Because I could not stop for Death (479)

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove He knew no haste

And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess in the Ring
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
We passed the Setting Sun

Or rather He passed us
The Dews drew quivering and chill
For only Gossamer, my Gown
My Tippet only Tulle
1

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground
The Roof was scarcely visible
The Cornice in the Ground

Since then tis Centuries and yet

Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses Heads
Were toward Eternity
"Because I could not stop for Death" is a lyrical poem by Emily Dickinson first published
posthumously in Poems: Series 1 in 1890. The poem is about Death. Dickinson personifies him
(death) as a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the poet to her grave.
According to Thomas H. Johnson[disambiguation needed]'s variorum edition of 1955 the number of this poem
is 712.

Summary[edit]
The poem was published posthumously in 1890 in Poems: Series 1, a collection of Dickinson's
poems assembled and edited by her friends Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson. The poem was published under the title "The Chariot". It is composed in
six quatrains with the meter alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Stanzas
1, 2, 4, and 6 employ end rhyme in their second and fourth lines, but some of these are only
close rhyme or eye rhyme. In the third stanza, there is no end rhyme, but "ring" in line 2 rhymes
with "gazing" and "setting" in lines 3 and 4 respectively. Internal rhyme is scattered
throughout. Figures of speech include alliteration, anaphora, paradox, and personification. The
poem personifies Death as a gentleman caller who takes a leisurely carriage ride with the poet to
her grave. She also personifies immortality.[1]

Critique[edit]
In 1936 Allen Tate wrote, "[The poem] exemplifies better than anything else [Dickinson] wrote the
special quality of her mind ... If the word great means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the

greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail. The rhythm charges with
movement the pattern of suspended action back of the poem. Every image is precise and,
moreover, not merely beautiful, but inextricably fused with the central idea. Every image extends
and intensifies every other ... No poet could have invented the elements of [this poem]; only a
great poet could have used them so perfectly. Miss Dickinson was a deep mind writing from a
deep culture, and when she came to poetry, she came infallibly.[2]

Musical settings[edit]
The poem has been set to music by Aaron Copland as the twelfth song of his song cycle Twelve
Poems of Emily Dickinson. And again, by John Adams as the second movement of his choral
symphony Harmonium, and also set to music by Nicholas J. White as a single movement piece
for chorus and chamber orchestra. Natalie Merchant and Susan McKeown have created a song
of the same name while preserving Dickinson's exact poem in its lyrics.

Type of Work
Because I Could Not Stop for Death is a lyric poem on the theme of death. The contains six stanzas,
each with four lines. A four-line stanza is called a quatrain. The poem was first published in 1890
in Poems, Series 1, a collection of Miss Dickinson's poems that was edited by two of her friends,
Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The editors titled the poem "Chariot."

Commentary and Theme

Because I Could Not Stop for Death reveals Emily Dickinsons calm acceptance of death. It is
surprising that she presents the experience as being no more frightening than receiving a gentleman
callerin this case, her fianc (Death personified).
The journey to the grave begins in Stanza 1, when Death comes calling in a carriage in which
Immortality is also a passenger. As the trip continues in Stanza 2, the carriage trundles along at an
easy, unhurried pace, perhaps suggesting that death has arrived in the form of a disease or debility
that takes its time to kill. Then, in Stanza 3, the author appears to review the stages of her life:
childhood (the recess scene), maturity (the ripe, hence, gazing grain), and the descent into death
(the setting sun)as she passes to the other side. There, she experiences a chill because she is not
warmly dressed. In fact, her garments are more appropriate for a wedding, representing a new
beginning, than for a funeral, representing an end.
Her description of the grave as her house indicates how comfortable she feels about death. There,
after centuries pass, so pleasant is her new life that time seems to stand still, feeling shorter than a
Day.
The overall theme of the poem seems to be that death is not to be feared since it is a natural part of
the endless cycle of nature. Her view of death may also reflect her personality and religious beliefs. On
the one hand, as a spinster, she was somewhat reclusive and introspective, tending to dwell on
loneliness and death. On the other hand, as a Christian and a Bible reader, she was optimistic about
her ultimate fate and appeared to see death as a friend.

Characters
Speaker: A woman who speaks from the grave. She says she calmly accepted death. In fact, she
seemed
to
welcome
death
as
a
suitor
whom
she
planned
to
"marry."

Death:
Suitor
who
called
for
the
narrator
to
escort
her
to
eternity.
Immortality:
A
passenger
in
the
carriage.
Children: Boys and girls at play in a schoolyard. They symbolize childhood as a stage of life.

Text

and

Notes

Because
I
He
kindly
The
carriage
And Immortality.

could

We
slowly
And
I
My
labor,
For his civility.

drove,

not
stopped
held

and

knew

haste,
away
too,

where

children
the

of

gazing

passed

grew

Since
then
'tis
Feels
shorter
I
first
surmised
Were toward eternity.

no
leisure

he

We
paused
A
swelling
The
roof
The cornice5 but a mound.

Death,
me;
ourselves

put
my

school,
in
fields

for
for
just

but

he
had

We
passed
the
At
recess,
We
passed
the
We passed the setting sun.
Or
rather,
The
dews
For
only
My tippet2 only tulle.3

stop

quivering
gossamer

before

and

was

centuries,6 and
than
the

us;
chill,
my gown,1

seemed
ground;
visible,

a house4 that
the
scarcely

of

strove
ring;
grain,

yet
the
horses'

each
day
heads

Notes
1...gossamer my gown: Thin wedding dress for the speaker's marriage to Death.
2...tippet:
Scarf
for
neck
or
shoulders.
3...tulle:
Netting.
4...house:
Speaker's
tomb.
5...cornice:
Horizontal
molding
along
the
top
of
a
wall.
6...Since . . . centuries: The length of time she has been in the tomb.

n this poem, Dickinsons speaker is communicating from beyond the

grave, describing her journey with Death, personified, from life to
afterlife. In the opening stanza, the speaker is too busy for Death
(Because I could not stop for Death), so Deathkindlytakes
the time to do what she cannot, and stops for her.
This civility that Death exhibits in taking time out for her leads her
to give up on those things that had made her so busyAnd I had
put away/My labor and my leisure tooso they can just enjoy this
carriage ride (We slowly drove He knew no haste).
In the third stanza we see reminders of the world that the speaker is
passing from, with children playing and fields of grain. Her place in
the world shifts between this stanza and the next; in the third
stanza, We passed the Setting Sun, but at the opening of the
fourth stanza, she corrects thisOr rather He passed Us
because she has stopped being an active agent, and is only now a
part of the landscape.
In this stanza, after the realization of her new place in the world, her
death also becomes suddenly very physical, as The Dews drew
quivering and chill, and she explains that her dress is only
gossamer, and her Tippet, a kind of cape usually made out of fur,
is only Tulle.
After this moment of seeing the coldness of her death, the carriage
pauses at her new House. The description of the houseA
Swelling of the Groundmakes it clear that this is no cottage,
but instead a grave. Yet they only pause at this house, because
although it is ostensibly her home, it is really only a resting place as
she travels to eternity.
The final stanza shows a glimpse of this immortality, made most
clear in the first two lines, where she says that although it has been
centuries since she has died, it feels no longer than a day. It is not
just any day that she compares it to, howeverit is the very day of
her death, when she saw the Horses Heads that were pulling her
towards this eternity.

Analysis
Dickinsons poems deal with death again and again, and it is never
quite the same in any poem. In Because I could not stop for Death
5

, we see death personified. He is no frightening, or even

intimidating, reaper, but rather a courteous and gentle guide, leading
her to eternity. The speaker feels no fear when Death picks her up
in his carriage, she just sees it as an act of kindness, as she was
too busy to find time for him.
It is this kindness, this individual attention to herit is emphasized
in the first stanza that the carriage holds just the two of them, doubly
so because of the internal rhyme in held and ourselvesthat
leads the speaker to so easily give up on her life and what it
contained. This is explicitly stated, as it is For His Civility that she
puts away her labor and her leisure, which is Dickinson using
metonymy to represent another alliterative wordher life.
Indeed, the next stanza shows the life is not so great, as this quiet,
slow carriage ride is contrasted with what she sees as they go. A
school scene of children playing, which could be emotional, is
instead only an example of the difficulty of lifealthough the
children are playing At Recess, the verb she uses is strove,
emphasizing the labors of existence. The use of anaphora with We
passed also emphasizes the tiring repetitiveness of mundane
routine.
The next stanza moves to present a more conventional vision of
deaththings become cold and more sinister, the speakers dress
is not thick enough to warm or protect her. Yet it quickly becomes
clear that though this part of deaththe coldness, and the next
stanzas image of the grave as homemay not be ideal, it is worth
it, for it leads to the final stanza, which ends with immortality.
Additionally, the use of alliteration in this stanza that emphasizes the
material trappingsgossamer gown and tippet tullemakes
the stanza as a whole less sinister.
That immorality is the goal is hinted at in the first stanza, where
Immortality is the only other occupant of the carriage, yet it is only
in the final stanza that we see that the speaker has obtained it. Time
suddenly loses its meaning; hundreds of years feel no different than
a day. Because time is gone, the speaker can still feel with relish
that moment of realization, that death was not just death, but
immortality, for she surmised the Horses Heads/Were toward

Eternity . By ending with Eternity , the poem itself enacts this

eternity, trailing out into the infinite.

