“After great pain…” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous and widely read poems, and one that has inspired a good deal of critical commentary and controversy. Because of Dickinson's notoriously private and reclusive nature, the poem’s apparent offer of insight into Dickinson’s personal psyche has long fascinated critics seeking to read this “great pain” into, or alongside, the poet’s own experience. Some critics, however, have reacted against this discourse, arguing that any attempt to read the poem as expressive of Dickinson’s own psychology is reductive at best.
What’s clear is that instead of going on to specify the circumstances or specifics of this “great pain,” Dickinson devotes the rest of her poem to exploring the “formal feeling” which arises in its wake. Thus, the majority of this very short poem (11 short lines) consists of the speaker reflecting on, exploring, and describing the various aspects of this “formal feeling” in language characteristically abstract, ambiguous, even gnomic.
Though a fundamentally introspective poem, it’s unclear whether the speaker’s introspection is attributable to the poet herself, or to any particular individual psychology. This ambiguity carries through to the end of the poem, leaving the status of the speaker, as well as her relation to this “great pain” and its attendant “formal feeling,” unresolved.
