Student Question
Why doesn't Dickinson specify the cause of the "great pain" in her poem? Is the exact pain not crucial to the poem?
Quick answer:
Emily Dickinson does not specify the cause of "great pain" in her poem to emphasize the universal experience of emotional numbness following trauma. By omitting specific details, she allows readers to relate the poem to their own experiences. The poem's focus is on the aftermath of pain, characterized by numbness and detachment, rather than the cause itself. This approach makes the poem more relatable and universal, highlighting the shared human response to suffering.
In her poem "After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes," I agree that Dickinson leaves out the reason for the pain because it is not important to the poem. The poem focuses on the feeling of numbness—a "formal" [stiff] feeling that descends and enshrouds after the first grief of a painful event dissipates and depression sets in.
After that, the depressed feeling that Dickinson describes is one of emotionlessness, of being in state of shock that cuts off all feeling. At this point, whatever precipitated the pain doesn't matter as much as what emotions the sufferer is left with.
The nerves have gone dead, as if in a "tomb." It doesn't seem to matter when the event occurred, whether it be yesterday or a hundred years ago, because the speaker has emotionally shut down and cut herself off from it.
In this state of complete dull, emotionless depression,...
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her feet, referred to not as her own feet, but as "the" feet—an object she is divorced from—go on moving, but she feels no part of them. It is as if she herself is not there, her physical body merely a mechanism. The calm or content she seems to exude really means that she has cut off her emotions and become as if she is a stone, a piece of quartz. She calls this time the "Hour of Lead."
The speaker goes on to state that this period of depression will end—is "outlived"—but she remembers it as feeling like a "Chill" and a "Stupor" before she lets it go.
By not revealing what caused the depression she has experienced, the speaker allows readers to apply the feeling she describes to their own painful situation, thus universalizing it.
Why does Dickinson omit the cause of the "great pain" in her poem?
While specific detail can make writing more vivid, it can also make it difficult for readers to relate when the detail described is completely outside of his or her experience. Much of Dickinson's writing draws upon the events of her own life, but here we might argue that the vagueness of the reference helps to make the poem more universal, allowing the reader to bring their own experience to bear in its interpretation. Dickinson does not refer to "my great pain," but instead describes a universal aftermath to pain, in general, and therefore pain as it is specific to each reader.
There are other details in the poem which are more specific and which help the reader to appreciate what the poem conveys. The aftermath of pain is described as "the Hour of lead," which, if survived, is remembered "as Freezing persons recollect the Snow." The language in the final stanza is suggestive of emotional numbness (leadenness), emphasized further by the imagery of "freezing persons" falling into "chill––then Stupor––then the letting go," which seems to allude to hypothermia. A sensory field is, therefore, created. Meanwhile, the generic articles applied throughout the poem to "the Nerves," "the stiff Heart," "the Feet" allow the reader to imagine their own nerves, hearts, and feet ("mechanical," again suggestive of numbness) in this situation.