Point of View

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes" is written from the third-person perspective of a speaker who describes the experience of grieving after a traumatic event. Emily Dickinson is known for her intimate, personal poems that often feature first-person speakers to convey a closeness with the reader. This poem departs from the first-person point of view, but remains intimate as the speaker suggests that they are indeed speaking from personal experience. The formal elements of the poem – the often ambiguous language and shifting notions of time and space – mirror the argument the speaker makes about the disorienting nature of grief. Thus, the speaker dramatizes this disorientation through the style of the poem itself. The lack of a first-person perspective ultimately emphasizes some of the poem's major themes about grief as a detached state of being. The speaker uses general terms like "The Nerves" (2), "The stiff...