One of My (or Several of Our) Emily Dickinsons
Both Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson published poetry in addition to their prose. In the case of both writers, readers not only generally preferred their prose, but also considered it more poetic than their poetry. In Women in the 19thCentury, Fuller expresses some exasperation in feeling forced to speak in what 20th century feminists have called the “alienated discourse” in order to have a chance at being taken seriously by the dominant men of the monoculture of the time: “it seems as if Heaven, having so long issued its edict in poetry and religion without securing intelligent obedience, now commanded the world in prose to take a high and rational view.”
Two decades after Fuller wrote this, Emily Dickinson, wrote poems 466 (whose first two lines are: “I dwell in possibility--/A fairer House than Prose—“) and 445 (“They shut me up in Prose—”). It sounds like people are asking her to explain herself in that “high and rational view” and she’s not going to have it! Whether she’s lamenting the pain the prose mandate has caused her, or defiantly celebrating the freedom of escape from it, she invites us to see the limits of “prose” as a social institution of communication, whether with other people or the divine, in ways that have analogies with the contrasts she makes between herself (‘the term between”) and the social norms of pubs (“I taste a liquor never brewed-” ) or churches (“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--”).
Although there may be elements of what’s called “transcendentalism” in her work, part of what draws me, and many other 21st century readers to it, is that, in contrast, to Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass, was published not long before she wrote, she celebrates the conservative (in the sense of conservation) tendency (the yin) that tends to get drowned out in Whitman’s celebrations of the “procreative urge…always sex” etc. She makes more room for pain! Brenda Hillman calls her “our first molecular biologist of pain.”[1]
As one of millions of Americans diagnosed with some form of psychological ‘abnormality” or “neurodivergence” (depression, PTSD, et al), sometimes I wonder if I’d be able to navigate such intense mood swings better if I didn’t necessarily consider them a deficit, or especially pathological (or even to avoid personal responsibility by emphasizing environmental factors). While “Song of Myself,” tries to speak most deeply from the perspective of a “me, myself” more real than “The sickness of one of my folks, or of myself, or ill-doing,… or depressions or exaltations;” Dickinson more imminently works through them, with an understanding that there is no human essence in this world without emotions. In contrast to Emerson, who I find myself wanting to psychoanalyze when reading, I often find Dickinson helpful in psychoanalyzing me in ways that seem to be therapeutic (in part because they can’t be reduced to ‘mere therapy’).
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then – (340)
This poem has been helpful for me at an actual funeral, or at the every-day funerals we may feel or find ourselves in (whether mourning someone else, something in ourselves, what we call ourselves, being mourned by someone else, or even by yourself). While Dickinson often uses a more generalized, decontextualized, (deceptively) detached voice in her poems (for instance, “This World Is Not Conclusion”), this poem is a first--person narrative, set in the past, or rather several pasts, and traces a trajectory between speaker and othered “brain” (which isn’t necessarily all in one’s head unless the brain is wider than the sky). This raises questions of “who or what is speaking?” Who or what are the mourners?
“In Poetry for students, Paul Pinero argues, “The two most popular interpretations of the poem are: it is a poem about the transition from life to death; and it is a poem about the loss of reason, a slipping into a senseless void of insanity.” In one reading, the speaker is a corpse-soul who has outlived her own death (or perhaps visualizing it), and in the other reading, the real situation is “all in the brain” and thus the mourners are the internalized phenomena in a psychological mapping much more dynamic than a post-Freudian diagnostic model.
I believe that both readings are plausible, and maybe not even incompatible, as if part of the point of the metaphoric thinking/feeling enacted here is to bridge these two realms, the so-called literal and the so-called figurative, experience and emotion, sense and reason, invisible and visible, outside and inside--opening up, at the so-called end, to a wider space “between” that can also be “around.” The speaker is clearly suffering due to this funereal feeling, and frankly, when some psychologists diagnose me with anxiety or depression or PSTD (et al.), I want to cry out, “I think Emily Dickinson diagnosed it better: I’m feeling a funeral in my brain! And since her diagnoses resonate with me more, perhaps she suggests a form of treatment…
Lynn Ma points out that there can be many other interpretations than Pinero’s reductive binary. Rather than uncritically accepting the negative connotations of ‘senseless void of insanity” Pinero confers upon the poem, Ma points out that this ‘mental breakdown’ can also, or even really, be “a liberation from the structure of reason…the salvation and relief from one’s reasoning after thinking too much.” Right now, I couldn’t agree with Ma more. After all, often, for Dickinson, “Much Madness is divinest Sense.”
