In the poem After great pain, a formal feeling comes from Emily Dickinson describes the innermost experiences of a person who has gone through a tragic loss. It focuses on mental anguish and sorrow. Emily Dickinson wrote many poems that described pain, grief, and death. Her shyness and sensitivity made her live in relative seclusion, but her poetry was saturated with inner energy and a storm of different feelings. The pain of loneliness undoubtedly nourished Dickinson’s creativity. However, human language has not have enough measures to express the full array of emotions. For Emily Dickinson, a poem was a synonym for an experiment. Her most emotionally intense stanzas “attempt to see how far one could go both with language and with consciousness” (Thomières 339). This essay will explore the purposes of the use of capitalization, dashes, direct speech, and awkwardly unfinished sentences by Emily Dickinson and discuss the effect on the reader achieved thereby.
On the surface, the speaker in the poem seems to be slightly unemotional and reserved. She explores her mental anguish through her physical feelings, naming such anatomical parts as the heart, the nerves, and the feet. The description abounds in cold logic, while the “great pain” remains undescribed (Dickinson 170). This avoidance suggests that it is too painful to reveal the details of the demise of the unknown “He” (Dickinson 170). Still, the author finds the strength to express the numbness caused by the unbearable pain, as if establishing a fact. The narrator is impassive and languid, but finally manages to live on: “then the letting go” (Dickinson 170). The general image created by the poem resembles a tomb or a crypt with a bleak ray of light gleaming through a crack in the tombstone. All the verbal and nonverbal means used in the poem serve to create this deplorable picture.
The first and the most noticeable verbal means in the poem is the capitalization of the most unexpected words. It is necessary to point out the pronoun “He,” which is capitalized to highlight the importance of the person who has passed away and his life in the heart of the poet. Other nouns and even adjectives are capitalized to personify them or make them more vivid. In the first line, “The Nerves sit ceremoniously, like Tombs,” the nerves represent perpetration and rigidness. In the next line, the heart is described as “stiff,” reinforcing the entire image of numbness. In addition, the sentence “This is the Hour of Lead” is a likely reference to a coffin: sometimes coffins were made of lead or decorated with lead ornaments. The words hour and lead are capitalized as well, suggesting another probable reason for such an omnipresent capitalization: it creates an optic feeling of rhythm. The poem lacks audible rhythm, so a visible one would recompense its absence. In addition, lead is one of the heaviest metals; it is difficult to forge it, suggesting a feeling of numbness and deadweight. Therefore, the words in this line are also capitalized to make them look heavy and immobile.
The third reason for the uncommon use of language is the focus on formality. Dickinson’s poetry is typically short; it starts with a long and languid first line, which demands a profound response from everything that follows. The “formal feeling” is the message that the poem intends to express through images, metaphors, and figurative language (Dickinson 170). The author wants the reader to experience the all-numbing “formal feeling” and understand why it is a formal one. She tries to clarify that the use of words, upper case, and punctuation is visibly intended. Her stressed and numb condition allows only observing the dull rules: “The Feet, mechanical, go round” (Dickinson 170). When a person is overwhelmed with mental pain, life seems to stop, and nothing more can be done than following a simple pattern. Every line in this poem seems to go round, creating the monotony of drops falling from a drying spring.
The use of dashes in the most unexpected places is another important expressive means. It creates an image of a tired person hardly trudging through numb rocks of petrified words. Dashes are used as a temporary silence in music, which is another reference to the experimental ways of creating the rhythm. One should note that there are no full stops in the poem. A full stop would stand for a simple pause indicating the end of a sentence. However, the author needs something different: a dash stands for an indefinitely long pause. It makes the reader stop in stupefaction and ponders why the author wanted to put a dash in such or another place.
It should be remarked that the poem remains unfinished as if the poet has been petrified, unable to complete the sentence. Something remains undefined after the dash; probably the life after “the letting go” is unclear and vague for the poet (Dickinson 170). Thomières sees two ways out of the mental breakdown of a person: it “culminates with an interrogation between life and death” (352). The first way out means breaking through this sorrow, returning to normal life, and acquiring clear-sightedness. The second and the grimmer one presupposes the imminent schizophrenia of the person in question due to the “irreversible fragmentation of body and mind” (Thomières 354). This fracture of the mind is visible in the hard-moving rhythm, which was discussed above. Emily Dickinson finishes the poem with a dash to show that even the poet does not know the further destiny of the grieving person.
This poem has a slant and full rhyme, even though it may seem otherwise at first glance. Slant rhyme is created by relative harmony of sounds that do not match to the full extent, creating slight dissonance. For instance: Lead – outlived, comes – Tombs. Full rhyme, in its turn, creates complete harmony through a tight bond, as in the cases of grown – stone, bore – before, Snow – go. Both types of rhyme can be found in couplets consisting of two lines. Slant rhyme is used at the beginning of the first and third stanzas, and the full rhyme can be seen at the end of every stanza. It could be admitted that the slant rhymes represent tension and unease of the “formal feeling” (Dickinson 170). On the contrary, the full ones form a base to show the grieving person bringing together the energy and strength to live on.
One should understand Emily Dickinson in the context of other poetic experimenters of her time. Thomières claims that Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Cézanne were her peers, so she belonged to her society and time (339). Dickinson’s poetry is a series of abstract feelings, problems, images, and experiences. Due to her experiments with the form and content in After great pain, a formal feeling comes, it is impossible to summarize or reformulate the poem without a considerable loss of meaning. Thus, every letter in each stanza plays its role, and if one was deleted, the entire structure would collapse. This complexity may suggest that tangled feelings cannot be expressed with simple language.
Dickinson’s writing is both a poetic and a philosophical endeavor intended to master one’s emotions. This poem creates an unfamiliar form, as well as psychological and philosophical meanings. The death and loss theme discussed in this and many other poems could be described as a coping mechanism due to witnessing a number of deaths in a lifetime. However, her poem can be read not only as a numb silence but also as a revelation of new possibilities. She does not reject her intention to recover, although, at the moment, it seems impossible.
Having considered everything above, one can conclude that Emily Dickinson was fully aware of the fact that her contemporaries would not understand her interplay of words, punctuation, and capitalization. At the least, they would consider her style as weird and unreadable. Probably that was the reason why she never published any of her works. Still, the abovementioned capitalization, incompleteness, and overflow with punctuation were used by the poet in a successful experiment with the form and meaning. Dickinson uses all the available tools and materials to make her poetry emotional, touching, and meaningful.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005.
Thomières, Daniel. (2017). “After Great Pain”: The Epistemology of the Grave according to Emily Dickinson.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 338–359.