("After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes–") Essay, Research Paper
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
["After great pain, a formal feeling comes"] is obviously an attempt to
communicate to the reader the nature of the experience which comes "after great
pain." The poet is using the imagery for this purpose, and the first line of the
poem, which states the subject of the poem, is the only abstract statement in the poem.
The pain is obviously not a physical pain; it is some great sorrow or mental pain which
leaves the mind numbed. The nerves, she says, "sit ceremonious like tombs." The
word sit is very important here. The nerves, it is implied, are like a group of people
after a funeral sitting in the parlor in a formal hush. Then the poet changes the image
slightly by adding "like tombs." The nerves are thus compared to two different
things, but each of the comparisons contributes to the same effect, and indeed are closely
related: people dressed in black sitting around a room after a funeral may be said to be
like tombs. And why does the reference to "tombs " seem such a good symbol for a
person who has just suffered great pain (whether it be a real person or the nerves of such
a person personified)? Because a tomb has to a supreme degree the qualities of deadness
(quietness, stillness) and of formality (ceremony, stiffness).
Notice that the imagery (through the first line of the last stanza) is characterized by
the possession of a common quality, the quality of stiff lifelessness. For instance, the
heart is "stiff," the feet walk a "wooden" way, the contentment is a
"quartz" contentment, the hour is that of "lead." The insistence on
this type of imagery is very important in confirming the sense of numbed consciousness
which is made more explicit by the statement that the feet move mechanically and are
"regardless" of where they go. Notice too that the lines are bound together, not
only by the constant reference of the imagery to the result of grief, but also by the fact
that the poet is stating in series what happens to the parts of the body: nerves, heart,
feet.
Two special passages in the first two stanzas deserve additional /469/ comment before
we pass on to the third stanza. The capital letter in the word He tells us that
Christ is meant. The heart, obsessed with pain and having lost the sense of time and
place, asks whether it was Christ who bore the cross. The question is abrupt and elliptic
as though uttered at a moment of pain. And the heart asks whether it is not experiencing
His pain, and—having lost hold of the real world—whether the crucifixion took
place yesterday or centuries before. And behind these questions lies the implication that
pain is a constant part of the human lot. The implied figure of a funeral makes the
heart’s question about the crucifixion come as an appropriate one, and the quality of the
suffering makes the connection implied between its own sufferings and that on the cross
not violently farfetched.
The line, "A quartz contentment like a stone," is particularly interesting.
The comparison involves two things. First, we see an extension of the common association
of stoniness with the numbness of grief, as in such phrases as "stony-eyed" or
"heart like a stone," etc. But why does the poet use "quartz"? There
are several reasons. The name of the stone helps to particularize the figure and prevent
the effect of a clich?. Moreover, quartz is a very hard stone. And, for one who knows
that quartz is a crystal, a "quartz contentment" is a contentment crystallized,
as it were, out of the pain. This brings us to the second general aspect involved by the
comparison. This aspect is ironical. The contentment arising after the shock of great pain
is a contentment because of the inability to respond any longer, rather than the ability
to respond satisfactorily and agreeably.
To summarize for a moment, the poet has developed an effect of inanimate lifelessness,
a stony, or wooden, or leaden stiffness; now, she proceeds to use a new figure, that of
the freezing person, which epitomizes the effect of those which have preceded it, but
which also gives a fresh and powerful statement.
The line, "Remembered if outlived," is particularly forceful. The implication
is that few outlive the experience to be able to remember and recount it to others. This
experience of grief is like a death by freezing: there is the chill, then the stupor as
the body becomes numbed, and then the last state in which the body finally gives up the
fight against the cold, and relaxes and /470/ dies. The correspondence of the stages of
death by freezing to the effect of the shock of deep grief on the mind is close enough to
make the passage very powerful. But there is another reason for the effect which this last
figure has on us. The imagery of the first two stanzas corresponds to the
"stupor." The last line carries a new twist of idea, one which supplies a
context for the preceding imagery and which by explaining it, makes it more meaningful.