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun In Corners - till a Day

The Owner passed - identified And carried Me away And now We roam in Sovreign Woods And now We hunt the Doe And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through And when at Night - Our good Day done I guard My Masters Head Tis better than the Eider Ducks
Deep Pillow - to have shared To foe of His - Im deadly foe None stir the second time On whom I lay a Yellow Eye Or an emphatic Thumb Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die The

Poems

of

Emily

Dickinson, Edited

by

R.

W.

Franklin

(Harvard

University

Press,

1999)

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition ed by Ralph W. Franklin (Harvard University Press,
1999)

On 754 ("My Life had

stood--a Loaded Gun--")
Adrienne Rich
There is one poem which is the real "onlie begetter" of my thoughts here about
Dickinson; a poem I have mused over, repeated to myself, taken into myself over
many years. I think it is a poem about possession by the daemon, about the dangers
and risks of such possession if you are a woman, about the knowledge that power in
a woman can seem destructive, and that you cannot live without the daemon once it
has possessed you. The archetype of the daemon as masculine is beginning to
change, but it has been real for women up until now. But this woman poet also
perceives herself as a lethal weapon:
[. . . .]
Here the poet sees herself as split, not between anything so simple as "masculine"
and "feminine" identify but between the hunter, admittedly masculine, but also a
human person, an active, willing being, and the gun--an object, condemned to
remain inactive until the hunter--the owner--takes possession of it. The gun
contains an energy capable of rousing echoes in the mountains, and lighting up the
valleys; it is also deadly, "Vesuvian"; it is also its owner's defender against the
"foe." It is the gun, furthermore, who speaks for him. If there is a female
consciousness in this poem, it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the
ambivalence toward power, which is extreme. Active willing and creation in
women are forms of aggression, and aggression is both "the power to kill" and
punishable by death. The union of gun with hunter embodies the danger of
identifying and taking hold of her forces, not least that in so doing she risks
defining herself--and being defined--as aggressive, is unwomanly ("and now we
hunt the Doe"), and as potentially lethal. That which she experiences in herself as
energy and potency call also be experienced as pure destruction. The final stanza,
with its precarious balance of phrasing, seems a desperate attempt to resolve the
ambivalence; but, I think, it is no resolution, only a further extension of
ambivalence.
Though
He

than

he--may
mustthan

longer

longer

live
I

For
I
have
Without--the power to die--

but

the

power

to

kill,

The poet experiences herself as loaded gun, imperious energy; yet without the
Owner, the possessor, she is merely lethal. Should that possession abandon her--but
the thought is unthinkable: "He longer must than I." The pronoun is masculine; the
antecedent is what Keats called "The Genius of Poetry."
I do not pretend to have--I don't even wish to have--explained this poem, accounted
for its every image; it will reverberate with new tones long after my words about it
have ceased to matter. But I think that for us, at this time, it is a central poem in
understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman
artist, particularly in the nineteenth century. It seems likely that the nineteenthcentury woman poet, especially, felt the medium of poetry as dangerous, in ways
that the woman novelist did not feel the medium of fiction to be. In writing even
such a novel of elemental sexuality and anger as Wuthering Heights, Emily Bront
could at least theoretically separate herself from her characters; they were, after all,
fictitious beings. Moreover, the novel is or can be a construct, planned and
organized to deal with human experiences on one level at a time. Poetry is too
much rooted in the unconscious; it presses too close against the barriers of
repression; and the nineteenth-century woman had much to repress.
From "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson." Reprinted in On Lies,
Secrets, and Silences. (W.W. Norton, 1979).

Paula Bennett
No poem written by a woman poet more perfectly captures the nature, the
difficulties, and the risks involved in this task of self-redefinition and selfempowerment than the poem that stands at the center of this book, Emily
Dickinson's brilliant and enigmatic "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun":
[. . . .]
Composed during the period when Dickinson had reached the height of her poetic
prowess, "My Life had stood" represents the poet's most extreme attempt to
characterize the Vesuvian nature of the power or art which she believed was hers.
Speaking through the voice of a gun, Dickinson presents herself in this poem as
everything "woman" is not: cruel not pleasant, hard not soft, emphatic not weak,
one who kills not one who nurtures. just as significant, she is proud of it, so proud
that the temptation is to echo Robert Lowell's notorious description of Sylvia Plath,
and say that in "My Life had stood," Emily Dickinson is "hardly a person at all, or a
woman, certainly not another 'poetess."
9

Like the persona in Plath's Ariel poems, in "My Life had stood," Dickinson's
speaker has deliberately shed the self-protective layers of conventional femininity,
symbolized in the poem by the doe and the deep pillow of the "masochistic" eider
duck. In the process the poet uncovers the true self within, in all its hardness and
rage, in its desire for revenge and aggressive, even masculine, sexuality (for this is,
after all, one interpretation of the gun in the poem). The picture of Dickinson that
emerges, like the picture of Plath that emerges from the "big strip tease" of "Lady
Lazarus" (CP245) and other Ariel poems, is not an attractive one. But, again like
Plath, Dickinson is prepared to embrace it nevertheless--together with all other
aspects of her unacceptable self. Indeed, embracing the true or unacceptable self
appears to be the poem's raison d'etre, just as it is the raison d'etre of Plath's last
poems.
In writing "My Life had stood," Dickinson clearly transgresses limits no woman,
indeed no human being, could lightly afford to break. And to judge by the poem's
final riddling stanza, a conundrum that critics have yet to solve satisfactorily, she
knew this better than anyone. As Adrienne Rich has observed, Dickinson's
underlying ambivalence toward the powers her speaker claims to exercise through
her art (the powers to "hunt," "speak, " "smile," "guard," and "kill") appears to be
extreme. Of this ambivalence and its effect on women poets, Rich has written most
poignantly, perhaps, because of her own position as poet. For Rich there is no easy
way to resolve the conflict entangling Dickinson in the poem. "If there is a
female consciousness in this poem," she writes,
it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the ambivalence toward power,
which is extreme. Active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression,
and aggression is both "the power to kill" and punishable by death. The union of
gun with hunter embodies the danger of identifying and taking hold of her forces,
not least that in so doing she risks defining herself--and being defined--as
aggressive, as unwomanly ("and now We hunt the Doe"), and as potentially lethal.
Yet despite these dangers and despite her recognition of the apparent
dehumanization her persona courts, in "My Life had stood" Emily Dickinson does
take precisely the risks that Rich describes. In the poem's terms, she is murderous.
She is a gun. Her rage is part of her being. Indeed, insofar as it permits her to
explode and hence to speak, rage defines her, unwomanly and inhuman though it is.
Whatever constraints existed in her daily life (the breathless and excessive
femininity so well described by her preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson),
inwardly it would seem Emily Dickinson was not to be denied. In her art she was
master of herself, whatever that self was, however aggressive, unwomanly, or even
inhuman society might judge it to be.
Given Dickinson's time and upbringing, it would, of course, have been unlikely that
she, any more than we today, would have been comfortable with the high degree of
anger and alienation which she exhibits in this extraordinary poem. But the anger
10

and the alienation are there and, whether we are comfortable or not, like Dickinson
we must deal with them. If, as Adrienne Rich asserts, "My Life had stood--a
Loaded Gun" is a "central poem in understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves,
and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century," it is
so precisely because Dickinson was prepared to grapple in it with so many
unacceptable feelings within herself. Whatever else "My Life had stood" may be
about, it is about the woman as artist, the woman who must deny her femininity,
even perhaps her humanity, if she is to achieve the fullness of her self and the
fullness of her power in her verse.
From My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity.
Copyright 1986 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Cristanne Miller
In "My Life had stood" [. . .] Dickinson compares an action in the present tense to
one in the past or present perfect:
And
do
I
Upon
the
It
is
as
Had let its pleasure through-And
when
at
I
guard
'Tis
better
Deep Pillow--to have shared--

smile,

such
Valley
a

Night--Our
My
than

cordial
Vesuvian

good
Master's
the

Day

light
glow-face
done
Head-Eider-Duck's

In the first instance, the speaker/Gun compares her smile to the aftermath of a
volcanic eruption. Her smile is not like the volcano's fire or threat but like its
completed act: when she smiles it is as if a volcano had erupted. The past perfect
verb is more chilling than the present tense would be because it signals completion,
even in the midst of a speculative ("as if') comparison; her smile has the cordiality
of ash, of accomplished violence or death, not just of present fire. In the second
instance, the speaker prefers guarding the master to having shared his pillow, that
is, to having shared intimacy with him--primarily sexual, one would guess from the
general structure of the poem. Again, the comparison contrasts action with effect
rather than action with action (and when I guard . . . 'tis better than sharing ... ). As
a consequence, the speaker seems ironically and almost condescendingly distant
from the world of life (here, of potential life-creation or love). Shared intimacy, in
her view, would bring nothing better than aggressive self-reliance does. Both uses
of the perfect tense in this poem distance the speaker from humanity, perhaps as
any skewed analogy would. Yet by allying herself with catastrophic power rather
11

than sexual intimacy, she may also be indicating that the former seems more
possible or safer to her; even the power of volcanoes may be known. The change in
tense alerts the reader to the peculiarity and the importance of the comparisons.
From Emily Dickinson: A Poets Grammar. Copyright 1987 by Harvard
University Press.

