Emily Dickinson Mental Pain
Several Emily Dickinson poems describe the nature of mental pain and anguish. Dickinson illustrates a formless, internal entity that is unable to be revealed to others through mere outward signs and manifestations. She sets up the speaker within a uniform and synchronized external reality that becomes complicated by the temporally nonuniform experience of pain. Dickinson uses images and metaphors to expand or contract the operations of the speaker’s mind and consciousness to portray how the speaker deals with pain. She breaks away from the normal conventions that dictate how time is measured; the very subject matter of pain itself necessitates that humans feel mental anguish in irregular ways. The reader is then lead to penetrate the reality
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The nerves, the heart, and the feet exist as sovereign entities. Since the body physically retains these parts yet fails to control them, this loss of self-possession is the “formal feeling” (1) benumbed contentment produces in a person who has lost a sense of identity. It is also apparent that the speaker has lost a sense of time, since the question arises: “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?” (3-4). All the parts of the body seem to be autonomous beings that move in mysterious ways. If such ungovernable attributes constitute the interiority of a person, and the interiority is where pain is felt, then a human’s experience with pain cannot be dictated by external forces, including time. Disjointedness runs deep, as it not only touches the speaker’s sense of physicality and time, but also guides the various perfunctory actions of the poem to convey the unsatisfying, quasi-ceremonious nature of pain. Pain, roughly related to a funeral, is not defined by any discreet ceremony. Since the actions that proceed the progression of pain are metaphors for numbness, they “sit” (2), temporally suspended, in what seems like a trivial rite. Such is the “formal feeling” (1) that comes after “great pain” (1). It is unfeeling: numb stiffness that must exist outside time and space in order for its victim to linger in a blank and static state of
The nerves, the heart, and the feet exist as sovereign entities. Since the body physically retains these parts yet fails to control them, this loss of self-possession is the “formal feeling” (1) benumbed contentment produces in a person who has lost a sense of identity. It is also apparent that the speaker has lost a sense of time, since the question arises: “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?” (3-4). All the parts of the body seem to be autonomous beings that move in mysterious ways. If such ungovernable attributes constitute the interiority of a person, and the interiority is where pain is felt, then a human’s experience with pain cannot be dictated by external forces, including time. Disjointedness runs deep, as it not only touches the speaker’s sense of physicality and time, but also guides the various perfunctory actions of the poem to convey the unsatisfying, quasi-ceremonious nature of pain. Pain, roughly related to a funeral, is not defined by any discreet ceremony. Since the actions that proceed the progression of pain are metaphors for numbness, they “sit” (2), temporally suspended, in what seems like a trivial rite. Such is the “formal feeling” (1) that comes after “great pain” (1). It is unfeeling: numb stiffness that must exist outside time and space in order for its victim to linger in a blank and static state of