The formality, the stiffness, the numbness of the first two stanzas is accounted for: it
is an attempt to hold in, the fight of the mind against letting go; it is a defense of the
mind. /471/
THOMAS H. JOHNSON
. . . The authority of "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" derives
from the technical skill with which the language is controlled. As she always does in her
best poems, Emily Dickinson makes her first line lock all succeeding lines into position.
. . . /97/ The heaviness of the pain is echoed by bore, wooden, quartz, stone, lead.
The formal feeling is coldly ceremonious, mechanical, and stiff, leading through chill and
stupor to a "letting go." The stately pentameter measure of the first stanza is
used, in the second, only in the first line and the last, between which are hastened
rhythms. The final two lines of the poem, which bring it to a close, reestablish the
formality of the opening lines. Exact rhymes conclude each of the stanzas.
Emily Dickinson’s impulse to let the outer form develop from the inner mood now begins
to extend to new freedoms. Among her poems composed basically as quatrains, she does not
hesitate to include a three-line stanza, as in "I rose because he sank," or a
five-line stanza, as in "Glee, the great storm is over." On some occasions, to
break the regularity in yet another way or to gain a new kind of emphasis, she splits a
line from its stanza, allowing it to stand apart, as in "Beauty—be not
caused—lt Is," and "There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House."
Sometimes poems beginning with an iambic beat shift in succeeding stanzas to a trochaic,
to hasten the tempo, as in "In falling timbers buried." It is the year too when
she used her dashes lavishly. /98/
FRANCIS MANLEY
Between 1860 and 1862 Emily Dickinson is commonly believed to have experienced a
psychic catastrophe, which drove her into poetry instead of out of her mind. According to
her explanation, she was haunted by some mysterious fright, and her fear, or whatever it
was, opened the floodgates of her poetry. But despite their overwhelming number, the poems
she produced under these conditions are not an amorphous overflow from a distraught mind;
they are informed and well-wrought, the creations of controlled artistry—especially
about twenty-five or thirty poems which, unlike the rest, treat specifically the intense
subtleties of mental anguish, anatomizing them with awesome precision. And since all of
the poems in this small cluster deal with varied aspects of that one subject, all of them
follow a certain basic pattern dictated by the abstract nature of pain.
In each of these poems Dickinson was faced with this initial problem: somehow she had
to describe a formless, internal entity which could never be revealed to others except in
terms of its outward signs and manifestations. Moreover, these externalizations did not
always /260/ correspond to the internal condition but at times, in fact, represented the
exact opposite. Yet in poetry if such signs were completely misleading, they would
obviously defeat their own purpose by communicating the wrong thing. Consequently, they
must offer some oblique means for the reader to penetrate appearances to the reality
beneath. In solving this problem Dickinson created some of her most interesting and
complex poetry. Generally speaking, irony was her weapon as well as her strategy. First,
she usually set up for her persona some sort of external ritual or drama, which contains
various levels of calm objectivity. Then, through a series of ironic involutions generated
in the course of this symbolic action, she eventually led the reader from appearances to
the reality of a silent anguish made more terrifying by its ironic presentation, as [in
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes"]. . . .
In a literal sense, this poem has neither persona nor ritual, and since it describes a
state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary. In such a case attention should be
centered on the feeling itself and secondarily on its location. Consequently Dickinson
personified various parts of the body so as to demonstrate the action of numbness on
them—the nerves, the heart, the feet—generalized entities
belonging to no one. Yet that is precisely the formal feeling benumbed contentment
produces in a person, especially one who has lost the sense of time and his own identity
(lines 3-4). All the parts of his body seem to be autonomous beings moving in mysterious
ways. If that constitutes a persona, it is necessarily an unobtrusive one that must be
reconstructed from disjecta membra. Similarly, the /261/ various actions performed
in this poem are disjunctive, and though vaguely related to a chaotic travesty of a
funeral, they are not patterned by any consistent, overall ceremony. Since they are all
external manifestations or metaphors for numbness, however, they are all as they should
be, lifeless forms enacted in a trance as though they were part of some meaningless rite.
