Ivana Srdic Analysis of After a Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes

After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes After great pain a formal feeling comes-The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs; The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore? And yesterday--or centuries before? The feet, mechanical, go round A wooden way Of ground, or air, or ought, 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.

In many of Emily Dickinsons poems the subject of elaboration is the theme of pain, suffering, anguish and distress. Such a poem where she works on the theme of suffering is the poem After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes. In it Emily Dickinson illustrates how we feel after we undergo a painful event in our lives. She doesnt state what caused the speakers torment in the poem, but she rather exemplifies how we (in general) feel after an unwelcome event. The speaker is anonymous; the sufferer is in a way dehumanized, which adds to the feeling of dullness; and in this way the emotions are applicable to every one of us who has experienced such a pain. In the first stanza we see the speakers nerves sit ceremonious like tombs (he/she is silent & still) after he/she experienced the excruciating incident, and his/her heart is stiff (cold and unable to feel). Sometime after feeling the pain, the speaker is rigid and wonders whether God is the one who brought him the pain, and loses track of time so wonders whether that happened just yesterday or a long time ago (lines 3&4).

In the second stanza, the effect of numbness is bigger as the speaker acts mechanically and feels a quartz contentment, like a stone. The speaker is numb; doesnt feel anything; he/she is cold and stiff like a stone. That is probably the phase when we are not conscious what happened to us and we havent accepted the pain yet. In the third stanza, we can read that such a pain can be dreadful, but if it is outlived we will remember it. The speaker is then compared with freezing persons that recollect the snow what probably shows us the moment when we accept the existence of the pain and we recollect the memory of the event, the emotions and figure out that they will live in our memory, but although we first feel chill, then stupor eventually we will find ourselves at the face of letting go (lines 12&13). The poem consists of three stanzas: two quatrains, and one (the middle one) is a quintain (of 5 lines). The line length varies between dimeter and pentameter. The rhyme scheme is: AABB CDEFF GHII. Typically for Dickinson, also in this poem there is use of dashes and capitalization. In relation to the style, Dickinson succeeded to impose on us the feeling of numbness and stiffness with the use of funeral-related words, as: tombs, wooden way (casket), stone (headstone) that evoke in us the cold and dull feeling when on a funeral. She uses irony, oxymoron and simile (for example, the quartz contentment, like a stone in line 9) very brilliantly with which she adds up to the numb feeling of the poem.