Mary Loeffelholz
The Dickinson poem that Rich so presciently invoked in 1965, "My Life had
stood--a Loaded Gun" (poem 754), has since then attracted diverse interpretations,
especially feminist interpretations. It has become the locus of discussion for
feminist critics concerned about accounting in some way for the aggression of
Dickinson's poetry, beginning with Rich herself. In her 1975 essay "Vesuvius at
Home," Rich names "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--" as the "'onlie begetter"'
of her vision of Dickinson, the poem Rich had "taken into myself over many
years."' The language of Rich's critical essay suggestively echoes the issues of the
poems Dickinson had already haunted and would later haunt for Rich. While not
explicitly violent in the way of Dickinson's loaded gun, Rich's metaphor of
incorporating, eating Dickinson's poem establishes, but only to transgress, the
boundary between inside and outside. Invoking the dedication to the "onlie
begetter" of Shakespeare's sonnets identifies Dickinson's poem with a male literary
tradition (although the overriding aim of Rich's essay is to link Dickinson to other
women writers) and identifies Dickinson herself with a phallic power (the loaded
gun's power) of inseminating Rich's thoughts. It is hardly necessary to add that
Rich's language is intimately, evocatively complicit in these respects with the
language of Dickinson's poem itself. What it means to be inside or outside another
identity; what it means to "take in" or possess; the very meaning of a boundary--are
put into question by "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--." In this and other poems,
Dickinson's often violent transactions with what is "outside" her reflect a situation
for women poets of the dominant Anglo-American tradition in which, according to
Joanne Feit Diehl, "the 'Other' is particularly dangerous ... because he recognizes no
boundaries, extending his presence into and through herself, where the self's
physical processes, such as breath and pain, may assume a male identity." The male
Other who occasions her speech may also commandeer her very bodily identity,
leaving nno refuge of interiority that is her own. Adrienne Richs reading of "My
Life had stood" internalizes Dickinson's struggle with the problem of boundary
and violence, rendering Dickinson both as the Other male ravisher and as an aspect
of Rich's own interior.
From Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory. Copyright 1991 by the
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
12

Albert Gelpi
Despite the narrative manner, it is no more peopled than the rest of Dickinson's
poems, which almost never have more than two figures: the speaker and another,
often an anonymous male figure suggestive of a lover or of God or of both. So
here: I and "My Master," the "Owner" of my life. Biographers have tried to sift the
evidence to identify the "man" in the central drama of the poetry. Three
draft-"letters" from the late 1850s and early 1860s, confessing in overwrought
language her passionate love for the "Master" and her pain at his rejection, might
seem to corroborate the factual basis for the relationship examined in this poem,
probably written in 1863. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the fact that
biographers have been led to different candidates, with the fragmentary evidence
pointing in several directions inconclusively, has deepened my conviction that "he"
is not a real human being whom Dickinson knew and loved and lost or renounced,
but a psychological presence or factor in her inner life. Nor does the identification
of "him" with Jesus or with God satisfactorily explain many of the poems,
including the poem under discussion here. I have come, therefore, to see "him" as
an image symbolic of certain aspects of her own personality, qualities and needs
and potentialities which have been identified culturally and psychologically with
the masculine, and which she consequently perceived and experienced as
masculine.
Carl Jung called this "masculine" aspect of the woman's psyche her "animus,"
corresponding to the postulation of an "anima" as the "feminine" aspect of the
man's psyche. The anima or animus, first felt as the disturbing presence of the
"other" in ones self, thus holds the key to fulfillment and can enable the man or the
woman to suffer through the initial crisis of alienation and conflict to assimilate the
"other" into an integrated identity. In the struggle toward wholeness the animus and
the anima come to mediate the whole range of experience for the woman and the
man: her and his connection with nature and sexuality on the one hand and with
spirit on the other. No wonder that the animus and the anima appear in dreams,
myths, fantasies, and works of art as figures at once human and divine, as lover and
god. Such a presence is Emily Dickinson's Master and Owner in the poem.
However, for women in a society like ours which enforces the subjection of women
in certain assigned roles, the process of growth and integration becomes especially
fraught with painful risks and traps and ambivalences. Nevertheless, here, as in
many poems, Dickinson sees the chance for fulfillment in her relationship to the
animus figure, indeed in her identification with him. Till he came, her life had
known only inertia, standing neglected in tight places, caught at the right angles of
walls: not just a corner, the first lines of the poem tell us, but corners, as though
wherever she stood was thereby a constricted place. But all the time she knew that
13

she was something other and more. Paradoxically, she attained her prerogatives
through submission to the internalized masculine principle. In the words of the
poem, the release of her power depended on her being "carried away"--rapt,
"raped"--by her Owner and Master. Moreover, by further turns of the paradox, a
surrender of womanhood transformed her into a phallic weapon, and in return his
recognition and adoption "identified" her.
Now we can begin to see why the serious fantasy of this poem makes her animus a
hunter and woodsman. With instinctive rightness Dickinson's imagination grasps
her situation in terms of the major myth of the American experience. The pioneer
on the frontier is the version of the universal hero myth indigenous to our specific
historical circumstances, and it remains today, even in our industrial society, the
mythic mainstay of American individualism. The pioneer claims his manhood by
measuring himself against the unfathomed, unfathomable immensity of his
elemental world, whose "otherness" he experiences at times as the inhuman, at
times as the feminine, at times as the divine--most often as all three at once. His
link with landscape, therefore, is a passage into the unknown in his own psyche, the
mystery of his unconscious. For the man the anima is the essential point of
connection with woman and with deity.
But all too easily, sometimes all too unwittingly, connection--which should move to
union--can gradually fall into competition, then contention and conflict. The man
who reaches out to Nature to engage his basic physical and spiritual needs finds
himself reaching out with the hands of the predator to possess and subdue, to make
Nature serve his own ends. From the point of view of Nature, then, or of woman or
of the values of the feminine principle the pioneer myth can assume a devastating
and tragic significance, as our history has repeatedly demonstrated. Forsaking the
institutional structures of patriarchal culture, the woodsman goes out alone, or
almost alone, to test whether his mind and will are capable of outwitting the lures
and wiles of Nature, her dark children and wild creatures. If he can vanquish her-Mother Nature, Virgin Land--then he can assume or resume his place in society and
as boon exact his share of the spoils of Nature and the service of those, including
women and the dark-skinned peoples, beneath him in the established order.
In psychosexual terms, therefore, the pioneer's struggle against the wilderness can
be seen, from the viewpoint, to enact the subjugation of the feminine principle,
whose dark mysteries are essential to the realization of personal and social identity
but for that reason threaten masculine prerogatives in a patriarchal ordering of
individual and social life. The hero fights to establish his ego-identity and assure
the linear transmission of the culture which sustains his ego-identity, and he does so
by maintaining himself against the encroachment of the Great Mother. Her rhythm
is the round of Nature, and her sovereignty is destructive to the independent
individual because the continuity of the round requires that she devour her children
and absorb their lives and consciousness back into her teeming womb, season after
season, generation after generation. So the pioneer who may first have ventured
14

into the woods to discover the otherness which is the clue to identity may in the end
find himself maneuvering against the feminine powers, weapon in hand, with mind
and will as his ultimate weapons for self-preservation. No longer seeker or lover, he
advances as the aggressor, murderer, rapist.
As we have seen, in this poem Emily Dickinson accedes to the "rape," because she
longs for the inversion of sexual roles which, from the male point of view, allows a
hunter or a soldier to call his phallic weapon by a girl's name and speak of it, even
to it, as a woman. Already by the second stanza "I" and "he" have become "We":
"And now We roam in Sovreign Woods-- / And now We hunt the Doe--," the
rhythm and repetition underscoring the momentous change of identity. However,
since roaming "in Sovreign Woods--," or, as the variant has it, roaming "the-Sovreign Woods--" is a contest of survival, it issues in bloodshed. "To foe of His-I'm deadly foe," she boasts later, and here their first venture involves hunting the
doe. It is important that the female of the deer is specified, for Dickinson's
identification of herself with the archetype of the hero in the figure of the
woodsman seems to her to necessitate a sacrifice of her womanhood, explicitly the
range of personality and experience as sexual and maternal woman. In just a few
lines she has converted her "rape" by the man into a hunting-down of Mother
Nature's creatures by manly comrades--Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in The
Last of the Mohicans,Natty Bumppo and Hurry Harry in The Deerslayer.
[. . . .]
In the psychological context of this archetypal struggle Emily Dickinson joins in
the killing of the doe without a murmur of pity or regret; she wants the
independence of will and the power of mind which her allegiance with the
woodsman makes possible. Specifically, engagement with the animus unlocks her
artistic creativity; through his inspiration and mastery she becomes a poet. The
variant for "power" in the last line is "art," and the irresistible force of the rifle's
muzzle-flash and of the bullet are rendered metaphorically in terms of the artist's
physiognomy: his blazing countenance ("Vesuvian face"), his vision ("Yellow
Eye"), his shaping hand ("emphatic Thimb"), his responsive heart ("cordial light").
So it is that when the hunter fires the rifle, "I speak for Him--." Without his
initiating pressure on the trigger, there would be no incandescence; but without her
as seer and craftsman there would be no art. From their conjunction issues the
poem's voice, reverberant enough to make silent nature echo with her words.
In Hebrew the word "prophet" means to "speak for." The prophet translates the
wordless meanings of the god into human language. Whitman defined the prophetic
function of the poet in precisely these terms: "it means one whose mind bubbles up
and pours forth as a fountain from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God.... The
great matter is to reveal and outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in
the soul."' Just as in the male poetic tradition such divine inspiration is
characteristically experienced as mediated through the anima and imaged as the
15

