The Full Text of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
1After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
2The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
3The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
4And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
5The Feet, mechanical, go round –
6A Wooden way
7Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
8Regardless grown,
9A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
10This is the Hour of Lead –
11Remembered, if outlived,
12As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
13First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
The Full Text of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
1After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
2The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
3The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
4And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
5The Feet, mechanical, go round –
6A Wooden way
7Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
8Regardless grown,
9A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
10This is the Hour of Lead –
11Remembered, if outlived,
12As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
13First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Introduction
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The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" around 1862. Like many of Dickinson’s poems from this period, “After great pain” discusses the experience of emotional suffering—specifically, the numb paralysis that the speaker says follows intense shock or trauma. The poem's form, which is alternately rigid and irregular, reflects both the numbness and anguish of someone in this state.
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Summary
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After intense emotional trauma, people feel stiff and solemn. Their senses are numb—almost as though they are attending a funeral, or are graves themselves. Their hearts feel tense, and they wonder if Christ felt like this on the cross—though they're unsure if the crucifixion happened yesterday or hundreds of years ago.
They go through their day on autopilot, their feet moving around robotically. They don't have a clear sense of where they are, where they're going, or how they got to be in their current state. They feel a sort of crystallized sense of calm, stupefied as stone.
This numb state won't last forever. But even if people survive it, they'll remember it in much the same way that people freezing to death remember the snow: first there's a sharp pain, then numbness, then release.
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Themes
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The Numbness Following Emotional Trauma
The poem examines the feeling of numbness and paralysis that comes after trauma. The speaker describes how, in such an “Hour of Lead,” the nerves feel stony and solemn, the heart seems to stiffen, and the feet move in a confused, mechanical way. In other words, the poem argues that moments of intense pain are followed by an almost zombie-like detachment from the world.
The speaker describes this detachment by saying that, after trauma, people's “Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” The word "ceremonious" evokes the solemn and formal atmosphere of a funeral, while "Tombs" implies cold lifelessness. Building on this image, the speaker says that the sufferer sinks into “A Quartz contentment, like a stone.” Such a person seems coldly calm in the wake of trauma, their emotions crystallized; they are so hardened and numb as to resemble stone. They thus go through the motions of life mechanically, without a sense of clarity or purpose.
The speaker further illustrates this emotional numbness by comparing it to the experience of hypothermia—that is, freezing to death. The “great pain” someone experiences is like the initial blast of “cold” that a hypothermia sufferer feels, followed by physical “stupor” (numbness and physical paralysis), and finally, by death itself—“letting go.” The speaker isn’t necessarily saying that this emotional state leads to literal death, and in fact calls the numbness that follows pain an “Hour of Lead” that may be “Remembered if outlived”—implying that this state is temporary. Perhaps “letting go,” then, means moving on and moving past whatever trauma cause this numbness in the first state.
Unfortunately, that “if”—"Remembered, if outlived”—signals that the speaker does not seem to think that “outliving” this leaden hour is guaranteed. The speaker thus leaves readers in limbo—implying that it’s possible to survive this kind of detached suffering, but also that it’s possible to be destroyed by it.
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Suffering, Time, and Memory
The poem explores not just emotional suffering, but also the relationship between that suffering and memory. The speaker describes how acute distress warps one’s sense of time, and how memories of past pain so often feel like they are happening in the here and now. In pointing out that pain blurs the distinction between past and present, the speaker also casts doubt on people’s ability to ever fully let go of great suffering.
The speaker is discussing the feeling that comes after “a great pain”—not the “great pain” itself. Right away, then, it’s clear that the poem is concerned with memory and the past.
The speaker goes on to compare present emotional suffering to the suffering of Christ on the cross, yet doesn’t seem to be able to clearly distinguish between these two events—asking, “‘was it He, that bore,’” before wondering, “And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?” This is, in part, because of the confusion that accompanies such post-trauma numbness; without a strong sensory connection to the world, the poem implies, the sufferer's sense of time grows jumbled.
So deep is the sufferer's lack of feeling that their “heart” can only stiffly “question[]” if this “formal feeling” what Christ felt on the cross. The heart can’t even be bothered to recall when this happened, casually wondering whether it was “yesterday” or “centuries” ago.
This temporal confusion is clearest in the poem’s final stanza. People who survive a great emotional trauma, the speaker says, will remember it as “Freezing persons, recollect the snow.” The tenses in the final lines emphasize this lack of distinction between past and present. “Freezing” is a present participle—it describes a state that is happening right now. However, the “Freezing persons” that the speaker describes seem to be merely recollecting a past trauma, not actually experiencing it.