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
Ma points out that Dickinson’s use of literary devices “work to emphasize her strong emotional feelings,” and claims “the dashes in this poem are stronger than the commas.” This treading feels violent and painful. Since “a funeral is more a formal affair with an order, and it is more evocative of sensible reason than wild irrationality,” as Leo Labadie, quoting Aleksandra Fortuna-Niec, puts it, one may wonder why this has such a turbulent impact on the speaker-soul: certainly that couldn’t be the intention of the funeral ceremony, but what does the last line of this stanza mean?
Would the seeming breaking through of sense be a good feeling or a bad feeling? Since the word “Sense” can be read in so many senses, it’s hard to read the connotations here. It feels more alive, and less harsh, compared to the treading. Labadie ruminates on the suggestiveness of “breaking through:” “The breaking of sense here could mean common sense and sanity are breaking through. It could also suggest we are making progress (&) coming into view or a collapse and fall through a certain thing, for example, the floorboards.” Perhaps on rereading, this last of the first stanza foreshadows the more dramatic final stanza, and, in this sense, it builds suspense.
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb –
The second stanza seems largely apposite to the first stanza in both feeling, theme, and poetic structure—though a tone of rising action amplifies this: as treading becomes beating. Though she’s using the term to refer to music, it feels more violent, less like beating hearts and more like pounding thoughts (high-blood pressure?) as the Mourners now become de-personified into a Service, the formal ceremony with its feelings of cold-duty rather than, say, the festivity of a New Orleans brass band playing “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Is it really doing a “service” to this “corpse-soul” speaker to mourn her thus? This “service” too may recall the sermon that goes on far too long that happens in the indoor churches she abjures in “Some keep the Sabbath” for an outdoor direct connection with divinity.
The parallels of these stanzas are also felt in the contrast between the two phrases (lines) that conclude these stanzas. The first (“Sense was breaking through—”) is more a physical reaction to this funeral, while the second (“My Mind was going numb—") is more a mental, abstract reaction, as if the mind is the opposite of sense. There’s also a contrast between walking and sitting. At least when these mourners were treading there seemed the possibility of breaking through to sense (or call it the part of the body that isn’t the brain), but now that they’re sitting, their brains are more violent, as if the change in position is responsible for this---the hunched, scrunched body of sitting. In the song, “Stand!” Sly Stone sings: “you’ve been sitting for far too long/ there’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong.” And it feels something like that is happening to these mourners. Also, since the word “knowing” becomes so important in the poem’s final line, we may note that neither the seeming of the first stanza nor the thinking of the second stanza denote any form of “knowing” or certainty here…
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
It is probably these stanzas that lend the most credence to the emphasis of the funeral vehicle over the suffering tenor (if we take the relationship between tenor and vehicle bi-directionally). The violence of the “they” is emphasized. The abrupt tolling here (as if the tolling of the bell at a funeral is the same as paying the toll to the ferryman at death?) leads to a more detailed (or even surreal)[2] description of how the speaker feels. Her use of the simile “As” as the transition between stanzas is agonizing. My Mom had an epiphany before her death that she wasn’t afraid of death as much as panicking before death, and this moment of intense trauma, this alienation from this funeral ritual, feels like a panic attack to me; the only sense the speaker feels is the passive receptive ear at the mercy of all this noise. Some pathologize it as “hearing voices.” Ah, these mourners! They think they’re speaking for me, ceremoniously honoring me, with their repressed sarcophagus nerves, crowding me out! If that’s what Heaven is, do I really want to be there?
This horror of absolute contextless of this “race” (which reminds me of “A Species stands apart” in “This World is Not Conclusion”) could be a personification of how an immortal soul must feel being confined by the funeral ritual, which now is implied as quite literally soulless. But the “As” also suggests perhaps a little room for silent space to push against the tolling Bell space, and leaves a little mystery, or call it possibility that, maybe I’m not really “wrecked, solitary, here.” And by associating herself with “Silence,” by identifying with it, and calling it a Race, she’s also making it clear that this isn’t just about me. I may feel alone in this funeral moment, but I am not alone in feeling alone. And although “Being” is “but an Ear,” this could be sense breaking through and getting us out of the brain of mere formal, funereal thinking and seeming which certainly was not a very or peaceful or loving way to die, or live amongst mourners.