poet's muse, so in this poem the animus figure functions as Dickinson's masculine
muse. Where Whitman experiences inspiration as the gushing flux of the Great
Mother, Dickinson experiences it as the Olympian fire: the gun-blast and Vesuvius.
In several poems Dickinson depicts herself as a smoldering volcano, the god's fire
flaring in the bosom of the female landscape. In her first conversation with the
critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson remarked: "If I feel physically as if
the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way."
But why is the creative faculty also destructive, Eros inseparable from Thanatos?
To begin with, for a woman like Dickinson, choosing to be an artist could seem to
require denying essential aspects of herself and relinquishing experience as lover,
wife, and mother. From other poems we know Dickinson's painfully, sometimes
excruciatingly divided attitude toward her womanhood, but here under the spell of
the animus muse she does not waver in the sacrifice. Having spilled the doe's blood
during the day's hunt, she stations herself for the night ("Our good Day done--") as
stiff, soldierly guard at "My Master's Head," scorning to enter the Master's bed and
sink softly into "the Eider-Duck's/ Deep Pillow." Her rejection of the conventional
sexual and domestic role expected of women is further underscored by the fact that
the variant for "Deep" is "low" ("the Eider-Duck's /Low Pillow") and by the fact
that the eider-duck is known not merely for the quality of her down but for lining
her nest by plucking the feathers from her own breast. No such "female
masochism" for this doeslayer; she is "foe" to "foe of His," the rhyme with "doe"
effecting the grim inversion.
Moreover, compounding the woman's alternatives, which exact part of herself no
matter how she chooses, stands the essential paradox of art: that the artist kills
experience into art, for temporal experience can only escape death by dying into the
"immortality" of artistic form. . . .
Both the poet's relation to her muse and the living death of the artwork lead into the
runic riddle of the last quatrain. It is actually a double riddle, each two lines long
connected by the conjunction "for" and by the rhyme:
Though
I
than
He
longer
For
I
have
but
Without--the power to die--

He--may
longer
must--than
the
power
to

live
I-kill,

In the first rune, why is it that she may live longer than he but he must live longer
than she? The poet lives on past the moment in which she is a vessel or instrument
in the hands of the creative animus for two reasons--first, because her temporal life
resumes when she is returned to one of life's corners, a waiting but loaded gun
again, but also because on another level she surpasses momentary possession by the
animus in the poem she has created under his inspiration. At the same time,
he must transcend her temporal life and even its artifacts because, as the archetypal
16

source of inspiration, the animus is, relative to the individual, transpersonal and so
in a sense "immortal."
The second rune extends the paradox of the poet's mortality and survival. The lines
begin to unravel and reveal themselves if we read the phrase "Without--the power
to die" not as "lacking the power to die" but rather as "except for the power to die,"
"unless I had the power to die." The lines would then read: unless she were mortal,
if she did not have the power to die, she would have only the power to kill. And
when we straighten out the grammatical construction of a condition-contrary-tofact to conform with fact, we come closer to the meaning: with mortality, if she
does have the power to die--as indeed she does--she would not have only the power
to kill. What else or what more would she then have? There are two clues. First, the
variant of "art" for "power" in the last line links "the power to die," mortality, all
the more closely with "the power to kill," the artistic process. In addition, the causal
conjunction "for" relates the capacity for death in the second rune back to the
capacity for life in the first rune. Thus, for her the power to die is resolved in the
artist's power to kill, whereby she dies into the hypostasized work of art. The
animus muse enables her to fix the dying moment, but it is only her human
capabilities, working in time with language, which are able to translate that fixed
moment into the words on the page. The artistic act is, therefore, not just
destructive but in the end self-creative. In a mysterious way the craftsmanship of
the doomed artist rescues her exalted moments from oblivion and extends destiny
beyond "dying" and "killing."
Now we can grasp the two runes together. The poets living and dying permit her to
be an artist; impelled by the animus, she is empowered to kill experience and slay
herself into art. Having suffered mortality, she "dies into life," as Keats's phrase
in Hyperion has it; virgin as the Grecian urn and the passionate figures on it, her
poetic self outlasts temporal process and those climactic instants of animus
possession, even though in the process of experience she knows him as a free spirit
independent of her and transcendent of her poems. In different ways, therefore,
each survives the other: she mortal in her person but timeless in her poems, he
transpersonal as an archetype but dependent on her transitory experience of him to
manifest himself. The interdependence through which she "speaks for" him as his
human voice makes both for her dependence and limitations and also for her
triumph over dependence and limitation.
Nevertheless, "My life had stood--a Loaded Gun--" leaves no doubt that a woman
in a patriarchal society achieves that triumph through a blood sacrifice. The poem
presents the alternatives unsparingly: be the hunter or the doe. She can refuse to be
a victim by casting her lot with the hunter, but thereby she claims herself as victim.
By the rules of the hunter's game, there seems no escape for the woman in the
woods. Emily Dickinson's sense of conflict within herself and about herself could
lead her to such a desperate and ghastly fantasy as the following lines from poem
1737:
17

Rearrange
a
When
they
Amputate
my
Make me bearded like a man!

"Wife's"
dislocate

my
freckled

affection!
Brain!
Bosom!

The violent, exclamatory self-mutilation indicates how far we have come from the
pieties of Mrs. Sigourney and her sisters.
Fortunately for Dickinson the alternatives did not always seem so categorical.
Some of her most energetic and ecstatic poems--those supreme moments which
redeemed the travail and anguish--celebrate her experience of her womanhood. The
vigor of these dense lyrics matches in depth and conviction Whitman's sprawling,
public celebration of his manhood. At such times she saw her identity not as a
denial of her feminine nature in the name of the animus but as an assimilation of
the animus into an integrated self.
From "Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet in
America." In Shakespeares Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Copyright
1979 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

Claudia Yukman
The object status of a subject within a narrative is dramatically played out in
Dickinson's
frequently
discussed
poem,
"My
Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- ." In this poem the subject fears the permanence
of
the
text
as
much
as
death,
or
rather,
fears the overdetermination of her subjectivity by the text more than "the power to
die."
[. . . .]
The term "identified" elsewhere in Dickinson's poetry and in her culture at large
refers
to
the
conversion
experience
that
authorizes the Christian to view his or her life as typified by the narrative of
Christ's life. To be able to tell this story, like learning
language, permits the individual to be a Christian to another Christian and to
herself.
Dickinson's
poem
is
told
by
the
object
it
is
about and thus gives expression to the object positions we all occupy within socialsymbolic codes. The Christian narrative form in this poem is enacted as the
object/instrument life of the gun. The master gives dramatic form to the prior
narrative,
or
master story, which confers identity on the gun. The "Sovereign Woods" designate
the
limits
within
which
both
the
master
and
18

gun are free, an analogue for the freedom invented by, but limited to, the Christian
narrative.
But during the process of the poem the object (the gun) increasingly takes on
subject status. Already in the second verse the gun speaks "for" the master, which is
to say she perceives her function as an extension of his power: his will and
figuratively, his voice. But in the mountain's reply to this speech the gun
experiences her own singular effect on the world. In the third verse she no longer
acts for the master but describes an exchange between herself and the mountain.
There is a greater equality between the gun and the mountain than between the
master and the gun because they respond to each other's alterity or otherness.
Interestingly, this situation of alterity and reciprocity is represented as the elision of
narrative (in the loss of a syntactical antecedent to the pronoun "it") in the line "It is
as a Vesuvian face / Had let its pleasure through." In recognizing the alterity
symbolized by the "reply" of the mountain, which entails that it recognize its own
otherness, the gun experiences an identity distinct from her purpose in the master's
life (or the master story). In the fourth verse, though she still serves her master by
"guarding his head," the gun expresses preference for the pleasure her autonomy
and alterity allow her."'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's / Deep pillow -- to have
shared -- " to guard the master's head.
But perhaps more significantly, in the next to the last stanza she speaks of herself as
bodily. In effect, the master disappears, his story, the prior narrative, eclipsed by the
difference rendered as the gun's increasing embodiment.
To
foe
of
His
-None
stir
the
On
whom
I
lay
Or an emphatic Thumb --

I'm
second
a

deadly
Yellow

foe
time
Eye

----

Again, as was the case in "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died," the narrative frame is
broken
by
the
bodily
frame
of
experience.
The object of the story becomes a subject at the same time it comes to perceive
itself
as
bodily.
Given this reading of the poem, the ambiguity of the ending, "Though I than He -may longer live / He longer must -- than I -- / For I have but the power to kill, /
Without -- the power to die -- " (like "to see to see") represents the difficulty and
relative success Dickinson has in creating a text that will preserve a relationship of
equality between herself and her reader, imaged in the exchange between the gun
and the mountain within the poem. Dickinson is using a text to free herself from the
restrictive and destructive freedom of the Christian narrative frame. We, her
readers, come upon her poem as a prior text, which we may read as our master
story because it is prior. The danger of inventing a new relationship between writer
and reader is suggested in the figures of the gun and the mountain. They are both
19

images of potential violence, and their unchecked pleasure or power, if we take the
allusion to the volcano Vesuvias literally, would ultimately be desructive of life. In
other words, there is a danger in escaping one form of identity only to become
mastered by another. In our desire for identity we bring the words we read, whether
those of the Bible or Dickinson's poem, to life. The words that liberate us in turn
become the limits of identity. Dickinson's works demonstrate that the only way to
prevent oneself from being "framed" by language is to keep writing one's way out.
from "Breaking the Eschatological Frame: Dickinson's Narrative Acts." Emily
Dickinson
Journal Vol.
1,
No.
1
1992.
Online
source:http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/I.1.Yukman.html

Emily Dickinson's 'My Life had stood-a

Loaded Gun-': Revealing the Power of a
Woman's Words
By Kathleen

E.

