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.