Ma writes that up until this point, “all senses were happening in her brain, and that is only part of her body.” The “I” however is outside the brain and feeling its effect. The last stanza, in contrast with the previous, lends more credence to the emphasis on the emotional tenor over the funereal vehicle. Here, for the first time we get the first mention of a word that I’m tempted to call the key to the poem, “Reason”
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then –
One critic reads this poem through a Platonic lens, claiming that Dickinson, like Plato, concludes that “human perception cannot derive knowledge, and real knowledge comes from philosophical reason,” but for Dickinson such reasoning can’t bring true knowledge either, or perhaps she’s actually inverting Plato, insofar as the perceiving sense of touch is felt (the double meaning of the word “feeling”) in this last stanza, a more embodied form of feeling you don’t have to call knowing…(“Besides Plato would’ve banished Dickinson from her Republic, and surely, in her soul’s process of selecting her own society, Dickinson would have been more than happy to shut the door on dear old Plato).
The “Plank in Reason” implies that reason is a room (just like Caedmon’s Hymn celebrated heaven as a roof) and that thisfuneral, which the poem otherwise leaves contextless, was indoors and, therefore in walls. The first 4 stanzas weren’t just set in one’s brain, but specifically in “reason,” the rational faculty, which has shown itself to be violent in its coldness. The word “Reason” now retroactively refers to what caused the suffering and alienation earlier in the poem; the funeral was the regime of reason (whether felt in an individual mind, or in a culture) under which feeling is alienated. In this context, this break could be felt as a “descent” (or more sensuously “plunge”) into the senses, the senses that are finally breaking through, into the parts of the body that are not the brain.
Leo Labadie writes, “helped by silence and solitude, a plank in the speaker’s reason broke.” Though such “liberation” is not without pain, and may be called sublime in a mixture of pleasure and terror, there is the sense that yielding to this out-of-control free-fall of pain is, at the very least, not as bad as the funeral. This corpse soul is more alive than the funeral that was trying to kill the dead. Death is a liberation from a funeral that what we call life, too often, is. Ma writes, “If there is death in life then there is life in death. I think that’s why she talks about death in the past tense.” Ma’s statement gets to a conundrum at the heart of language as a meaning-making function, by questioning the singularity of death, and perhaps influences Sylvia Plath’s ability to say that she, too, died many times.
Are we being unfair to death, to reduce it to a singular moment, at the end? And what does that do to what we call life? Is it really just “poetic license” or a pathetic fallacy when people speak casually of the deaths in daily life. We could call them ‘little deaths’ in comparison to “the big one,” but there could be a sense a prophetic futurity here based on the deepest possible experience of pain in the present, as if we have to pass through intense pain to become liberated from that which caused it, that which was allegedly designed to help “ease” us into, whether that be a social funeral, or a private funeral for “knowing” and “reason.” Sometimes being “driven out of your mind” is a good thing! This stanza feels so much more the liberation of which Ma writes than the “senseless void of insanity” of which Pinero writes.
Just because these “mourners” are in your brain, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t empirically there socially too. This could be compared to “judgment day” poems, but not the Judgment from G-d as much as but human, all too human (or rational, all too rational) mourners (if anything, a believer could read G-d as the speaker). I am reminded of Nicanor Parra’s later “funerales no, muerte si.” On one level, you could say Dickinson is making a didactic argument that we, as a society, need to change our funeral rituals that disrespect the dead or potentially any social ritual. After being subjected to a sense of the sick gossipy small-town social milieu that Dickinson had to deal with, as seen in the movie, Wild Nights with Emily Dickinson (2018), it’s hard not imagine that Dickinson’s own funeral was attended by some cold mourners such as those portrayed in the “brain” of this poem, trying to act formally and hold in their unspoken unhappy gnawing resentments, like the mourners in “The last Night that She lived-“ who both blame and are jealous of the recently deceased.