Gilligan

2011, Vol. 3 No. 09 | pg. 1/1

Cite References Print

KEYWORDS:
Keywords:Poetry Emily Dickinson American Poetry Feminism Gender Roles
Born in 1830 to Calvinist parents in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is renowned
as one of Americas greatest poets. Though her poems often focused on death, she
in fact wrote on many subjects. Life, nature, love, science, heaven, hell, religion,
writing, and longing are just a few of the topics she explored. In many cases her
poems seems to have a straightforward message spelled out so that even those who
are unfamiliar with poetry are able to see her meaning.
At other times, Dickinsons poetry can seem confusing or strange to even the most
careful reader. In such instances it is necessary to sift through the clues she leaves
in her words in order to decipher the hidden meaning. Her seemingly random
capitalization, lack of punctuation or obsession with dashes, and incorrect use of
grammar were all done deliberately, sometimes to highlight the message that would
have otherwise gone unheeded. One such poem which has multiple meanings is
My Life had stooda Loaded Gun. To the average reader, Emily Dickinsons
My Life had stooda Loaded Gun personifies a gun, but several metaphorical
clues lead to a second meaning and message: a woman and her words have great
power.
Throughout her work, one can see that Dickinson does not seem to care about what
is socially accepted. She does not shy away from subjects like religion and/or
heaven and hell, which could be considered the most controversial of the time and
20

which other authors and poets (and women in particular) may have avoided for that
reason. In her poems, instead of trying to hide her dislike of organized religion, she
did the opposite and flaunted her views. Some keep the Sabbath going to church
and Im cededIve stopped being Theirs are perfect examples of this. All the
same, some of her poems do contain hidden meanings which arent necessarily
obvious.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was an American poet whose work became known
only posthumously. Her poetry is recognized today for its non-standard form and
often unusual syntax. Image: artistic rendering of Emily Dickinson by Lisa Perrin.
Emily Dickinson rarely published her poems but it was not because she was afraid
of criticism, rather that she was unhappy with the editing that her poems went
through by those to whom she sent them. If she was not afraid of criticism, it is
likely she simply enjoyed creating poems with double meanings. My Life had
stooda Loaded Gun, written in alternating lines of iambic trimeter and
tetrameter and with stanza rhymes of either abcb or abcd, is all the more interesting
for its two meanings.
The first line immediately includes a caesura and sets the stage for the literal
meaning of the six stanza poem (1). My Life is the subject of the line, and
subsequently becomes the subject of the poem (1). Yet the narrator or persona of
the poem is actually the gun, as indicated after the enjambment of the second line:
The Owner passedidentified/ And carried Me away (3-4). The Me is the
gun (4). To paraphrase, the gun stayed in the corner until its owner came and took
it.
On the other hand, if one looks deeper into these lines, a connection can be made to
a woman and her words. The My Life becomes a womans life, while the
Loaded Gun indicates the potential power and danger that a woman has. All four
words are capitalized, and though Loaded has one more syllable, in the line they
almost become parallel or equivalent to each other. The woman has stood In
Corners until her Owner, or husband, identified or chose her and carried her
away (2-4). Dickinson is saying that women are powerful, but are the tools of men
and often have no choice other than to wait for marriage.
The second stanza tells what the personified gun does. Dickinson uses anaphora in
the beginning lines to stress the change that has occurred. We refers to the gun
and its owner, plainly stating that they roam in Sovreign Woods and hunt the
Doe, or go through the woods and hunt deer (5-6). The enjambed every time I
speak for Him refers to when the gun is shot, and The Mountains straight reply
21

 is the sound of the shot hitting off the mountains and returning (echoing) back
to the gun and its owner (7-8). This meaning is obvious, despite the
figurative language about the mountains echoing. As for the second meaning about
a womans words, there are some large clues in this stanza. Sovreign often
indicates one with supreme power and authority, and in this case refers to men (5).
The We roam in Sovreign Woods refers to the husband and wife being in
mans world (5). The We hunt the Doe was carefully worded by Dickinson (6).
Doe could as easily have been replaced with deer or buck, but it was the
female of the species that was chosen (6). This line means that females are killed in
the world of men, or the power of the female is killed. The men cannot allow the
females to get too powerful. When the female does speak for Him, The
Mountains straight reply (7-8). Dickinson is saying that when a woman makes a
decision that is normally a mans or ventures to write something (venturing into the
territory men believe belongs to them), she gets nowhere. One could read these
lines as either the womans way is blocked by a wall (Mountains), or that she is
instantly met with criticism (straight reply) (8).
The two interpretations continue into the third stanza. The smile and light that
Upon the Valley glow indicate the guns spark and flash as it goes off (9-10).
It is as a Vesuvian face/ Had let its pleasure through compares the spark and
flash to a sudden and violent outburst like Vesuvius erupting (11-12). The meaning
of the stanza changes if the persona is a woman. The smile and cordial light
could be the polite mask a woman must wear in a mans world, or even the lovely
appearance of her poetry (9). The Vesuvian face letting its pleasure through-
however, may be a reference to a woman exploding through writing and letting her
words through (11-12). A vesuvian was also known as a slow burning match that
was used to light cigars, and Dickinson could have meant to indicate that the power
of a womans words, once released, do not easily fade (vesuvian).
Returning to the guns story, the fourth stanza tells of what the gun does at the end
of the day. Dickinson uses alliteration more in this stanza than anywhere else in the
poem, with Day done, My Masters, and Ducks Deep using repeated
sounds. In the first line of this stanza, Dickinson also plays around with language
and structure by using both Night and Day (13). I guard my Masters Head/
Tis better than the Eider Ducks/ Deep Pillowto have shared refers to the
guns placement at night (14-16).
The gun is above its Masters Head, perhaps on the wall, and believes that is a
better place to be as opposed to the Eider Ducks pillow they could have shared
22

(14-16). The alternate meaning shows that the womans husband is also her
Master (14). Tis better than the Eider Ducks/ Deep Pillowto have shared,
means the woman is turning away from the softness of feminine life, and perhaps
even from sharing a bed with her husband (15-16).
To foe of HisIm deadly foe/ None stir the second time is straightforward
when one believes the gun is the speaker (17-18). The gun protects its owner from
any foe (17). Nobody gets up a second time because they are dead (18). Why
are they dead? Because the gun has laid a Yellow Eye, which is the spark as the
gun fires and perhaps the bullet itself, and an emphatic Thumb, or the finger that
pulls back the hammer on the gun to allow it to shoot (19-20). In the alternative
meaning of this stanza, the woman declares To foe of HisIm deadly foe (17).
The dash is in the middle of the line, which twists the meaning. Instead of meaning
that the woman is deadly To foe of His, it is as if she means that To foe of His
and everybody else Im deadly foe (17). Shes deadly due to the power her words
carry, and once used as a weapon, None stir the second time (18). The Yellow
Eye could refer to a jaundiced eye, where something is looked at with a negative
or critical view (19). The emphatic Thumb could mean making a decision about
something (thumbs up or thumbs down) and expressing view forcibly (20).
Together the Yellow Eye and emphatic Thumb, or the womans critical words
about something, are unstoppable.
The final stanza, though of a different tone than the rest of the piece, continues on
with dual meanings. Dickinson uses alliteration as the gun states that it may longer
live, with it seemingly distraught about its longevity and insists that He longer
mustthan I, or that his owner must live longer (21-22). The gun seems to long
for the death that will eventually come to the owner, but will never get because it is
not human. In the final two lines the gun almost expresses its disgust for what has
been its job, and once again there is a hint of longing for what it will never have:
For I have but the power to kill,/ Withoutthe power to die (23-24).
When it comes down to it, the gun was just a tool to be used by its owner and will
never be able to find the peace its owner will. The meaning concerning a woman in
this stanza of Dickinsons poem is a bit different. The Though I than Hemay
longer live/ He longer mustthan I means that she realizes it is possible for her to
live longer, but he physically must live longer than she will (21-22).
This is because she has the power to kill,/ Withoutthe power to die, meaning
that her words and poetry have the power to kill (or fight or argue) and cannot end
23

or be taken back once she puts them out there; therefore because her words will be
immortal, it is necessary for men to live longer than she physically has, so that her
words will continuously be around them (23-24).
Poetry rarely means what it appears to mean. Often, there is a hidden or double
meaning in the seemingly innocent words that are presented to an audience. The
perfect place to hide anything is in plain sight, whether it is a forbidden object or a
taboo subject matter. As discussed above, Dickinson did not have any problem
tackling tough topics like heaven, hell, or religion, and so poems did not contain
hidden meanings because she was afraid of criticism.
Rather, it was likely due to Dickinson simply enjoying the experience of layering
meanings on top of each other. Her poems can be likened to archeological digs. On
the surface there is one layer, but dig a little deeper and another layer is found. In
the case of My Life had stooda Loaded Gun, the surface meaning is about a
personified gun, but delve a little deeper into the text and Dickinsons views on
women and poetry are, perhaps, revealed: a woman and her words are not only
powerful, but in a mans world will stand the test of time.