The first stanza, for instance, is held rigid by the ceremonious formality of the
chamber of death when, after the great pain of its passing, the corpse lies tranquil and
composed, surrounded by mourners hushed in awe so silent that time seems to have gone off
into eternity "Yesterday, or Centuries before." In one respect this metaphor is
particularly suitable since the nerves are situated round about the body or the
"stiff Heart" like mourners about the bed of death. But if the metaphor is
extended further, it seems to become ludicrously unsuitable. These nerves, for example,
are not neighbors lamenting with their silent presence the death of a friend. They are
sensation itself, but here they are dead, as ceremonious and lifeless as tombs.
Consequently, the formal feeling that comes after great pain is, ironically, no feeling at
all, only benumbed rigidness. Conversely, if the "stiff Heart" is the corpse, he
nevertheless has life or consciousness enough to question whether it was "He, that
bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before." Obviously, this is moving toward
artistic chaos since metaphors should be more and more applicable the further they are
extended, but this one apparently becomes progressively worse. Curiously, however, by
breaking all the rules Dickinson achieved the exact effect she needed. Her problem was to
describe an essentially paradoxical state of mind in which one is alive but yet numb to
life, both a living organism and a frozen form. Consequently she took both terms of this
paradox and made each a reversed reflection of the other. Although the mourners, the
nerves, appear to be the living, they are in actuality the dead, and conversely the stiff
heart, the metaphoric corpse, has ironically at least a semblance of consciousness. In
their totality, both these forms of living death define the "stop sensation"
that comes after great pain.
Since the metaphoric nightmare of the first stanza could hardly be extended any
further, Dickinson is obviously not concerned with elaborating a conceit. In the second
stanza, then, the cataleptically formal rites of the dead are replaced by a different sort
pf action ceremoniously performed in a trance, an extension not of the previous metaphor,
but of the paradox which informed it. For although move- /262/ ment usually indicates
vitality, there is no life in the aimless circles of the walking dead. Whether numb feet
go on the hardness of ground or on the softness of air, their way is wooden because
paralysis is within them. Since they cannot feel nor know nor even care where they are
going ("Regardless grown"), they wander in circles ("go round") on an
insane treadmill as though lost, suspended between life and death and sharing the
attributes of both.
The third stanza is, in one respect, an imagistic repetition of the second. Benumbed,
aimless movements through a world of waste, the motions of the living dead are similar to
the trance-like, enchanted steps of persons freezing in a blank and silent world of
muffling snow. But at the same time that this metaphor refers particularly to the
preceding stanza, it also summarizes the entire poem since the ambiguous antecedent of This
in line 10 is, in one respect, everything that went before. Consequently, this final image
should somehow fuse all the essential elements of the poem. Not only that, it should
present them in sharp focus.
Certainly the chill and subsequent stupor of freezing, a gradual numbing of the senses,
incorporates many of the attributes of death itself: a loss of vital warmth, of
locomotion, of a sense of identity in time and space conjoined with an increasing
coolness, rigidness, and apathy. Since freezing, however, is neither life nor death but
both simultaneously, it is an excellent, expansive metaphor for the living death which
comes after great pain. But in addition to extending the basic paradox which informs the
poem, this final figure serves a more important function by drawing to the surface and
presenting in full ambivalence a certain ironic ambiguity which in the first two stanzas
remains somewhat below the threshold of conscious awareness.
In its furthest extent great pain produces internal paralysis, but, ironically, this
numbness is not itself a pain. It is no feeling, "an element of blank," which
gradually emerges from the poem until at the end it almost engulfs it in white
helplessness. In the first stanza it lurks just below the surface, unstated, but
ironically present in the situation itself. For although the nerves represent
metaphorically the formal feeling which comes after great pain by being silent,
ceremonious mourners, they are simultaneously dead sensation, no feeling, formal or
otherwise, not pain, but nothing. In the second stanza this implication is no longer
subliminal, but even though it is at the surface, it is not developed, merely stated:
"A Quartz /263/ contentment, like a stone." According to Webster’s American
Dictionary (1851), the lexicon Dickinson used, contentment was a "Rest or
quietness of mind in the present condition; satisfaction which holds the mind in peace,
restraining complaint, opposition, or further desire, and often implying a moderate degree
of happiness." Apparently, then, by the second stanza anguish has resolved itself
into its impossible opposite, a hard, cold, quartz-like peaceful satisfaction of the mind.