At the end, not only does reason disappear, but so do the mourners. Does the word “hit” in “And hit a World, at every plunge,” suggest a violence? It could sound painful, like trying to punch a rock will inevitably hurt you more than you hurt it. But I don’t feel it violently, because of association with “plunge” which feels, to me at least, more fun like a water slide or amusement park ride where the floor drops out. When a dearly beloved friend of mine who touched many people’s hearts and souls died recently, so many different people felt him as presence from beyond the grave, and I wondered if that means he too is finding, or embracing, and loving, “a world at every plunge” and it certainly seems to me preferable to the ready-made static images of heaven and hell.
Yet I do not want to discount a violent reading either in this catharsis of the last stanza. Throughout the poem the “I” had been a victim of their assault, but here she could be seen as actively gaining a form of agency by hitting back, or you could call it somatically shaking out all the negative energy she had been forced to consume, to passively be subjected to, object of, in the Service of Reason. Dickinson does not shy away from sometimes expressing herself assertively using the language of violence (dancing like “a little Bomb,” for instancing, or the thrill of getting to shoot on behalf of a “Master”).
And although prose says Dickinson died and was as subject to editors and critics and mythmakers (those vultures who erased her relationship with Susan, for instance! treading, treading, beating—beating…) as much as Jesus was (insert red angry face emoticon here), it feels (over 130 years later) that her soul, like sense in this poem, has been, for many worlds (I mean people), been able to break though…to undo paranoia, rid us of over-attachment to the superficial social (sometimes social media feels like a funeral in my brain!) and reason’s fear of dying. In this light, perhaps the poem could just as easily be called “I escaped a funeral in my brain!” Whose funeral? “They thought it was mine, but it was really reason’s and knowing’s and mourning’s….
“Finished knowing,” however, is no more of a conclusion than the phrase, “finished finishing” would be. Dickinson’s unfinishing finish emphasizes feeling, even if it’s ‘merely’ seeming without having to confer upon it the honorific title, “knowing.” The dashes around “—then—” can be hesitant pauses, and/or represent acts of unknowing. Because there are no recordings of Dickinson reading aloud, I can’t pinpoint the tone of the word “then.” Ma reads it as if she’s saying “to be continued…” I too definitely feel the “then” as purposely period-less, to create suspense, as if to say, “and then…you’ll never guess what?” Thus any sense of conclusion, especially one a funeral may presume to give, refuses to click shut like that box they lift.
I’m reminded of the argument about song lyrics not being “real poetry” because they can lean on the extra-linguistic crutches of the sensuousness of music unavailable to poetry, so that, once heard, you can’t really sufficiently separate the meanings from the experience. Yet one of the reason Dickinson’s so musical (aside from use of ballad stanzas) is sometimes these dashes dance with the meanings of the words, as the musical instruments (including even the sound of the voice) dance with the meanings, in heaves or breaths, like inhaling and exhaling. It’s almost like “music” and “silence” are uniting against meaning (to enhance it) here. If you’re into winning arguments, you can say silence does get the last wordless word! But then, a blank, a dash (like the dashes---between—the—sound of—a Fly”—oops, wrong poem…
Recently, Jorie Graham said that Dickinson’s dashes are like the other speech greater than hers, the tongue of the interrupter to whom she must give way over and over, but the interrupter who will not itself speak.”[3] These “diacritical marks[4]” could also be taken as a kind of meditative stillness that can be reached when words tire themselves out into a state of mystical inexpressible connection, but since it’s certainly no once and for all “happy ending,” there’s this more ominous suggestion that we may very well be feeling this funeral again. This final “dash” could also be a Da Capo movement:
And Finished knowing - then –
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
This process, if not conclusion, may very well repeat itself, not necessarily as a Sisyphusian eternal recurrence, with no space in between (the dash could be a very long interval, and could last longer than the poem itself), but more like having to take a daily walk (if that doesn’t sound too ableist). This poem could also be read on a meta-level as about the reading (and listening) and writing process, and the funeral representing an alienating rational book that scorns emotions and feelings, a paralyzing primer that shuts you up in rational conundrums, so much you have to put the damn thing down and let all the word energies it pent up in you free, in this sense the speaker could be the soul of possibility freeing herself from being shut up in prose, especially the kind these cis-het white men were writing, and demanding she conform to. For some people the feeling that there can be “no easy once and for closure” can also be better than the alienating demand for it. Then we, as the Iris Dement song put it, can let the mystery be….
