After great pain, a formal feeling comes

Emily Dickinson’s poem opens with a “great pain” (Line 1) that alienates the person from themselves, and the separation between the person and their trauma manifests in the absence of a specific person. There’s a speaker, but they don’t identify themselves. There’s no “I” in the poem. There’s also no “you” or personal pronouns. The lack of a discrete emissary and addressee reinforces the claim that intense suffering produces disassociation. A person who’s deeply suffering—in their “Hour of Lead” (Line 10)—is not a whole, intact person but an amalgamation of other things and figures. They become “Nerves” (Line 2), a “Heart” (Line 3), a “mechanical” toy (Line 5), a “Wooden” puppet (Line 6), or “stone” (Line 9). Pain breaks a person into parts, and the fragments reassemble into something else—something other than what they were before the pain began.

While the speaker and the audience don’t have a palpable place in the poem, there are two humans—or human-like—figures, Jesus Christ and the people suffering from hypothermia. Christ advances the theme of alienation. The person in pain compares their suffering to Christ, but they’re presumably not Christ—the son of God. More so, Christ represents alienation, as His identity is the subject of debate, with people making the complex claim that Christ was an incarnation of a human but truly a god.