In the third stanza, this inert irony fully emerges to modify response and ultimately to
qualify it to such an extent that the poem ends in tense, unresolved ambivalence.
According to the superficial movement of the poem, the time after great pain will later be
remembered as a period of living death similar to the sensation of freezing. Yet the
qualifications attached to that statement drain it of its assertiveness and curiously
force it to imply its own negative. For there is not only a doubt that this hour of crisis
may not be outlived (line 11), but even the positive statement (that it will be
remembered) is made fully ambivalent by being modified by its own negative (that it will
be remembered just as freezing persons recollect the snow). Ironically, freezing persons
can never remember the snow since they die in it, destroyed by a warm, contented numbness
in which they sleep and perish in entranced delusion. Because there is no solution to this
ambivalence, the poem ends unresolved, suspended between life and death in a quartz
contentment, the most deadly anguish of all, the very essence of pain, which is not pain,
but a blank peace, just as the essence of sound is silence. /264/
CHARLES R. ANDERSON
[In "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," the] three stanzas faintly
shadow forth three stages of a familiar ceremony: the formal service, the tread of
pallbearers, and the final lowering into a grave. But metaphor is subdued to meaning by
subtle controls. . . . /210/ This poem has recently received the explication it deserves,
matching its excellence. But its pertinence to this whole group of poems is such as to
justify a brief summary of the interpretation here.
‘In a literal sense,’ according to this critic, there is ‘neither persona nor ritual,
and since it describes a state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary.’ Instead, as
befits one who has lost all sense of identity, the various parts of the body are
personified as autonomous entities (the nerves, the heart, the feet),
belonging to no one and moving through the acts of a meaningless ceremony, lifeless forms
enacted in a trance. As a result, attention is centered on the feeling itself and not on
the pattern of figures that dramatize it. As the images of a funeral rite subside, two
related ones emerge to body forth the victim who is at once a living organism and a frozen
form. Both are symbols of crystallization: ‘Freez
nor death but both simultaneously; and ‘A Quartz contentment, like a stone,’ for the
paradoxical serenity that follows intense suffering. This recalls her envy of the ‘little
Stone,’ happy because unconscious of the exigencies that afflict mortals, and points
forward to the paradox in another poem, ‘Contented as despair.’ Such is the ‘formal
feeling’ that comes after great pain. It is, ironically, no feeling at all, only numb
rigidness existing outside time and space. /211/ Sharon Cameron
"Great pain" is the predicate on which the sentence of fixity lies, the prior
experience against which feeling hardens in intransigent difference. The relationship
between the adjective in "formal feeling," the adverb in "The Nerves sit
ceremonious," and the simile, "like Tombs—" is a relationship of
progressive clarity; the connections get made in the underground touching of the roots of
each of these words; the "formal feeling," "ceremonious," is a feeling
of death. And as if in parody of the initial image, in the next line the "Heart"
too is a "stiff," unable to connect self to incident or to date.
Like the "Element of Blank—," like the "Trance—" that
covers pain, and like the "nearness to Tremendousness— / An Agony
procures—," the "formal feeling" is an abdication of presence, a fact
that explains why the question the speaker puts to herself is framed by incredulity and
designates the subject as someone else, a "He, that bore," why the time that
precedes the present becomes mere undifferentiated space, "Yesterday, or Centuries
before?" But unlike "Blank—," "Trance—," and "a
nearness to Tremendousness—," the "formal feeling" is an anatomy of
pain’s aftermath from a distance, a self standing outside of the otherness that possesses
it. Thus we are told of the parts of the body as if they were someone else’s or no one’s:
"The Heart . . . the Nerves . . . the Feet . . . "; thus we are shown actions,
how the body looks, what it does, rather than feelings. Thus the speaker arrives at a
definition ("This is the Hour of Lead—") divorced from the experience
because encompassing it. Thus the concluding simile departs from the present as if in
analogy there were some further, final escape.