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Many readers and critics have shown similarities between “After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)” and “I Felt a Funeral.” Beyond the similar alliterative “f” in the first line, the nerves sitting ceremoniously, like Tombs, could echo the sitting mourners at the Service, and the “Hour of Lead” could remind one of the “Boots of Lead.” Just as the funeral was associated with reason in the earlier poem, here the formal feeling is associated with “Ought---,” how we should feel, rather than how we do feel. Finally, the hitting “a World at every plunge,” could flesh out, more dramatically and viscerally, the “letting go—” with which this poem ends.
But the differences between them are at least as significant. While “Funeral” was a more expansive first-person lyric narrative (or narrative lyric) clearly speaking from a feeling of great pain, “Formal Feeling” is spoken in a detached generalizing tone not only removed from pain, but from feeling itself, with no “I” to feel it (and not even a mention of “persons” until the penultimate line), as if from the formal feeling. We also witness much more lyric compression; insofar as there’s drama in this poem, it’s often between words, but that drama can open up too (especially for a poet who can find worlds in the grains of sand at every plunge, or who occupies herself “spreading wide my narrow Hands/To gather Paradise--” as “I dwell in Possibility – (466)” puts it):
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 –
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A formal feeling comes. It is apparently not something we choose or will. Does this formal feeling, then, come to rescue or recuse us from the pain, like a calm after a storm? One wonders if the first line would appeal to readers such as Thomas Higginson who took Wordsworth’s “poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility,” as a kind of dictum or rule for the revision process of a proper poem (and apparently told Dickinson this as he rejected her poems). Yet, while Wordsworth’s “feelings” could be either intense pain, or intense giddy over-excitement, there is no giddiness here, and as the poem goes on to describe this formal feeling, it certainly doesn’t seem very calm or tranquil.
So what kind of “formal feeling” is it? As we move from the Nerves to the “Stiff Heart,” (which Sharon Cameron[5] believes could be punning on the sense of ‘stiff’ as corpse, or one may think of “stiff heart syndrome”—in which the heart unnaturally begins to beat like a metronome, with which Milford Graves was diagnosed, and was able to treat by free-form jazz drumming), which is personified as speaking,[6] like a diagnostic mind searching for causes (trauma, or depression, for instance, or even anosognosia, the inability to perceive one’s condition). Since Christian metaphysics in the 19th century served much of the same function that clinical psychology serves in today’s more secular America, in Dickinson this diagnostic “stiff heart” (there’s no mind in this poem either) takes the form, uses the diction, of Christianity, in an attempt to locate what had happened with and/or to the great pain:
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
Presumably the “He” is Christ, who some say bore the great pain of all human suffering in His passion, and perhaps it was he who rescued or recused her from the great pain (although this poem has no “rainbow sign” of salvation), but perhaps we could also read “bore” as either “he bore through me, and, damn, it hurt” (or even more sardonically, “did he cause the boredom I feel?” since this formal feeling could be called a kind of boredom).
Suzanne Juhasz writes: “the heart can no longer tell how much time has elapsed between its present condition and when the great pain occurred: ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before?’” Sharon Cameron writes: “the question the speaker puts to herself is framed by incredulity and designates the subject as someone else,.. the time that precedes the present becomes mere undifferentiated space…” But the stiff heart’s questions proliferate. Was Jesus’s attitude towards suffering a ceremonious stoic detachment, or a cry of agony? What if it wasn’t Christ’s pain I felt, what if it was merely mine? Does it make a difference whose it was? Is it a feeling, then, of the weight of the world on my shoulders? Wait, do I even have shoulders? (No! Just ceremonial nerves, a stiff heart, and mechanical feet, and there isn’t even an “I” to feel them). Is this the over-analytical mind absolutely devoid of feeling or perception?