So why are they still freezing? The speaker seems to be suggesting that there is little difference between remembering an extreme emotion and reliving that emotion (sounds a bit like the way psychologists describe traumatic flashbacks!). Even if people do outlive a “great pain” (and the “Hour of Lead” that follows it), they may still vividly remember their suffering and relive it in their minds. In other words, great suffering is something that can be outlived, but not forgotten.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
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Lines 1-2
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –The poem starts off with two lofty, vague phrases that might seem confusing at first, as the speaker refers to "great pain" and the "formal feeling" that follows such pain. The first of these phrases simply refers to intense shock or trauma, but the speaker never bothers to specify the nature of the original “great pain” any more than that.
Perhaps this "pain" refers to heartbreak or grief over the loss of a loved one; given the morbid references in the following lines, death certainly seems to be on the speaker's mind!
But the speaker never clarifies what, exactly, this pain is because that's not the point here. The speaker doesn't seem interested in that pain itself, because the poem isn't focused on what people experience during a trauma. Instead, it's looking at the "formal feeling" that comes after said trauma.
"Formal" is the opposite of "casual"; it connotes the idea of ceremony or tradition, of stiffness, seriousness, and coldness. Basically, then, the speaker is saying that after great trauma comes a feeling of emotional numbness or paralysis; people seem suddenly to close themselves off or shut down.
The speaker personifies a sufferer's “Nerves” in order to illustrate this feeling further, saying that these nerves "sit ceremonious." Think about how you'd sit during a formal ceremony of some sort, like a wedding or graduation: quietly, a bit rigidly, immobile. And while the mention of ceremony here might briefly bring to mind images of a fancy, thrilling event or black-tie gathering, any positive connotations are quickly squashed by the comparison of these "Nerves" to "Tombs"—a simile that evokes a funeral. The sibilance of "sit ceremonious" recalls the quiet, hushed atmosphere of a funeral as well.
What actually does it mean to "sit" like a "Tomb"? Well, tombs are cold, inanimate objects, often dug into the earth. To "sit like Tombs" thus suggests being still and lifeless, forever in the cold and dark.
Imagine shocked, stricken people standing around an open grave. They aren’t weeping, or tearing their hair out in grief; instead, they're stiff and solemn, seemingly unable to express, or perhaps even, feel their anguish. This is the kind of "formal feeling" the speaker refers to.
The iambic pentameter in these lines adds to this sense of rigid formality. Iambic pentameter is perhaps the most common meter in traditional English poetry. It consists of five iambs, feet made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. This gives iambic lines a steady, rhythmic feeling—almost like the beat of a funeral march (da-DUM da-DUM). Take line 1:
After | great pain, | a form- | al feel- | ing comes –
The meter isn't perfect here, but it's iambic enough to evoke that stiff beat. The trochee (stressed-unstressed) of "After" and spondee (stressed-stressed) of "great pain" suggest the force of such pain, the way it trips the speaker up before returning to the iambic plod.
The alliteration, especially in the first line, also emphasizes this rhythm. Notice how the /f/ sounds of "formal feeling" come at the beginning of a stressed syllable and draw readers' attention to this important phrase.
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Lines 3-4
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? -
Lines 5-7
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – -
Lines 8-9
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone – -
Lines 10-11
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived, -
Lines 12-13
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Symbols
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Hard, Solid Materials
Throughout the poem, the speaker uses various solid materials to symbolize the sufferer's stiff, frozen state.
Different materials convey different aspects of this "formal feeling." The tomb mentioned in line 2, for example, specifically conveys a sense of cold lifelessness; tombs may be carved from stone or dug into the earth, and the image here evokes the way the sufferer's "Nerves" feel themselves buried, cut off from the world. The "Wooden way" in line 6 has a slightly different feel to it; think about the muffled, dull thud of walking on wood, as well as the robotic, stiff movement implied by a "wooden" manner.
Quartz, in line 5, adds a sense of sharp rigidity to the "formal feeling." Quartz is a crystal, and its mention here suggests that way that the sufferer's emotions have metaphorically "crystallized" into an unbreakable formation. Finally, in line 10, "Lead" represents the heaviness and dullness of this formal feeling.
Taken together, these solid materials symbolize a state of numb, emotionless frigidity.
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
"After great pain" uses several metaphors that evoke sufferer's emotionally frozen state.
In line 5, for example, the speaker's description of "mechanical" feet is metaphorical. The speaker is comparing the sufferer's feet to a kind of machine. This comparison highlights the sufferer's lifelessness and lack of emotion; they are robotic, on autopilot.
In line 7, the description of the sufferer walking on “Air, or Ought” is also metaphorical, since the sufferer cannot literally be walking on air or ought. "Ought" can mean “nothing,” “anything,” or “should.” The speaker is illustrating the sufferer’s uncertainty and mental confusion; someone who walks on air, or nothing, is someone who is lost, ungrounded. “Ought” might also imply that the sufferer is mentally ruminating on what they ought to have done to prevent the “great pain.”
