Essay
Analysing 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes'
Analysing 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes' by Emily Dickinson, an A grade exam style answer.
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‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes -’Explore how Emily Dickinson presents pain in ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes -’ and make
connections with one or two other poems from your collection.
You should consider Dickinson’s use of poetic and stylistic techniques and significant literary or other
relevant contexts.
‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes -’ describes a fragile emotional equilibrium with settles
heavily over a survivor of a recent trauma. The central theme of this poem seems to be the
omnipresence and omnipotence of pain and how pain overwhelms an individual to the point of
unfeeling. Dickinson describes emotional pain progressing to numbness, like the process of freezing
to death.
She explores an emotional pain so great it has a physical entity and dimension. The noun phrase
“formal feeling” with it’s accented f’s and l’s suggests the speaker's withdrawal from the world, and
describes the wake of pain and perhaps, numbness from the trauma. It suggests anything but
formality—anything but control, measure, politeness, and concern for others. If the noun phrase
“great pain” is physical, it is hard to ignore. Even if it is mainly psychological, it can in some ways be
just as intense, just as hard to shake. This is shown in the bodily semantic field ‘nerves, heart’ which
describes the speaker’s body as unwhole, detailed in objectified fragmentations as if to describe
each hurting part. The premodifier ‘The stiff heart questions was it He, that bore’ references to the
tired from pain, petrified and confused heart which comes with grief. Dickinson uses ‘bore’ as an
indefinite, intransitive verb in this line rather than a transitive verb which determines suffering and
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