On a formal level, Brooks and Warren point out that the questions in these lines are “abrupt and elliptical as if uttered in a moment of pain.” Even in this “formal feeling,” pain occurs, between the lines as it were, and perhaps similarly to the way “sense was breaking through” in the first stanza of “Funeral” foreshadows the last stanza, this unspoken, but felt, pain may anticipate the “Formal Feeling’s” final stanza. Kamilla Denman elaborates: “The comma following the word, “He,” is the first breakdown of syntax…The disruptive comma also creates a temporal dislocation that permeates the poem: the present thought is not completed (the object of “bore” is lacking).” These asked questions are not answered, perhaps because they are unanswerable…
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The second stanza is a description, as well as an enactment, of how this “formal feeling” manifests itself in the present, in feet. While the first stanza’s nerves and heart were understood affectively (what some call “interiority”), here the formal feeling turns to a visible physical behavior. While Funeral moved from “treading” to sitting, here we move from sitting to, perhaps, pacing around, yet even making their rounds seems perfunctory, as a “Wooden way” ossifies into stone:
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
Do we picture a speaker pacing around after getting literally sick of too much sitting? Cameron says it’s a “body that lost its spirit, a vacancy of will…movement without meaning.” On an ethical level, the word “Ought,” emphasized by the capital, and its place at the ending of a line, is particularly striking. I agree with Juhasz that “Ought is the path taken by the mind—that of duty—a formal gesture.” It seems as if these feet are so preoccupied by how they’re supposed to feel (according perhaps to a social Norm who wants her “still” and shuts her up in prose) that they forgot how to feel. It seem this feeling could describe a wide range of social situations in today’s civilized society, from a sense it of people’s feet twitching as they ceremoniously sit at a poetry reading (or the ritual, of writing, at home, in solitude) to the feelings of absolute numbness many contemporary Chinese factory slave-shop worker-poets testify to (poets such as the suicided Xu Lizhi with powerful poignancy the pain that comes during, and after, the Oughts of an overly formal setting)…
Does she mean “Regardless grown,” as unheeding, or as an inability to perceive, to wonder, to feel pain or awe? If so, does this feeling (or no feeling) get us at least out of, or beyond, the way of “Ought?”
What is this “Quartz contentment?” Suzanne Juhasz notes how “Contentment follows from regardless and ought” as if to imply it’s a philosophically stoic contentment, back in the days when “complacency” was used with more positive connotations. Brooks and Warren write “The contentment arising after the shock of great pain is contentment because of their inability to respond any longer, rather than the ability to respond satisfactorily and agreeably” Yet Dickinson doesn’t seem to be judging it as unfeeling here; she’s not necessarily pathologizing it. Perhaps this could be the healing powers of namaste stillness, or more like Wallace Stevens’s “Mind of Winter.” Juhasz calls it, “the ultimate quiet, the stasis that resembles death, as in:
“perfect —paralyzing Bliss—
Contented as Despair—” (“One Blessing had I than the rest”)
But though I’ve definitely felt that feeling, the word “ought” is ominous (like what EFT Therapists would call an “instrumental response”)? Maybe, for instance, a speaker is trying to conform to someone else’s demand more for “recollection in tranquility,” or at least trying it on for sighs, as if to ask: is this what Higginson means by tranquility? Can it help? Or at least not hurt?
On a formal level, I find it difficult not to read the word “feet” in this second stanza self-referentially, as referring to metrical feet. In this stanza, she seems to be very consciously deviating from her use of the stricter ballad-stanzas and fourteeners. Kamilla Denman writes “the temporal disruption of the speaker’s psyche extends to the syntax and meter, with incomplete sentences and sudden shifts from pentameter to tetrameter to trimester and back.” The 5 lines’ metrical shifts, create a new symmetrical syllabic stanzaic form:
Tetrameter
Dimeter
Trimeter
Dimeter
Tetrameter
For Thomas H. Johnson, this gives the effect of “hastened rhythms.” I start wondering if possibly the stanza had been written originally as:
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way Of Ground,
or Air, or Ought –Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
In this version, not only do we have “perfect” end-rhymes throughout, but also the first three lines would fully scan to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” and the fourth one would have had not she added “A Quartz.” But she purposely departs from this, by relining it (and added the word quartz) to show a detachment from this “formal feeling”—as if a revision process could be “I was in great pain and couldn’t even write from it, but now I’m so numb all I can do is analyze it in a stiff, unfeeling, rough draft-- but now (later) that I’m reading it, it seems too alienated from feeling---so how bring feeling back into it, to make it “breathe”? Perhaps, I do an injustice to claim this was a conscious manipulated decision, in revising to create an effect when it could very well be improvisations that always left room for operating from an emotional blindspot…
This returns me to the question of who or what is speaking the poem. Up to this point, it has seemed to be speaking not just of, but from, the formal feeling, but the third and final stanza suggests that she is not necessarily feeling it, but speaking from elsewhere..
