Summary
The speaker notes that following great pain, “a formal
feeling” often sets in, during which the “Nerves” are solemn and
“ceremonious, like Tombs.” The heart questions whether it ever really
endured such pain and whether it was really so recent (“The stiff
Heart questions was it He, that bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?”).
The feet continue to plod mechanically, with a wooden way, and the
heart feels a stone-like contentment. This, the speaker says, is
“the Hour of Lead,” and if the person experiencing it survives this
Hour, he or she will remember it in the same way that “Freezing
persons” remember the snow: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting
go—.”
Form
“After great pain” is structurally looser than most Dickinson
poems: The iambic meter fades in places; line-length ranges from
dimeter to pentameter; the rhyme scheme is haphazard and mostly
utilizes couplets (stanza-by-stanza, it is AABB CDEFF GHII); and
the middle stanza is five lines long, rather than Dickinson’s typical
four. Like most other Dickinson poems, however, it uses the long
rhythmic dash to indicate short pauses.
Commentary
Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s greatest achievement as a poet
is the record she left of her own inwardness; because of her extraordinary
powers of self-observation and her extraordinary willingness to
map her own feelings as accurately and honestly as she could, Dickinson
has bequeathed us a multitude of hard, intense, and subtle poems,
detailing complicated feelings rarely described by other poets.
And yet, encountering these feelings in the compression chamber
of a Dickinson poem, one recognizes them instantly. “After great
pain, a formal feeling comes” describes the fragile emotional equilibrium
that settles heavily over a survivor of recent trauma or profound
grief.
Dickinson’s descriptive words lend a funereal feel to
the poem: The emotion following pain is “formal,” one’s nerves feel
like “Tombs,” one’s heart is stiff and disbelieving. The feet’s
“Wooden way” evokes a wooden casket, and the final “like a stone”
recalls a headstone. The speaker emphasizes the fragile state of
a person experiencing the “formal feeling” by never referring to
such people as whole human beings, detailing their bodies in objectified
fragments (“The stiff Heart,” “The Feet, mechanical,” etc.).