The phrase "A Quartz contentment" in line 9 contains an implied comparison between quartz, a hard crystal, and the sufferer's state of numb "contentment." (Note that this metaphor is also part of a larger simile: at the end of line 9, the speaker says that the sufferer's "Quartz contentment" is "like a stone".) By comparing the sufferer's state to quartz, the speaker highlights the sufferer's cold, calm numbness. People in the sufferer's state seem unable to feel anything at all—not grief, joy, nor even pain. They're so numb, in fact, that they even seem to be contented, or at peace, with their current state. At the very least, they don't seem to have the motivation or wherewithal to get out of their state. They are more like a mineral than a human being.
The phrase "Hour of Lead" is also metaphorical. The numbness that comes in the period after a shock, the speaker says, feels as heavy and dull as lead. Lead is an extremely dense metal, and in the 19th century, was commonly used to make bullets and weights. Someone in an "Hour of Lead" feels gray and weighed down by life.
Finally, "letting go" in the final line is a metaphor that compares the physical act of letting go of something to a more figurative surrender. Here, there are several possible layers of metaphor. "Letting go" might refer to dying (letting go of life). It might also mean "letting go" of suffering, either emotional (as in the case of the sufferer) or physical (as in the case of the "Freezing persons"). In any case, “letting go” is a common metaphor that implies some kind of surrender and release.
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Alliteration
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Simile
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Polysyndeton
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Caesura
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Allusion
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Personification
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"After great pain, a formal feeling comes –" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Formal
- Ceremonious
- "He, that bore"
- Ought
- Quartz
- Contentment
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Conventional, done according to rules or traditions. Here the word "formal" evokes a sense of rigidity and lifelessness. It conveys a sense of disconnect from emotion; the sufferer is just going numbly through the rituals of life without showing, or even knowing, how they truly feel.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
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Form
This poem consists of three stanzas. The first and last are quatrains (meaning they have four lines), while the middle stanza is a quintain (it has five lines). The first and last stanza also feature the same rhyme scheme. The general structure of the poem is fairly rigid, then, which makes sense, given the "formal" and "ceremonious" state the speaker is describing.
However, the middle stanza, with its irregular meter and extra line, throws a wrench into this structure. This deviation might mirror a person's emotional struggle after a great shock; it's almost like a momentary glimpse of the raging feelings lurking beneath a sufferer's rigid numbness.
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Meter
The poem's meter bounces around throughout. It begins in iambic pentameter, meaning each line consists of five iambs—feet made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This steady, da-DUM rhythm fits right in with the formality the speaker describes. It might even evoke the formal, rhythmic beat of a funeral procession. Here's the first line, for instance:
After | great pain, | a for- | mal feel- | ing comes –
Right away, readers can see that the meter isn't perfect here. The first foot ("After") is actually a trochee, meaning it begins on a stressed syllable. The next foot contains two stressed syllables ("great pain"), making it a spondee. Even in this fairly traditional stanza, things aren't perfectly rhythmic or formal.
These slight deviations in the first stanza, however, are nothing compared to those that follow. The second stanza breaks free from iambic pentameter completely (though it does maintain the same iambic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables). The first line is in iambic tetrameter, which means that it has four iambs instead of five:
The Feet, | mechan- | ical, | go round –
The next line has only two iambs, making it in iambic dimeter:
A Wood- | en way
This pattern continues throughout the stanza: the third line is in iambic tetrameter, the fourth in iambic dimeter, and the fifth in iambic tetrameter. This irregularity in terms of line lengths creates a sense of unpredictability and confusion. It's like the poem (and by extension the sufferer here) is unsure of where it is going.
At the same time, the steady iambic, da-DUM pattern maintains a certain sense of order. The poem (or the sufferer) might be confused or distressed, but it's still marching forward, "mechanical[ly]" following the expected steps.
The final stanza returns to the more formal, recognizable meter of the first. Its first two lines are in iambic tetrameter, with minor deviations. The poem's final lines are in iambic pentameter:
As Freez- | ing per- | sons, re- | collect | the Snow –
First – Chill | – then Stu- | por – then | the let- | ting go –The steadiness and renewed length of the final lines suggests the cool, calm "stupor" and sense of "letting go" being described.