But although the initial images follow upon each other like a death, the second stanza
makes clear that death is only an analogy for the body that has lost its spirit, for the
vacancy of will. Given its absence, all action is repetition of movement without meaning,
and as if to emphasize the attendant vacuousness, the lines repeat each other: "The
Feet" "go round—" in circles, "Wooden," "Regardless
grown," until the stanza’s final line boldly flaunts its own redundancy. "A
Quartz contentment " is "like a stone—" because quartz is a stone.
However, perhaps Dickinson means us to see two images here, the transparent crystal and
the grey stone to which it clouds, in a synesthesia that would equate the darkening of
color with a formal hardening. As in "perfect—paralyzing Bliss— / Contented
as Despair—," contentment here is the ultimate quiet, the stasis that resembles
death. "Wood," "stone," "Lead—"—the images to this
point have been ones of progressive hardening. The image with which the poem concludes,
however, is more complex because of its susceptibility to transformation, its capacity to
exist as ice, snow, and finally as the melting that reduces these crystals to water. The
poem’s last line is an undoing of the spell of stasis. Because it is not another,
different expression of hardness but implies a definite progression away from it by
retracing the steps that comprise its history, we know that the "letting
go—" is not a letting go of life, is not death, but is rather the more
colloquial "letting go" of feeling, an unleashing of the ability to experience
it again. To connect the stages of the analogy to the stages of the poem:
"Chill—" precedes the poem, "Stupor—" preoccupies it, and
"the letting go—" exists on the far side of its ending. The process whereby
blankness has been called into existence, given palpable form, dimension, character and
movement enables the poem to specify what the previous poems on pain merely note.
Dickinson’s poems mostly take place "After great pain," in the space between
"Chill—" and "Stupor—." "Life [is] so very sweet at the
Crisp," she wrote longingly, "what must it be unfrozen! " (L 472). But the
conversion of the body into stone was not lasting. She was not, as she sometimes seemed to
declare herself, numb from the neck down. Pain was the shot that inflicted temporary
paralysis, a remedy that worked until the poems took over. Then she could spell out the
words she swore consciousness refused her, "letting [the feeling] go—" into
them where from a distance she could look.
We saw earlier how, in Derrida’s terms, pain is a trace of lost presence, the
record of its having been. Thus Dickinson’s speakers "learn the Transport by the
Pain—," sometimes seeming to harbor the belief that "Pain-" is
"the Transport" it stands for. Pain is with us as a presence because pain stands
for (in place of) presence. But pain, as we have seen in the last few pages, is also the
past after which, from which, comes the "formal feeling" that is the poem. If we
were to arrange the three terms in a sequence (present/ce, pain, and poem) they would,
each one, hark back to a past that eluded all efforts to retain it. For the first temporal
principle is one of alterity, the present differing from the past and the future from the
present. We then have some idea of why Dickinson claimed in her meeting with Higginson not
to have learned how to tell time until she was fifteen. For to tell time is to tell
difference, to note the failure of resemblance ever to be the same as that from which it
differs. Dickinson’s poems on pain are an attempt to blank time out and to create, in
its place, a space where the temporal apparatus of daily life has been as if disconnected.
For presence is past, and even what follows presence (what Poulet calls the moment after
loss) lies behind us. In the sequence of diminishing returns, what has been is, by
definition, missing. What remains is a true blank, the genuine space at the thought of
which despair "raves—," and around which words gather in the mourning that
is language.
from Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright ? 1979 by The
Johns Hopkins UP.
Kamilla Denman
While Dickinson did not go so far as to make words mean their
logical opposite, she did disrupt conventional arrangements to create emotional and
psychological effects, as in the lines of "The Snake" above. A more extended
example of this process appears in poem 341 . . . .
Temporal dislocation in the content of the poem is integrally related to its syntactic
and metrical form. generally, the order of words in temporal sequence establishes
linguistic relationships from which meanings emerge. In this poem, the temporal disruption
of the speaker’s psyche extends to the syntax and meter, with incomplete sentences and
sudden shifts from pentameter to tetrameter to trimeter to dimeter and back. Other phrases
in the poem initially seem to form complete sentences but then unravel in subsequent lines
that confuse the original meaning, as in the last stanza. There are no periods to mark off
any thought as complete, nor even to mark the poem as a complete thought: the final
sentence is completely fragmented by dashes. Alan Helms, in his incisive reading of the
punctuation in this poem, says that the dashes in the last line approximate the experience
of freezing by slowing down the tempo. The final verb, "letting go," is followed
by a dash that hangs the poem and the experience described in the poem over a visual and
aural precipice of frozen silence. Were the sentences to be made complete and the poem
conventionally punctuated, the essence of the experience it describes would be lost.