This poem is an extended metaphor, in which the speakers life

becomes a loaded gun, as defined in the first line. The gun is
unused for the first stanza, until its owner recognizes it and takes it
away with him. In the second stanza, the gun and the owner
become closely connected, traveling together through the woods in
pursuit of the deer they are hunting.
Whenever the gun is fired (And every time I speak for him ), its
boom is echoed by the mountainstheir straight reply. Similarly,
when the gun is fired (And do I smile) there is an explosion of light
(such cordial light/Upon the Valley glow ), which illuminates the
valley (It is as a Vesuvian face/Had let its pleasure through).
When the owner goes to sleep (And when at Night Our good Day
done ), he has his gun by his bedside to protect him (I guard My
Masters Head ), and the gun prefers this role to sleeping with the
master (Tis better than the Edier-Ducks/Deep Pillow to have
shared ). The gun warns that to any enemy of his masters, he will
prove to be very dangerous (To foe of His Im deadly foe ). No
one who he is fired at, that is, who sees his explosion (On whom I
lay a Yellow eye ) or who is on the wrong end when he cocks the
24

gun (Or an emphatic Thumb ), will survive (None stir the second
time ).
The gun will live longer than his master (Though I than He may
longer live), but it is not true living, because he is Without the
power to die . It is death which defines life, thus though he may
last longer than his master, his master in the true meaning of the
word will outlive himHe longer must than I .

Analysis
There are two conventional understandings of the metaphor of this
poem. The first is that the Master is God, and so, picked up by
God, the speaker becomes his marksman. She is his staunch
defender, and in fulfilling this role, becomes powerfulshe shares
his voice, acts only at his bidding, and is in some way immortal. In
this reading, then, choosing to serve God is a way to further your
own power and existence.
The second conventional reading is that the Master is not God, but
a lover. The speaker only gains agency or power when she is
identified by this lover, and carried away by him. In the second
stanza they are fused; they are We, she becomes his voice and
guardian. Her guarding of him, however, is fierce, fueled by a
murderous and possessive fury to such an extent that, though a bed
is mentioned, it is not a sexual place but one of violence, where she
guards him jealously. She in fact explicitly states that she would
rather guard him than share the bed with him.
In either case, whether the Master is deity or lover, the central
dilemma of the poem is that of the fusion of the gun and its owner,
the force and the agent, the violence and the perpetrator. This
becomes very clear in the second stanza, where the speaker and
her owner fuse together into a We, and this is emphasized further
by the anaphora of the first two lines of that stanza. In addition, the
gun, in going off, is communicating for the masterevery time I
speak for Him taking on his voice.
In the fifth stanza, too, the speaker and the owner are almost
indistinguishablethe Yellow Eye, a very human feature, actually
refers to the guns explosions, and the sentence grammatically
reads On whom I layan emphatic Thumb, but the thumb is
25

clearly actually that of the owner, who is cocking the gun. The
poems final stanza makes the two entities distinct again, although it
ultimately fuses them in tying their lives and deaths together, and in
making this interdependence complicated enough that it is nearly
impossible to extricate one from the other.
This poem, like so many of Dickinsons, deals with the theme of
death, but here, unusually, it is not death that is powerful, but the
ability to die. This shows how intricately life and death are tied up,
and how life cannot exist without death, for while the gun may
longer live than the human master, it never really lives at all
Without the power to die . How closely this last stanza ties
everything together is made clear in the abundant repetition within it
longer, the power to, than, He, and I.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (372)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

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
26

Summary
The speaker notes that following great pain, a formal feeling often sets in, during which the
Nerves are solemn and ceremonious, like Tombs. The heart questions whether it ever really
endured such pain and whether it was really so recent (The stiff Heart questions was it He, that
bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?). The feet continue to plod mechanically, with a
wooden way, and the heart feels a stone-like contentment. This, the speaker says, is the Hour of
Lead, and if the person experiencing it survives this Hour, he or she will remember it in the same
way that Freezing persons remember the snow: FirstChillthen Stuporthen the letting go
.

Form
After great pain is structurally looser than most Dickinson poems: The iambic meter fades in
places; line-length ranges from dimeter to pentameter; the rhyme scheme is haphazard and
mostly utilizes couplets (stanza-by-stanza, it is AABB CDEFF GHII); and the middle stanza is five
lines long, rather than Dickinsons typical four. Like most other Dickinson poems, however, it uses
the long rhythmic dash to indicate short pauses.

Commentary
Perhaps Emily Dickinsons greatest achievement as a poet is the record she left of her own
inwardness; because of her extraordinary powers of self-observation and her extraordinary
willingness to map her own feelings as accurately and honestly as she could, Dickinson has
bequeathed us a multitude of hard, intense, and subtle poems, detailing complicated feelings
rarely described by other poets. And yet, encountering these feelings in the compression
chamber of a Dickinson poem, one recognizes them instantly. After great pain, a formal feeling
comes describes the fragile emotional equilibrium that settles heavily over a survivor of recent
trauma or profound grief.
Dickinsons descriptive words lend a funereal feel to the poem: The emotion following pain is
formal, ones nerves feel like Tombs, ones heart is stiff and disbelieving. The feets Wooden
way evokes a wooden casket, and the final like a stone recalls a headstone. The speaker
emphasizes the fragile state of a person experiencing the formal feeling by never referring to
such people as whole human beings, detailing their bodies in objectified fragments (The stiff
Heart, The Feet, mechanical, etc.).

27

On 341 ("After great

pain, a formal feeling
comes--")
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
["After great pain, a formal feeling comes"] is obviously an attempt to
communicate to the reader the nature of the experience which comes "after great
pain." The poet is using the imagery for this purpose, and the first line of the poem,
which states the subject of the poem, is the only abstract statement in the poem.
The pain is obviously not a physical pain; it is some great sorrow or mental pain
which leaves the mind numbed. The nerves, she says, "sit ceremonious like tombs."
The word sit is very important here. The nerves, it is implied, are like a group of
people after a funeral sitting in the parlor in a formal hush. Then the poet changes
the image slightly by adding "like tombs." The nerves are thus compared to two
different things, but each of the comparisons contributes to the same effect, and
indeed are closely related: people dressed in black sitting around a room after a
funeral may be said to be like tombs. And why does the reference to "tombs " seem
such a good symbol for a person who has just suffered great pain (whether it be a
real person or the nerves of such a person personified)? Because a tomb has to a
supreme degree the qualities of deadness (quietness, stillness) and of formality
(ceremony, stiffness).
Notice that the imagery (through the first line of the last stanza) is characterized by
the possession of a common quality, the quality of stiff lifelessness. For instance,
the heart is "stiff," the feet walk a "wooden" way, the contentment is a "quartz"
contentment, the hour is that of "lead." The insistence on this type of imagery is
very important in confirming the sense of numbed consciousness which is made
more explicit by the statement that the feet move mechanically and are "regardless"
of where they go. Notice too that the lines are bound together, not only by the
constant reference of the imagery to the result of grief, but also by the fact that the
poet is stating in series what happens to the parts of the body: nerves, heart, feet.
Two special passages in the first two stanzas deserve additional /469/ comment
before we pass on to the third stanza. The capital letter in the word He tells us that
Christ is meant. The heart, obsessed with pain and having lost the sense of time and
place, asks whether it was Christ who bore the cross. The question is abrupt and
28

elliptic as though uttered at a moment of pain. And the heart asks whether it is not
experiencing His pain, andhaving lost hold of the real worldwhether the
crucifixion took place yesterday or centuries before. And behind these questions
lies the implication that pain is a constant part of the human lot. The implied figure
of a funeral makes the heart's question about the crucifixion come as an appropriate
one, and the quality of the suffering makes the connection implied between its own
sufferings and that on the cross not violently farfetched.
The line, "A quartz contentment like a stone," is particularly interesting. The
comparison involves two things. First, we see an extension of the common
association of stoniness with the numbness of grief, as in such phrases as "stonyeyed" or "heart like a stone," etc. But why does the poet use "quartz"? There are
several reasons. The name of the stone helps to particularize the figure and prevent
the effect of a clich. Moreover, quartz is a very hard stone. And, for one who
knows that quartz is a crystal, a "quartz contentment" is a contentment crystallized,
as it were, out of the pain. This brings us to the second general aspect involved by
the comparison. This aspect is ironical. The contentment arising after the shock of
great pain is a contentment because of the inability to respond any longer, rather
than the ability to respond satisfactorily and agreeably.
To summarize for a moment, the poet has developed an effect of inanimate
lifelessness, a stony, or wooden, or leaden stiffness; now, she proceeds to use a new
figure, that of the freezing person, which epitomizes the effect of those which have
preceded it, but which also gives a fresh and powerful statement.
The line, "Remembered if outlived," is particularly forceful. The implication is that
few outlive the experience to be able to remember and recount it to others. This
experience of grief is like a death by freezing: there is the chill, then the stupor as
the body becomes numbed, and then the last state in which the body finally gives
up the fight against the cold, and relaxes and /470/ dies. The correspondence of the
stages of death by freezing to the effect of the shock of deep grief on the mind is
close enough to make the passage very powerful. But there is another reason for the
effect which this last figure has on us. The imagery of the first two stanzas
corresponds to the "stupor." The last line carries a new twist of idea, one which
supplies a context for the preceding imagery and which by explaining it, makes it
more meaningful. The formality, the stiffness, the numbness of the first two stanzas
is accounted for: it is an attempt to hold in, the fight of the mind against letting go;
it is a defense of the mind. /471/
THOMAS H. JOHNSON
. . . The authority of "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" derives from the
technical skill with which the language is controlled. As she always does in her best
poems, Emily Dickinson makes her first line lock all succeeding lines into position.
. . . /97/ The heaviness of the pain is echoed by bore, wooden, quartz, stone, lead.
29