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Rhyme Scheme
The first and last stanzas have the same pattern of two rhyming couplets (albeit with different rhyme sounds in each), while the second stanza is all over the place. The rhyme scheme of the whole poem looks like this:
AABB CDEFF GGHH
The couplets of the first and last stanzas feel relatively steady and predictable. The second stanza throws a wrench in things, however. The messy rhyme scheme here fits in with this stanza's irregular meter. Both suggest a feeling of confusion or imbalance, reflecting the idea that the sufferer here doesn't actually know where they're going (instead moving around either on the "Ground," in "Air," or through "Ought," whatever that means!). The final two lines here return to the couplet pattern, the satisfying rhyme between "grown" and "stone" evoking the "contentment" this person feelings upon stopping their wandering and accepting their stony, numb state.
Notice that Dickinson's rhymes are often imperfect or slant rhymes; they sound similar, but aren't exactly the same ("Lead" and "outlived," "comes" and "tombs," "round" and "stones"). Slant rhymes are a hallmark of Dickinson's poetry, and they add a sense of irregularity and movement to her verse. Even when a poem follows a formal rhyme scheme or meter, it never feels too static.
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is anonymous. They don't tell the reader anything about their gender, age, or background, and this helps keep the poem's message universal; the speaker is presenting this "formal feeling" as something everyone goes through after trauma. At the same time, the vividness and specificity of the poem's language implies that the speaker has some personal experience with "great pain" and the "formal feeling" that follows.
It might be tempting to imagine that the speaker is Dickinson herself, especially given what historians have guessed about Dickinson's tumultuous personal life at this time period. However, there is no real evidence that the speaker and poet are one.
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“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Setting
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The poem has no specific setting, which allows its message to feel universal and timeless. The speaker isn't talking about what happens after a specific "great pain," but after any "great pain." These numb feelings can strike anyone, anywhere.
More generally, the poem might be thought of as taking place in the period after some sort of emotional shock or trauma. And although the poem has no clear physical or environment, the speaker does refer to various metaphorical places as a way of illustrating the sufferer's state. The reference to "Tombs" and "formal feeling[s]" in the first stanza, for example, bring to mind a graveyard or funeral. The description of "Freezing persons" in the final stanza evokes somewhere isolated and icy. These metaphorical locations serve to highlight the death-like, rigid feeling that the sufferer is currently experiencing.
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Literary and Historical Context of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
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Literary Context
Dickinson had a wide range of literary influences, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the Romantic poets. Of all the literary movements that influenced her work, the most important was probably Transcendentalism, an American movement that emerged from Romanticism in the 1820s and lasted until the mid-19th century.
Like the Transcendentalists (whose ranks included fellow New Englanders Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), Dickinson was deeply interested in nature, spirituality, and personal communion with God. She often described nature in ecstatic terms, turned away from conventional religious language and practices, and valued intuitive experience.
Unlike the Transcendentalists, however, Dickinson was not interested in developing a spiritual philosophy or an abstract system of thought. She was a writer of the particular and the personal. Her speakers do not often make proclamations about the general state of humanity; indeed, they are often frustratingly ambiguous, and sometimes seem to be as lost and confused as their readers.
Dickinson's own influence on contemporary is difficult to underestimate. She was a great literary innovator and constantly experimented with form and language, which influenced many 20th-century poets as they moved away from traditional verse. Her interest in personal experience, rather than abstract ideas, also influenced Confessional writers like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Carson.
It is worth noting that many of Dickinson’s poems were not published until the mid 1900s, which meant that the full force of her influence was not felt until more than half a century after her death.
Historical Context
Dickinson wrote this poem in 1862, just a year after the start of the Civil War. Unlike many of her contemporary writers, like Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dickinson wrote relatively little about the war, or the social and political movements surrounding it.
Despite this lack of explicit commentary, however, Dickinson was deeply affected by the war. Her father, a prominent Massachusetts politician, argued vehemently against slavery. Several of her friends and family members fought for the Union Army, including her eventual publisher Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
At the end of 1861, her brother Austin's close friend, Frazer Stearns, was killed in action in North Carolina. Dickinson's 1862 letter describing Stearns's death contains several echoes of "After great pain":
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—
The Civil War years were also a highly productive time for Dickinson, who is estimated to have written around half of her poems between 1861 and 1865. She seems to have coped with the chaos and bloodshed of the war through personal creative acts, rather than through public proclamations.
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More “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” Resources
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External Resources
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — In-depth information about Dickinson's life and poetry from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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Emily Dickinson Lexicon — An online dictionary of all of the words in Emily Dickinson’s collected poems, published by Brigham Young University
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Ada Limón — Watch a video of the contemporary poet Ada Limón reading "After great pain."
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Emily Dickinson's Letters — An 1891 Atlantic article about the poet's letters by her friend and publisher Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
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The Poem in Dickinson's Own Hand — An image of the manuscript of "After great pain" from the Emily Dickinson Archives at Harvard University.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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