Clearly, much of Dickinson’s power in evoking psychological states lies in her
disregard for conventional rules of grammar and punctuation, as well as conventional rules
of poetic meter, line, and rhyme.
The poem begins with words conventionally grouped (though the punctuation marks
Dickinson used were not conventional), but by the third line, the grammar of the poem
begins to disintegrate with the introduction of an additional comma, leaving only the
iambic pentameter as a stabilizing if relentless rhythmic force throughout the first
stanza. The first line describes the psychological state philosophically, the second
describes it imagistically, and the two make an impressive epigram. But Dickinson is not
content to end the poem here: she must explore the state from a more intimate and
vulnerable standpoint. She is not content to recollect emotion in tranquillity, nor to
describe it in eloquent, complete sentences. The introduction of the subject,
"He," causes the clear ideas and images of the first two lines to crumble into
disconnected images and fragmented phrases. The comma that follows the word,
"He," is the first signal of the breakdown in the syntax, separating predicate
nominative from its relative pronoun and verb, and person from action. The disruptive
comma also creates a temporal dislocation that permeates the poem: the present thought is
not completed (the object of "bore" is lacking), as the speaker unsuccessfully
seeks to locate the incomplete action in past time. The present experience described in
the second stanza is a mechanical, cyclical treadmill, while the past of the first stanza
stretches out vaguely and endlessly. In the final stanza, past and present are confused in
the line, "Freezing persons, recollect the Snow." The present participle evokes
a present condition, but the snow that is causing the freezing is disconcertingly thrown
into the chasm of the past by the verb, "recollect." The experience of freezing
is so intensely present that even the snow that causes it, like the "He" who
bore the pain, seems to belong in the past.
From "Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation." Emily Dickinson
Journal (1993)
Suzanne Juhasz
Lack of feeling, or various forms of "death," occasions the metaphoric
transfers which interweave in "After great pain" to measure the effect of pain
on the mind and body and, in consequence, to tell us something about the nature of pain
itself.
Crucial is the poem’s structure of "analogical progression" (Weisbuch’s
term): that is, a movement typological rather than linear, since each analogy, set in
apposition to a central idea, proceeds only in that it further defines. Here a series of
analogies for the "formal feeling" which comes after great pain call upon a
range of external situations, intricately interrelated by metaphor. The feeling is
internal, mental, but Dickinson uses words associated with the body, with nature, with
society, and with physical death, as well with the mind, to shape and articulate both its
sensation and significance.
First Dickinson outlines the feeling by describing the body’s manifestation of it:
nerves, heart, feet. In each instance, however, figurative language expands the
experiential nexus. The nerves are personified; they "sit ceremonious." A social
definition of formal–marked by form or ceremony–is called into play; the image may evoke
a scene of ladies at tea. However, immediately they are compared to tombs. Formal meaning
stiff or rigid; formal marking another kind of ceremony–that of death; more definitions
are added. Now all ceremonies are suspect. And that is the point. Formal behavior, because
it relies on predetermined patterns, because it proceeds by rote, is mindless.
Next we see the heart. It is stiff. Stiff is another definition for formal, here
specifically denoting lack of feeling; for the heart can no longer tell how much time has
elapsed between its present condition and when the great pain occurred: "Yesterday,
or Centuries before?"
Then the feet. They move mechanically: formal meaning highly organized, also stiff,
also devoid of thought, moving by rote–a kind of death. Their path, be it "Of
Ground, or Air, or Ought," is wooden and regardless. Both nouns and objects
describing the route of the feet, in their juxtaposition of concrete and abstract,
indicate that this path is as conceptual as it is physical, and that the feet, like nerves
and heart, function synecdochically for the person–especially, for the person’s mind.
