After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

Nonetheless, my chosen work has multiple facets to this period. In the poem “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes—“, Dickenson has an emotional proposition. I believe that when she mentions her pain, it is heartache and something that can't be physically seen. When Dickinson says “A Wooden way regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone" (7-9), she is referring to the feeling that she has deep within that no one can help with. The pain that she is enduring is so terrible that she literally can’t take it anymore, so her heart goes numb. I feel that with the piece of poetry being a part of the Romanticism, it is rejecting a dark and gothic emotional ambience, with a tone that is gloomy or even pessimistic. Dickinson uses imagery in her words to get the reader to empathize with her pain. Her words draw emotions across your eyes that can help you better understand the true meaning of the poem. This piece of work resembles the Romanticism by Dickinson focusing on her own hurt. As a replacement of her using a cause and effect method to present her physical suffering, she focuses on declaring her pain through each

Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” is a short poem about the struggles and hard transition of getting over the heartbreaking feelings that come after a great tragedy in one’s life such as losing someone; a friend, a lover etcetera. In a sense, this poem is very general, yet it cannot be applied to just any situation. It is general in the sense that those who have gone through such feelings of pain and lose know exactly what kind of “numbness” and hollow that Dickinson writes about; the feeling of not wanting or caring about what life has to offer anymore for a time once the “great pain” has first occurred and how hard it becomes to continue daily tasks, activities and routines. This poem is specifically about confronting the pain and making sense of it, and understanding that a great pain is a very

In Emily Dickinson’s poem “Pain—has an Element of Blank” symbolism, as well as poetic devices are used to discuss the theme of pain not having a beginning, but it’s always there and with it brings complications. Literary devices such as personification, and irony are used by Emily to convey the meaning of pain, and how it is everywhere. The future, and the past both are used in the poem as symbols that represent where pain is and where it will be.

There are several lines within this poem referring to motifs that revolve around pain and emotional outlet. The lines “to thrust all that life under your tongue!— / that, all by itself, becomes a passion / death’s a

Emily Dickinson lived a large period of her life isolated from the outside world, surrounded by her close family and friends. It is apparent that with most of her spare time, she wrote poems and letters. Dickinson’s poems were heavily influenced by the gothic movement in the 19th century of America, and her fascination with nature that is exposed through her continuous theme of nature being the source of joy or pain in your life. Both Dickinson’s curiosity about nature, and the gothic movement, influenced the recurring theme in her poems, which is displayed in the analysis of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”.

This provokes the readers' psyche of a lonesome, fragile individual, standing isolated at the end of an dark, treacherous road. This imagery is successfully used to illustrate a portrait of Dickinson, or even the individual reading the piece themselves, as they’re yearning for their new life, which right now is filled with darkness and sorrow. The poem is comprised of five stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The monotonous nature of the poem is nothing gleaming or eye catching, and this is purposely done for the conspicuous fact that sometimes, precious values and things you love are vaporized. With the abandonment of something important, the world does not stop revolving around you and seemingly mold itself for you. It will continue to revolve in the same way it always has for four and half billion years, but now only seeming to be filled with darkness, difficulty and

“Afraid! Of whom am I afraid? Not Death – for who is He?” (F345). Dickinson, on the other hand, was not shaken by the thought of death, but rather welcomed it. Dickinson’s poetry not only portrayed death as nothing to fear, but it also counterbalanced society’s disdain for death. In one of Dickinson’s most popular poems, she writes “Because I could not stop for death- he kindly stopped for me” (F479). Culture typically sees death as an unwelcome end that everyone must face, but her poetry depicts death as being kind enough to halt its progress to accommodate her. Why is Emily Dickinson’s poetry so in love with death? Death is the only reliable constant (Ottlinger, 42). “All but Death, Can be adjusted Dynasties repaired – Systems – settled in the Sockets – Citadels – dissolved – Wastes of Lives – resown with Colors By Succeeding Springs – Death – unto itself – Exception – is exempt from Change -” (F789). Perhaps the harshest aspect of her poetry’s death is that after it has taken another soul, life moves on simply

Francis Manley’s “An Explication of Dickinson's 'After Great Pain'." main point is centered around when it is thought that Dickinson experienced some deep and extremely traumatic event, and the poem “After Great Pain” is about that traumatic experience. Manley points out how Dickinson’s personifies different parts of the human body. Manley states that the personification is to “demonstrate the numbness” (Manley 261) she feels emotionally. The personification used is of the heart and nerves, all of which are things that can represent emotion. I can use this to my advantage to show that possibly the great pain Dickinson has felt is Lost love.

Emily Dickinson’s poem, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-“is a profound portrayal of the debilitating process of grief human beings undergo when confronted with a horrific tragedy. The response to that ultimate pain is the predominance of numbness, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-/The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-“(1-2). This is a poem that must be read slowly to become saturated in the melancholy, the dehumanization of suffering as it affects each aspect of the body without reference to the chaotic emotionality of it. The abundance of metaphors within Dickinson’s poem provides the means to empathize the necessity of numbness. It is also through the use of punctuation and capitalization, depicting the presence of a

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

Emily Dickinson once said, “Dying is a wild night and a new road.” Some people welcome death with open arms while others cower in fear when confronted in the arms of death. Through the use of ambiguity, metaphors, personification and paradoxes Emily Dickinson still gives readers a sense of vagueness on how she feels about dying. Emily Dickinson inventively expresses the nature of death in the poems, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (280)”, “I Heard a fly Buzz—When I Died—(465)“ and “Because I could not stop for Death—(712)”.

Dickinson’s poetry reflects her loneliness and the speaker of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life giving and suggests the possibility of happiness. In the year 1860s, she lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintain many correspondences and read widely. In her poems on death, critics have observed that there is the universal craving for establishing communion with the dead. Perhaps it was this craving which gave rise to the belief in the immortality of the soul or in the life after death. This belief has softened the pangs of separation from the dead. In Emily there is also such softening of sorrow. She finds comfort in the knowledge that the bustle of life in its variety would continue.

Running through Dickinson's work is a concern with the workings of the body itself. Her poems offer a compelling inner perspective on the breath, the circulation of the blood, varieties of pain, and the last moments of life itself. While human-scaled and engaged with the viscerality of the everyday, her work simultaneously conjures the epic and the immense — cosmic rhythms

When people experience a tragedy, the pain that is felt by those affected can feel suffocating and unending. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “There is a pain—so utter—”, the speaker describes this type of idea, as he or she dramatizes this dread as an abyss that swallows up everything that comes near it. As she describes this, the speaker says that it “swallows substance up” (2) and that it can drop people “bone by bone” (8). The speaker then states that “Memory can step around—across—upon it”. (4, 5)