After Great Pain …
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 –
Emily Dickinson begins her poem by demonstrating rhythmically the “formal feeling” that succeeds “great pain”. The pain isn’t specified, and could be physical, but there are strong suggestions that it’s the response to death, the pain of mourning. This pain’s aftermath is a physically embodied numbness, almost an absence of response, almost a living death.
In that extraordinary second-line simile, “[t]he Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-” it’s impossible to resist the image of the nerves themselves being enlarged into tomb-like objects. They are death’s presence in the body, and the first sight of the stoniness and heaviness which dominate the imagery. But we can also think of mourners who “sit ceremonious” at a funeral, and who may talk, as the “stiff Heart” talks, about “He that bore”. “He” is clearly Christ (the one that bore our sins in Christian phraseology). The words would be murmured by mourners in prayer at a funeral service. But it’s significant that it’s phrased as a question “was it He, that bore” and that the phrase breaks off without an object. It’s possible that the “He” could also represent a soldier burdened with a backpack. The poem written in 1862, when the American civil war was intensifying. The final question asking if the event was “Yesterday, or Centuries before” suggests a current resonance, and almost makes Christ and the soldier interchangeable.
Continuing the analogy with the mourner’s state of mind in stanza two, the tired marcher moves woodenly, and the feet are nailed to the wood of the cross. The “wooden way” is further dramatised, with an image of walking the air (as in violent death and/or psychological dissociation) and the compulsion of duty (“Ought”). There is also, of course, an echo of “aught” (meaning “anything at all”) in this brilliantly coined noun. This stanza, although it begins and ends with the iambic pentameter of the first, is disrupted by shorter lines of two, three and two beats respectively. There are five lines altogether, and only the last two rhyme.
In the last stanza, formality is almost restored, as a new analogy replaces “the hour of lead” – the process of being frozen to the point of unconsciousness. But there’s a simultaneous movement towards consolation in the thought that the frozen stasis can be “outlived” and might be transformed, by a “letting go” that isn’t that of death but the recovery of life.
Dickinson’s powerful images of lead and coldness recall those of a letter she wrote to Samuel Bowles in 1862, concerning the death of her brother Austin’s friend, Frazer Stearns, in the battle of New Bern. “Austin is chilled – by Frazer’s murder – He says – his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ – ‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it – to Him. Two or three words of lead – that dropped so deep, they keep weighing –”. It seems that the poem’s finely deployed psychological observations may have begun with an experience which brought the civil war very close to home.