Ought is a path taken by the mind: that of duty—a formal gesture. The conjunction of Wooden
and regardless gives dimension to thought–or rather, to the lack of it. A final
metaphor and analogy complete the stanza. "A Quartz contentment, like a stone,"
further describes the wooden way, but it is as well in apposition to "a formal
feeling," like all of the images thus far. Contentment follows from regardless and
Ought, while Quartz parallels Wooden and mechanical; each
harkens back to stiff, ceremonious, and Tombs; all are aspects of formal.
In the phrase "Quartz contentment" the concrete and abstract vocabularies
are dramatically joined: two versions of rigidity, of formality, inform one another. The
quartz is stiff and symmetrical–shaped in a formal pattern. With regardless, Ought, and
mechanical to precede contentment, we recognize in that seemingly benign
term the kind of formality with which the poem has been dealing throughout: the death-like
impotence that marks it in other poems as a primary symptom of despair. We recall "A
perfect–paralyzing Bliss–/Contented as Despair–," and the stone eye "that
knows–it cannot see." The concluding analogy, "like a stone," comes as no
surprise. A quartz contentment is a stony contentment, but the introduction of the word stone
more directly yokes Tombs and consequently death to the image.
A formal feeling, then, is stiff, rigid, cold, conforming to patterns with no thought
producing them, contented because of the absence of awareness, vitality, sensation, life.
"Formal feeling" is really an oxymoron, for the feeling of no feeling.
The last stanza is introduced by a summarizing metaphor–"This is the Hour of
Lead" –summarizing in that Hour and Lead hook on to the chain of
epithets that have been defining formal in an increasingly ominous way. Lead is as heavy,
dark, solid and inanimate as tomb–like nerves, stiff hearts, mechanical feet, wooden
ways, and quartz contentment. Hour is the present tense of a mind that questions
its understanding of time, that proceeds by rote, according to ought rather than insight,
that has grown in its contentment, regardless. The "Hour of Lead" equals "a
formal feeling": with its successive parallelism the poem comes full circle here, for
the circle has outlined meaning.
But the poem is not over yet, because for all of the lack of a sense of time that
accompanies the formal feeling, the poem, like "It ceased to hurt me," is
concerned with temporal progression, from pain to the formal feeling to whatever succeeds
it. Its first word is "After"; its concluding lines return from the stasis of
the formal feeling to the process in which it is located. As the poem begins by setting
out the past–what precedes the action of the poem–so its final analogy projects the poem
into the future, what will hopefully (unless the formal feeling is truly death-dealing)
follow: "Remembered, if outlived,/ As Freezing persons, recollect the
Snow–/First—Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go–." In this poem, too, time
is a frame that holds the subject in place, through which one can study it.
Sharon Cameron’s reading of these lines is excellent, noting as it does how the images
themselves embody the temporal progression described.
The image with which the poem concludes … is more complex because of its
susceptibility to transformation, its capacity to exist as ice, snow, and finally as the
melting that reduces these crystals to water. The poem’s last line is an undoing of the
spell of stasis. Because it is not another, different expression of hardness but implies a
definite progression away from it by retracing the steps that comprise its history, we
know that the "letting go–" is not a letting go of life, is not death, but is
rather the more colloquial "letting go" of feeling, an unleashing of the ability
to experience it again. To connect the stages of the analogy to the stages of the poem:
"Chill–" precedes the poem, "Stupor–" preoccupies it, and "the
letting go–" exists on the far side of its ending.
In "After great pain," a dazzling demonstration of her analogical method,
Dickinson is like a juggler: the balls she suspends in air so that their shapes and colors
enrich one another to create the meaning of the whole are versions of "formal,"
taken from all manner of experiences in the world beyond the mind. The shape that they
make as they circle in the air becomes, however, that of a mental experience: lack of
feeling, a formal feeling. This poem is Dickinson’s most intense and most precise
definition of a condition that appears throughout her poetry on mental experience. This
particular version of formal feeling comes after great pain; it is the self-protective
response of the mind to a severe internal wound. . . .
From The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind.
(Indiana University Press, 1983.) Copyright ? 1983 by Suzanne Juhasz.