An Explication of Dickinson's "After Great Pain"

Author(s): Francis Manley

Source: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Apr., 1958), pp. 260-264
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3043421
Accessed: 19-10-2019 17:43 UTC

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correspond to the internal condition but at times, in fact, represented
the exact opposite. Yet in poetry if such signs were completely mis-
leading, they would obviously defeat their own purpose by communi-
cating the wrong thing. Consequently, they must offer some oblique
means for the reader to penetrate appearances to the reality beneath.
In solving this problem Dickinson created some of her most interesting
and complex poetry. Generally speaking, irony was her weapon as
well as her strategy. First, she usually set up for her persona some
sort of external ritual or drama which contains various levels of
calm objectivity. Then, through a series of ironic involutions gener-
ated in the course of this symbolic action, she eventually led the
reader from appearances to the reality of a silent anguish made more
terrifying by its ironic presentation, as here:

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-

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought-
A Wooden way
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.2

In a literal sense, this poem has neither persona nor ritual, and
since it describes a state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary.
In such a case attention should be centered on the feeling itself and
secondarily on its location. Consequently Dickinson personified vari-
ous parts of the body so as to demonstrate the action of numbness
on them-the nerves, the heart, the feet-generalized entities belong-
ing to no one. Yet that is precisely the formal feeling benumbed
contentment produces in a person, especially one who has lost the
sense of time and his own identity (lines 3-4). All the parts of
his body seem to be autonomous beings moving in mysterious ways.
If that constitutes a persona, it is necessarily an unobtrusive one
that must be reconstructed from disjecta membra. Similarly, the

2 Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.,

1955), i, poem 341.

VOL. LXXIII, April 1958 261

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various actions performed in this poem are disjunctive, and though
vaguely related to a chaotic travesty of a funeral, they are not pat-
terned by any consistent, overall ceremony. Since they are all external
manifestations or metaphors for numbness, however, they are all as
they should be, lifeless forms enacted in a trance as though they were
part of some meaningless rite.
The first stanza, for instance, is held rigid by the ceremonious
formality of the chamber of death when, after the great pain of its
passing, the corpse lies tranquil and composed, surrounded by mourners
hushed in awe so silent that time seems to have gone off into eternity
"Yesterday, or Centuries before." In one respect this metaphor is
particularly suitable since the nerves are situated round about the
body or the "stiff Heart" like mourners about the bed of death.
But if the metaphor is extended further, it seems to become ludicrously
unsuitable. These nerves, for example, are not neighbors lamenting
with their silent presence the death of a friend. They are sensation
itself, but here they are dead, as ceremonious and lifeless as tombs.
Consequently, the formal feeling that comes after great pain is,
ironically, no feeling at all, only benumbed rigidness. Conversely, if
the " stiff Heart " is the corpse, he nevertheless has life or conscious-
ness enough to question whether it was " He, that bore, / And Yester-
day or Centuries before." Obviously, this is moving toward artistic
chaos since metaphors should be more and more applicable the further
they are extended, but this one apparently become progressively worse.
Curiously, however, by breaking all the rules Dickinson achieved the
exact effect she needed. Her problem was to describe an essentially
paradoxical state of mind in which one is alive but yet numb to life,
both a living organism and a frozen form. Consequently she took both
terms of this paradox and made each a reversed reflection of the
other. Although the mourners, the nerves, appear to be the living, the
are in actuality the dead, and conversely the stiff heart, the metaphori
corpse, has ironically at least a semblance of consciousness. In their
totality, both these forms of living death define the " stop sensation"
that comes after great pain.
Since the metaphoric nightmare of the first stanza could hardly
be extended any further, Dickinson is obviously not concerned with
elaborating a conceit. In the second stanza, then, the cataleptically
formal rites of the dead are replaced by a different sort of action
ceremoniously performed in a trance, an extension not of the previous
metaphor, but of the paradox which informed it. For although move-

