “if” (Line 11) never materialized. Whether the result is death or life, the person has reached their limit. They’ve met the tangible boundaries of pain and its consequences.
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