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Sharon Cameron points out that the first line, as summary, is “divorced from the experience because encompassing it.” Indexically speaking, what is “this” in the first line? Since this line echoes the formal feeling of the first line, presumably the Hour of Lead is the formal feeling rather than the great pain. The second line, too, suggests that this poem (or at least this stanza) is not only about “pain and its aftermath,” but spoken as if from the aftermath of the aftermath, as if the process of naming an intense feeling (even if it’s the numbness s of a formal feeling, or what Charles Anderson called “numb rigidness, existing outside time and space”) can distance ourselves from it, just as it had detached itself from a spontaneous overflow of pain.
This is also the first time there’s a hint of a human world, subjects who feel. What do we make of the analogical transition between the second and third line? In Cameron’s tracing of sequence (or progression) of the image patterns of this poem, she writes about the transformation that occurs between the first line and the 3rd line:
`“…the images to this point have been ones of progressive hardening. The image with which the poem concludes, however, is more complex because of its susceptibility to transformation, its capacity to exist as ice, snow, and finally as the melting that reduces these crystals to water. The poem's last line is an undoing of the spell of stasis. Because it is not another, different expression of hardness but implies a definite progression away from it by retracing the steps that comprise its history…”
A meaning of the first three lines of this stanza is, on one level, driven by a simile that perhaps means—to—show-- an analogy between purely physical pain and the feeling happening here. Remembering the Formal Feeling of the Hour of Lead yields to recollecting the snow which, by comparison, seems to be an image (or even cause) of the pain. Perhaps this metaphor can bring the “merely physical” and the “mental/emotional (spiritual)” together, and, through the mystery of memory, be both great pain and formal feeling, perhaps a state that never happens in “a single moment” but rather in a dwelling like possibility…
Part of me wants to interpret it thus: “Ever take a walk in the freezing cold snow, and become so numb you can’t even feel how cold it is (I mean “cold you are”) until you’re in a warmer environment, even by the fire perhaps, and as your nerves, and feelings come back, you’re shivering and shaking out the cold that you had gotten into (and got in you)? Well, it’s that way with emotions and mood swings (specifically pain and formal feelings, and their relation to memory) too…Ever been so hardened and numb that you don’t even realize you’re hardened and numb until you start thawing?”
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Helms writes that the dashes in the last line approximate the experience of “freezing by slowing down the tempo,” but couldn’t the “letting go” denote a process of thawing, just as snow itself can be seen as a thawing compared to lead. It’s possible to read the first stanza as “the chill,” the second stanza as the “Stupor,” and the final stanza as the “letting go.” We may also note it’s the first time that persons (rather than body parts) emerge, or consider the contrast between remembering and recollection (to me, recollecting seems as stronger word, as it could imply a collecting or gathering of it into you), and the many possible ways the comma between “persons” and “recollect” can be read…
Yet the closer and closer I look at this last stanza, the weirder and weirder it gets. Kamilla Denman writes that “phrases…that initially seem to form complete sentences … unravel in subsequent lines that confuse the original meaning.” Alan Helms writes “were the poem conventionally punctuated, the essence of the experience it describes will be lost.” Sharon Cameron writes: “Pain was the shot that inflicted temporary paralysis, a remedy that worked until the poems took over.” I feel you Kamilla, Alan, and Sharon.
As the poem takes over, any attempt to analyze its conundrums feels inadequate with all the grammatical and punctuation pyrotechnics disrupting the interpretive faculty, as I (or, in a classroom, we) find ourselves going down barren conundrums of uncompleted thoughts, and disruptive disjunctions, as if we’re enacting the pain that had been repressed, or suspended in the formal feeling. We could say it’s a poem about the volatility and/or transience of moods, as we find pain in the formal feeling, and the formal feeling in pain, as if to induce “Stupor” (people in a stupor often only respond to intense stimuli such as pain).