262 Modern Lang uage Notes

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ment usually indicates vitality, there is no life in the aimless circles
of the walking dead. Whether numb feet go on the hardness of
ground or on the softness of air, their way is wooden because paralysis
is within them. Since they cannot feel nor know nor even care where
they are going (" Regardless grown "), they wander in circles (" go
round") on an insane treadmill as though lost, suspended between
life and death and sharing the attributes of both.
The third stanza is, in one respect, an imagistic repetition of the
second. Benumbed, aimless movements through a world of waste,
the motions of the living dead are similar to the trance-like, enchanted
steps of persons freezing in a blank and silent world of muffling
snow. But at the same time that this metaphor refers particularly
to the preceding stanza, it also summarizes the entire poem since the
ambiguous antecedent of This in line 10 is, in one respect, everything
that went before. Consequently, this final image should somehow
fuse all the essential elements of the poem. Not only that, it should
present them in sharp focus.
Certainly the chill and subsequent stupor of freezing, a gradual
numbing of the senses, incorporates many of the attributes of death
itself: a loss of vital warmth, of locomotion, of a sense of identity
in time and space conjoined with an increasing coolness, rigidness,
and apathy. Since freezing, however, is neither life nor death but
both simultaneously, it is an excellent, expansive metaphor for the
living death which comes after great pain. But in addition to ex-
tending the basic paradox which informs the poem, this final figure
serves a more important function by drawing to the surface and
presenting in full ambivalence a certain ironic ambiguity which in
the first two stanzas remains somewhat below the threshold of conscious
awareness.
In its furthest extent great pain produces internal paralysis, but,
ironically, this numbness is not itself a pain. It is no feeling, " an
element of blank," which gradually emerges from the poem until at
the end it almost engulfs it in white helplessness. In the first stanza
it lurks just below the surface, unstated, but ironically present in
the situation itself. For although the nerves represent metaphorically
the formal feeling which comes after great pain by being silent,
ceremonious mourners, they are simultaneously dead sensation, no
feeling, formal or otherwise, not pain, but nothing. In the second
stanza this implication is no longer subliminal, but even though it
is at the surface, it is not developed, merely stated: " A Quartz

VOL. LXXI, April 1958 263

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contentment, like a stone." According to Webster's American Diction-
ary (1851), the lexicon Dickinson used, contentment was a "Rest
or quietness of mind in the present condition; satisfaction which
holds the mind in peace, restraining complaint, opposition, or further
desire, and often implying a moderate degree of happiness." Appar-
ently, then, by the second stanza anguish has resolved itself into its
impossible opposite, a hard, cold, quartz-like peaceful satisfaction
of the mind. In the third stanza, this inert irony fully emerges to
modify response and ultimately to qualify it to such an extent that
the poem ends in tense, unresolved ambivalence. According to the
superficial movement of the poem, the time after great pain will
later be remembered as a period of living death similar to the sensa-
tion of freezing. Yet the qualifications attached to that statement
drain it of its assertiveness and curiously force it to imply its own
negative. For there is not only a doubt that this hour of crisis may
not be outlived (line 11), but even the positive statement (that it
will be remembered) is made fully ambivalent by being modified by
its own negative (that it will be remembered just as freezing persons
recollect the snow). Ironically, freezing persons can never remember
the snow since they die in it, destroyed by a warm, contented numb-
ness in which they sleep and perish in entranced delusion. Because
there is no solution to this ambivalence, the poem ends unresolved,
suspended between life and death in a quartz contentment, the most
deadly anguish of all, the very essence of pain, which is not pain,
but a blank peace, just as the essence of sound is silence.

The Johns Hopkins University FRANCIS MANLEY

Mark Twain's Arkansaw Yahoos

The events and the people I refer to are found in chapter 21 (" An
Arkansaw Difficulty") and 22 ("Why the Lynching Bee Failed")
of Huckleberry Finn. The major point I would make about these
two chapters is one that no one appears to have commented on: namely,
that in point of view and in tone they stand apart from the rest of
the novel.
The action in these two chapters may be summarized quite briefly:
a man was murdered; townspeople attempted to lynch the murderer.

264 Modern Language Notes

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