After Great Pain A Formal Feeling Comes - Example Essay #1

“The feet, mechanical, go round”

How does Dickinson display a lack of freedom?

Throughout Dickinson’s poems we can see the recurring motif of entrapment and her lack of freedom, an example of this would be in ‘What mystery pervades a well’, in which we see the entrapment of the yonic water, by the phallic well. It is also seen in certain lines such as, ‘shaven a fitted to a frame’, in which we see how parts of her soul have been shaven away so that she can be what society wants of her, and so that she is respectable so people can watch and judge her. However the image of her lack of freedom is most clearly shown in ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’, in which the reader see how the speaker as almost stuck on a merry-go-round, symbolic of her life, a never ending ride that she is desperate to get off of, the only escape being death.

One of the techniques that Dickinson uses to illustrate her lack of freedom is in the separation of various body parts, an example being in stanza one where we see how she refers to her heart as being, ‘The stiff Heart’. An indication that her heart is unable to love due to the fact that it is so cold, and lifeless, also due to the fact that it is identified as being separate from her we see how she has no control over it, again showing her lack of freedom and power even over her own life.  Also the way in which she is separate from her heart could also be an indication of how she has the inability to love another person and so therefore her lack of love does not allow her to interact with others around her, so she loses freedom because she cannot interact with others. We also see the separation of her body parts later on in the poem on the line, ‘The feet, mechanical, go round’. This again is an indication of how her body parts are not her own, we see how they are the ones that are in control and are forcing her to follow a path that she clearly does not want to be on. This image of the feet as mechanical also could be related to almost like a wind-up toy, they themselves really have no idea where they are going, so she is being lead to pain for no really reason, similar in ‘I heard a fly buzz’ where she is being lead to pain even though the fly itself does not really feel she needs to go to hell, the fly is referred to as ‘stumbling, between the light and me,’ a hesitant movement with no real motive behind it.

The image of her life as a ‘mechanical’ also gives the reader the image of her life as almost like a merry-go-round, she is on a continuous cycle where, as soon as one pain leaves her she knows that it is only a matter of time before the next pain comes along. This again shows how she has not control over her life, she is unable to move from the cyclical nature of her life, and so therefore must endure the pain repeatedly. This again is a reflection of her lack of power and freedom she is unable to get of the ride that is her life; she is unable to die so that she no longer endures the pain.  We also see the image later on in the poem of her being a mechanical being, ‘A quarts contentment, like a stone’. This gives the image of her as effectively a robot, a tin man, who is again unable to have any really control over her body. We also get the sense that there is someone above her controlling her every move, to make sure that she is a respectable member of the society in which she is forced to live in. We also see how she is a not organic substance, again reflecting her ‘stiff Heart’ and there is no end to the mechanical existence that she is currently livening. The image of her lack of freedom due to the her inability to die is also shown in ‘The last night that she lived’, in this poem, as well as seeing the small amount of sadness at the fact that her friend has passed, we see the large amounts of jealousy that Dickinson feels, as she is the one that wants to die, but is completely unable due to her lack of freedom to do as she wishes with her life.

The structure of the poem also reflects her lack of freedom, an example of this is the use of iambic tetra and trimeter. This strict structure reflects how she is even contained by the verses of her poetry, and also shows how she has a lack of freedom to express herself fully and be free in her writing. The way in which it is written is so regimented that she is unable, even when she is trying to express herself, to fully be free from the rules and images that society have made for her. Also we can see in her choice of words that she again has a lack of freedom, an example of this would be ‘Remembered if outlived’ we see how she longs not to survive this, she wants to break free from the merry-go-round that is her life but she is unable to due to her lack of freedom and control over her own life.  We can also see how she refers to the pain that she feels as something that should kill you, there is a large chance that you would die while experiencing it, this again shows how she feels that her pain is more that any person has felt before, how the pain that she feels should have killed her and all of this should be over, but due to the fact that she cannot die she must endure it over and over again. The use of enjambment also plays a big part in ensuring that the reader can fully see how elongated and painful her life is, ‘go round/ A wooden way’. This shows how the wooden way has been long and is never ending, shown by the unbroken sentence.

Dickinson also uses religious images to illustrate how she is trapped, we see in stanza one how she refers to the pain that she feels as equal to the pain that ‘He that bore?’ This image connects that pain she feels to the pain that Jesus felt on the cross, reflecting how, similar to Jesus, she is unable to get down of her own accord, her life is in the hands of people around her, and she has lost all control. This also gives the image of how people are willing to stand and watch her suffering, and therefore allow her suffering to continue.