Is she trying to get us to feel pain by showing the pain of trying to escape the pain, the futility of stony shoulds of detachment, as if this enactment is purposely designed to thwart a Higginsonian mind! As Denman puts it, Dickinson here “is not content to recollect emotion in tranquility,” nor to describe it in eloquent, complete sentences” (emphasis added). Is the point to overdose us on a feeling so maddeningly formal (“the madness of discourse”), to give Higginson and those who demand “subdued emotions,” a taste of their own medicine; the pain you could no longer bear consciousness of, or ran away from (insofar as you had any control in the matter), now seems refreshing by comparison? Perhaps it’s a ritual of trying to write oneself back into pain, to feel alive again. In this sense, we can retroactively read the first line as “A Formal Feeling comes after a great pain,” like it’s chasing after it—but that implies it’s a need (an “Adult Delight in Pain”)[7], and there’s no needs in this “merely descriptive’” poem.
Brooks and Warren claim the poem reveals “the fight of the mind against letting go… a defense of the mind,” or what Cameron calls a “spell of stasis” which the last stanza undoes. Does the process of writing this poem, strengthen the speaker, or reader, for the painful situation they know they must return to keep living? Notably, there is no ethical judgment of either the great pain or the formal feeling in this poem. She avoids pathologizing the process, not calling it a good or bad thing. It’s just something that happens, whether daily, weekly, or seasonally. Nor is necessarily a moral argument: “you must feel pain or you’re a stiff!” If her attitude to the reader is “you must feel this way sometimes,” it’s not a demand as much as a question (or a deep knowledge into human nature, or at least abnormal people like me, if you must). Neither is it ameliorative, especially in any once and for all sense. All I can say with any authority is that reading her makes me feel someone understands (even when health-care professions don’t…), and there may not be a remedy, but there may be remedies, like daily namaste wordless meditation rituals are for some (others, by contrast, can get to that meditative stillness by indulging in the formal feeling of writing…
The vertigo of the final stanza does have similarities, albeit in a more compressed way, with the drama of the last stanza of “Funeral,” (which could flesh out, what “the letting go,” may feel like).
Perhaps she has written her way out of the formal feeling as the last stanza of “I Felt a Funeral” wrote itself out of the “funeral,” wrote herself into silence, maybe even….tranquility? Where are we at the end? Maybe back in pain, or maybe neither, maybe both pain and a formal feeling. After all they are just words to describe something beyond words, as the poem gloriously defeats itself so we may feel a pain more real than what we call pain, the pain of wordlessness as felt by a formal mourning ceremony…Or perhaps, even better, “—” as if this poem is taking place prior to the linguistic distinction between immanence and transcendence (similar to the way another poem overdoses on “playing glaciers” to appreciate the fire you feared more). In both poems, it seems, at the end, the sovereign soul has yield to a more fluid, and porous soul, one that can stand ajar…
Reading these two poems (as well as other Dickinson poems), I am reminded of a passage in a more didactic Rumi poem about the fear of death (or maybe the fear of “great pain”) that moved, and inspired me, translated as “Craftsmanship and Emptiness.”
Workers rush towards some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t thin
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need! [...]
This invisible ocean has given you such abundance,
but still you call it “death,”
that which provides you sustenance and work.
God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,
so that you see the scorpion pit
as an object of desire,
and all the beautiful expanse around it
as dangerous and swarming with snakes.” (106)
One could do worse than to read Dickinson’s more subtle, nuanced poetry, in this light…
[1] Editor’s Preface, The Pocket Emily Dickinson (Shambhala Pocket Classics, 1995)
[2] As convulsively agonizing as the chance meeting of as the loud bells of heaven and lead-boot drumsticks in the wreck of a solitary soul reduced to an ear…
[3] Between The Covers with David Naimon, https://tinhouse.com/podcast/jorie-graham-runaway/
[4] Patrick Rosal, “The Art of the Mistake: Some Notes on Breaking as Making,” The Breakbeat Poets (ed, Kevin Coval, Quaraysh Ali Lansana & Nate Marshall): Haymarket Books (2015)
[5] All the quotes from Academic critics are taken from this document: https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poem/341-after-great-pain-formal-feeling-comes
[6] Charles Anderson writes, “as befits one who has lost all sense of identity, the various parts of the body are personified as autonomous entities,” disconnected from each other…
[7] As she puts in the later poem, “Wonder—is not precisely knowing” (1874)
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