The formal feeling is coldly ceremonious, mechanical, and stiff, leading through
chill and stupor to a "letting go." The stately pentameter measure of the first stanza
is used, in the second, only in the first line and the last, between which are hastened
rhythms. The final two lines of the poem, which bring it to a close, reestablish the
formality of the opening lines. Exact rhymes conclude each of the stanzas.
Emily Dickinson's impulse to let the outer form develop from the inner mood now
begins to extend to new freedoms. Among her poems composed basically as
quatrains, she does not hesitate to include a three-line stanza, as in "I rose because
he sank," or a five-line stanza, as in "Glee, the great storm is over." On some
occasions, to break the regularity in yet another way or to gain a new kind of
emphasis, she splits a line from its stanza, allowing it to stand apart, as in "Beauty
be not causedlt Is," and "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House."
Sometimes poems beginning with an iambic beat shift in succeeding stanzas to a
trochaic, to hasten the tempo, as in "In falling timbers buried." It is the year too
when she used her dashes lavishly. /98/
FRANCIS MANLEY
Between 1860 and 1862 Emily Dickinson is commonly believed to have
experienced a psychic catastrophe, which drove her into poetry instead of out of her
mind. According to her explanation, she was haunted by some mysterious fright,
and her fear, or whatever it was, opened the floodgates of her poetry. But despite
their overwhelming number, the poems she produced under these conditions are not
an amorphous overflow from a distraught mind; they are informed and wellwrought, the creations of controlled artistryespecially about twenty-five or thirty
poems which, unlike the rest, treat specifically the intense subtleties of mental
anguish, anatomizing them with awesome precision. And since all of the poems in
this small cluster deal with varied aspects of that one subject, all of them follow a
certain basic pattern dictated by the abstract nature of pain.
In each of these poems Dickinson was faced with this initial problem: somehow she
had to describe a formless, internal entity which could never be revealed to others
except in terms of its outward signs and manifestations. Moreover, these
externalizations did not always /260/ correspond to the internal condition but at
times, in fact, represented the exact opposite. Yet in poetry if such signs were
completely misleading, they would obviously defeat their own purpose by
communicating 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 generated in
the course of this symbolic action, she eventually led the reader from appearances

30

to the reality of a silent anguish made more terrifying by its ironic presentation, as
[in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"]. . . .
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 various parts of the body so as to demonstrate the action of
numbness on themthe nerves, the heart, the feetgeneralized entities belonging
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 /261/ various
actions performed in this poem are disjunctive, and though vaguely related to a
chaotic travesty of a funeral, they are not patterned 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 consciousness enough to question whether it was
"He, that bore, / And Yesterday, 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 becomes 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,
they are in actuality the dead, and conversely the stiff heart, the metaphoric 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
31

second stanza, then, the cataleptically formal rites of the dead are replaced by a
different sort pf action ceremoniously performed in a trance, an extension not of the
previous metaphor, but of the paradox which informed it. For although move- /262/
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 extending 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 /263/ contentment, like a stone." According to
Webster's American Dictionary (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." Apparently, then, by the second stanza
anguish has resolved itself into its impossible opposite, a hard, cold, quartz-like
32

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 sensation 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 numbness 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. /264/
CHARLES R. ANDERSON
[In "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," the] three stanzas faintly shadow
forth three stages of a familiar ceremony: the formal service, the tread of
pallbearers, and the final lowering into a grave. But metaphor is subdued to
meaning by subtle controls. . . . /210/ This poem has recently received the
explication it deserves, matching its excellence. But its pertinence to this whole
group of poems is such as to justify a brief summary of the interpretation here.
'In a literal sense,' according to this critic, there is 'neither persona nor ritual, and
since it describes a state of mind, neither would seem to be necessary.' Instead, as
befits one who has lost all sense of identity, the various parts of the body are
personified as autonomous entities (the nerves, the heart, the feet), belonging to no
one and moving through the acts of a meaningless ceremony, lifeless forms enacted
in a trance. As a result, attention is centered on the feeling itself and not on the
pattern of figures that dramatize it. As the images of a funeral rite subside, two
related ones emerge to body forth the victim who is at once a living organism and a
frozen form. Both are symbols of crystallization: 'Freezing' in the snow, which is
neither life nor death but both simultaneously; and A Quartz contentment, like a
stone,' for the paradoxical serenity that follows intense suffering. This recalls her
envy of the 'little Stone,' happy because unconscious of the exigencies that afflict
mortals, and points forward to the paradox in another poem, 'Contented as despair.'
Such is the 'formal feeling' that comes after great pain. It is, ironically, no feeling at
all, only numb rigidness existing outside time and space. /211/

Sharon Cameron
33

"Great pain" is the predicate on which the sentence of fixity lies, the prior
experience against which feeling hardens in intransigent difference. The
relationship between the adjective in "formal feeling," the adverb in "The Nerves
sit ceremonious," and the simile, "like Tombs" is a relationship of progressive
clarity; the connections get made in the underground touching of the roots of each
of these words; the "formal feeling," "ceremonious," is a feeling of death. And as if
in parody of the initial image, in the next line the "Heart" too is a "stiff," unable to
connect self to incident or to date.
Like the "Element of Blank," like the "Trance" that covers pain, and like the
"nearness to Tremendousness / An Agony procures," the "formal feeling" is an
abdication of presence, a fact that explains why the question the speaker puts to
herself is framed by incredulity and designates the subject as someone else, a "He,
that bore," why the time that precedes the present becomes mere undifferentiated
space, "Yesterday, or Centuries before?" But unlike "Blank," "Trance," and "a
nearness to Tremendousness," the "formal feeling" is an anatomy of pain's
aftermath from a distance, a self standing outside of the otherness that possesses it.
Thus we are told of the parts of the body as if they were someone else's or no one's:
"The Heart . . . the Nerves . . . the Feet . . . "; thus we are shown actions, how the
body looks, what it does, rather than feelings. Thus the speaker arrives at a
definition ("This is the Hour of Lead") divorced from the experience because
encompassing it. Thus the concluding simile departs from the present as if in
analogy there were some further, final escape.
But although the initial images follow upon each other like a death, the second
stanza makes clear that death is only an analogy for the body that has lost its spirit,
for the vacancy of will. Given its absence, all action is repetition of movement
without meaning, and as if to emphasize the attendant vacuousness, the lines repeat
each other: "The Feet" "go round" in circles, "Wooden," "Regardless grown,"
until the stanza's final line boldly flaunts its own redundancy. "A Quartz
contentment " is "like a stone" because quartz is a stone. However, perhaps
Dickinson means us to see two images here, the transparent crystal and the grey
stone to which it clouds, in a synesthesia that would equate the darkening of color
with a formal hardening. As in "perfectparalyzing Bliss / Contented as Despair
," contentment here is the ultimate quiet, the stasis that resembles death. "Wood,"
"stone," "Lead"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, we know that the "letting go" is not a letting go of life, is
not death, but is rather the more colloquial "letting go" of feeling, an unleashing of
the ability to experience it again. To connect the stages of the analogy to the stages
of the poem: "Chill" precedes the poem, "Stupor" preoccupies it, and "the
34

letting go" exists on the far side of its ending. The process whereby blankness
has been called into existence, given palpable form, dimension, character and
movement enables the poem to specify what the previous poems on pain merely
note. Dickinson's poems mostly take place "After great pain," in the space between
"Chill" and "Stupor." "Life [is] so very sweet at the Crisp," she wrote
longingly, "what must it be unfrozen! " (L 472). But the conversion of the body into
stone was not lasting. She was not, as she sometimes seemed to declare herself,
numb from the neck down. Pain was the shot that inflicted temporary paralysis, a
remedy that worked until the poems took over. Then she could spell out the words
she swore consciousness refused her, "letting [the feeling] go" into them where
from a distance she could look.
We saw earlier how, in Derridas terms, pain is a trace of lost presence, the record
of its having been. Thus Dickinson's speakers "learn the Transport by the Pain,"
sometimes seeming to harbor the belief that "Pain-" is "the Transport" it stands for.
Pain is with us as a presence because pain stands for (in place of) presence. But
pain, as we have seen in the last few pages, is also the past after which, from which,
comes the "formal feeling" that is the poem. If we were to arrange the three terms
in a sequence (present/ce, pain, and poem) they would, each one, hark back to a
past that eluded all efforts to retain it. For the first temporal principle is one of
alterity, the present differing from the past and the future from the present. We then
have some idea of why Dickinson claimed in her meeting with Higginson not to
have learned how to tell time until she was fifteen. For to tell time is to tell
difference, to note the failure of resemblance ever to be the same as that from
which it differs. Dickinsons poems on pain are an attempt to blank time out and to
create, in its place, a space where the temporal apparatus of daily life has been as if
disconnected. For presence is past, and even what follows presence (what Poulet
calls the moment after loss) lies behind us. In the sequence of diminishing returns,
what has been is, by definition, missing. What remains is a true blank, the genuine
space at the thought of which despair "raves," and around which words gather in
the mourning that is language.
from Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Copyright 1979 by The
Johns Hopkins UP.

