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: ‘Freezing’ in the snow, which is neither life
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