After great pain, a formal feeling comes

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” is a lyric written by famed American poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson likely wrote the poem in 1862, but it wasn’t published until it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1929 (Dickinson died in 1886). Also in 1929, the poem appeared in another posthumous volume of Dickinson’s poetry, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson. Despite her notoriety as an American poet, Dickinson hardly published her work while she was alive. She separated herself from society, confining herself to her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote around 1,800 poems. Dickinson didn’t title her poems, so the first line of each poem is used as the title. Scholars also numbered the poems based on the dates they believed she wrote them (Dickinson didn’t date her poems either). 

Like her other poems, “After great pain” features nonstandard punctuation and jarring dashes. The message in “After great pain” is likewise straightforward yet subversive and complex. The poem addresses themes like The Alienating Elements of Trauma, The Dignity of Pain, and The Finite Quality of Suffering. The poem is one of Dickinson’s more well-known poems, but it’s not as famous as poems such as “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (1891) or “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died” (1896).

Poet Biography

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia (her nickname was Vinnie). The Dickinson children didn’t suffer many privations, as their family was affluent and prestigious. Dickinson’s grandfather built Amherst’s first brick house, and he helped establish Amherst College. Dickinson’s father was a prosperous lawyer and politician, and her mother came from a family of successful farmers.

Growing up, Dickinson went to first-rate schools, maintained an active social life, and occasionally went to church with her family. As she became an adult, Dickinson withdrew from general society and stayed in her family home, where she read copiously and wrote myriad poems and letters. Her face-to-face relationships revolved around family members, including an intense connection with Austin’s wife, her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Dickinson never married or had children, and her affluence precluded the necessity of finding a paying job.

After Dickinson died in 1886, Vinnie found her trove of poems. Some were gathered in booklets, while others were on separate sheets of paper or the backs of envelopes. As Susan had qualms about publishing Dickinson’s poems, Vinnie sought the help of Mabel Loomis Todd—a local artist and writer who had an infamous affair with Austin. Like future editors, Todd tried to make Dickinson’s poems accessible by replacing the dashes with commas and standardizing the capitalization.

A faithful presentation of Dickinson's work didn’t appear until 1955—when the American literary scholar Thomas Herbert Johnson edited and published multiple volumes of Dickinson’s poems and letters. Using her handwriting as a guide, Johnson affixed dates to Dickinson’s poems and numbered them based on the order in which he surmised she wrote them. Johnson assigned “After great pain” number 341. In 1998, R. W. Franklin, director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, published what many deem the definitive collection of Dickinson’s output. Franklin attaches “After great pain” to number 372.

Poem text

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 -

Dickinson, Emily. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” 1929. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Emily Dickinson’s poem focuses on the impact of keen suffering. The unnamed speaker believes dispassion follows grave distress. When a person’s feelings become dignifiedly detached, the speaker believes it is as if they’re attending a solemn funeral. The person’s heart, too, is stoic, and the speaker highlights how a suffering person thinks about Jesus Christ. The speaker compares such agony to Christ’s crucifixion, which causes a hurt person to wonder if Christ’s trauma occurred recently or hundreds of years ago.

In Stanza 2, the speaker details how exceptional pain influences a person’s day-to-day life. A person in pain has feet that move robotically and woodenly as they mindlessly go down, up, or in some other direction. As days pass, the person becomes stony yet tranquil.

The sharp disassociation—“the Hour of Lead” (Line 10)—won’t last indefinitely. If the suffering person survives, they’ll remember it the way that people who almost freeze to death think of the cold snow. Similar to the person battling hypothermia, the person in pain faces three steps: They feel a “Chill” (Line 13), they’re in a daze, and then they move on.