Kamilla Denman
While Dickinson did not go so far as to make words mean their logical opposite,
she did disrupt conventional arrangements to create emotional and psychological
effects, as in the lines of "The Snake" above. A more extended example of this
process appears in poem 341 . . . .
35

Temporal dislocation in the content of the poem is integrally related to its syntactic
and metrical form. generally, the order of words in temporal sequence establishes
linguistic relationships from which meanings emerge. In this poem, 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 trimeter to dimeter
and back. Other phrases in the poem initially seem to form complete sentences but
then unravel in subsequent lines that confuse the original meaning, as in the last
stanza. There are no periods to mark off any thought as complete, nor even to mark
the poem as a complete thought: the final sentence is completely fragmented by
dashes. Alan Helms, in his incisive reading of the punctuation in this poem, says
that the dashes in the last line approximate the experience of freezing by slowing
down the tempo. The final verb, "letting go," is followed by a dash that hangs the
poem and the experience described in the poem over a visual and aural precipice of
frozen silence. Were the sentences to be made complete and the poem
conventionally punctuated, the essence of the experience it describes would be lost.
Clearly, much of Dickinsons power in evoking psychological states lies in her
disregard for conventional rules of grammar and punctuation, as well as
conventional rules of poetic meter, line, and rhyme.
The poem begins with words conventionally grouped (though the punctuation
marks Dickinson used were not conventional), but by the third line, the grammar of
the poem begins to disintegrate with the introduction of an additional comma,
leaving only the iambic pentameter as a stabilizing if relentless rhythmic force
throughout the first stanza. The first line describes the psychological state
philosophically, the second describes it imagistically, and the two make an
impressive epigram. But Dickinson is not content to end the poem here: she must
explore the state from a more intimate and vulnerable standpoint. She is not content
to recollect emotion in tranquillity, nor to describe it in eloquent, complete
sentences. The introduction of the subject, "He," causes the clear ideas and images
of the first two lines to crumble into disconnected images and fragmented phrases.
The comma that follows the word, "He," is the first signal of the breakdown in the
syntax, separating predicate nominative from its relative pronoun and verb, and
person from action. The disruptive comma also creates a temporal dislocation that
permeates the poem: the present thought is not completed (the object of "bore" is
lacking), as the speaker unsuccessfully seeks to locate the incomplete action in past
time. The present experience described in the second stanza is a mechanical,
cyclical treadmill, while the past of the first stanza stretches out vaguely and
endlessly. In the final stanza, past and present are confused in the line, "Freezing
persons, recollect the Snow." The present participle evokes a present condition, but
the snow that is causing the freezing is disconcertingly thrown into the chasm of the
past by the verb, "recollect." The experience of freezing is so intensely present that
even the snow that causes it, like the "He" who bore the pain, seems to belong in
the past.
From "Emily Dickinsons Volcanic Punctuation." Emily Dickinson Journal (1993)
36

Suzanne Juhasz
Lack of feeling, or various forms of "death," occasions the metaphoric transfers
which interweave in "After great pain" to measure the effect of pain on the mind
and body and, in consequence, to tell us something about the nature of pain itself.
Crucial is the poem's structure of "analogical progression" (Weisbuch's term): that
is, a movement typological rather than linear, since each analogy, set in apposition
to a central idea, proceeds only in that it further defines. Here a series of analogies
for the "formal feeling" which comes after great pain call upon a range of external
situations, intricately interrelated by metaphor. The feeling is internal, mental, but
Dickinson uses words associated with the body, with nature, with society, and with
physical death, as well with the mind, to shape and articulate both its sensation and
significance.
First Dickinson outlines the feeling by describing the body's manifestation of it:
nerves, heart, feet. In each instance, however, figurative language expands the
experiential nexus. The nerves are personified; they "sit ceremonious." A social
definition of formal--marked by form or ceremony--is called into play; the image
may evoke a scene of ladies at tea. However, immediately they are compared to
tombs. Formal meaning stiff or rigid; formal marking another kind of ceremony-that of death; more definitions are added. Now all ceremonies are suspect. And that
is the point. Formal behavior, because it relies on predetermined patterns, because it
proceeds by rote, is mindless.
Next we see the heart. It is stiff. Stiff is another definition for formal, here
specifically denoting lack of feeling; for 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?"
Then the feet. They move mechanically: formal meaning highly organized, also
stiff, also devoid of thought, moving by rote--a kind of death. Their path, be it "Of
Ground, or Air, or Ought," is wooden and regardless. Both nouns and objects
describing the route of the feet, in their juxtaposition of concrete and abstract,
indicate that this path is as conceptual as it is physical, and that the feet, like nerves
and heart, function synecdochically for the person--especially, for the person's
mind. Ought is a path taken by the mind: that of dutya formal gesture. The
conjunction of Wooden and regardless gives dimension to thought--or rather, to the
lack of it. A final metaphor and analogy complete the stanza. "A Quartz
contentment, like a stone," further describes the wooden way, but it is as well in
apposition to "a formal feeling," like all of the images thus far. Contentment
follows
from regardless and Ought,
while Quartz parallels Wooden and mechanical; each harkens back to stiff,
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ceremonious, and Tombs; all are aspects offormal. In the phrase "Quartz
contentment" the concrete and abstract vocabularies are dramatically joined: two
versions of rigidity, of formality, inform one another. The quartz is stiff and
symmetrical--shaped
in
a
formal
pattern.
With regardless,
Ought, and mechanical to precede contentment, we recognize in that seemingly
benign term the kind of formality with which the poem has been dealing
throughout: the death-like impotence that marks it in other poems as a primary
symptom of despair. We recall "A perfect--paralyzing Bliss--/Contented as
Despair--," and the stone eye "that knows--it cannot see." The concluding analogy,
"like a stone," comes as no surprise. A quartz contentment is a stony contentment,
but the introduction of the word stone more directly yokes Tombs and consequently
death to the image.
A formal feeling, then, is stiff, rigid, cold, conforming to patterns with no thought
producing them, contented because of the absence of awareness, vitality, sensation,
life. "Formal feeling" is really an oxymoron, for the feeling of no feeling.
The last stanza is introduced by a summarizing metaphor--"This is the Hour of
Lead" --summarizing in that Hour and Lead hook on to the chain of epithets that
have been defining formal in an increasingly ominous way. Lead is as heavy, dark,
solid and inanimate as tomb--like nerves, stiff hearts, mechanical feet, wooden
ways, and quartz contentment. Hour is the present tense of a mind that questions its
understanding of time, that proceeds by rote, according to ought rather than insight,
that has grown in its contentment, regardless. The "Hour of Lead" equals "a formal
feeling": with its successive parallelism the poem comes full circle here, for the
circle has outlined meaning.
But the poem is not over yet, because for all of the lack of a sense of time that
accompanies the formal feeling, the poem, like "It ceased to hurt me," is concerned
with temporal progression, from pain to the formal feeling to whatever succeeds it.
Its first word is "After"; its concluding lines return from the stasis of the formal
feeling to the process in which it is located. As the poem begins by setting out the
past--what precedes the action of the poem--so its final analogy projects the poem
into the future, what will hopefully (unless the formal feeling is truly death-dealing)
follow: "Remembered, if outlived,/ As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--/First
Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--." In this poem, too, time is a frame that
holds the subject in place, through which one can study it.
Sharon Cameron's reading of these lines is excellent, noting as it does how the
images themselves embody the temporal progression described.
The image with which the poem concludes ... 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
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implies a definite progression away from it by retracing the steps that comprise its
history, we know that the "letting go--" is not a letting go of life, is not death, but is
rather the more colloquial "letting go" of feeling, an unleashing of the ability to
experience it again. To connect the stages of the analogy to the stages of the poem:
"Chill--" precedes the poem, "Stupor--" preoccupies it, and "the letting go--" exists
on the far side of its ending.
In "After great pain," a dazzling demonstration of her analogical method,
Dickinson is like a juggler: the balls she suspends in air so that their shapes and
colors enrich one another to create the meaning of the whole are versions of
"formal," taken from all manner of experiences in the world beyond the mind. The
shape that they make as they circle in the air becomes, however, that of a mental
experience: lack of feeling, a formal feeling. This poem is Dickinson's most intense
and most precise definition of a condition that appears throughout her poetry on
mental experience. This particular version of formal feeling comes after great pain;
it is the self-protective response of the mind to a severe internal wound. . . .

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