Emily Dickinson, "After great pain . . . "

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

In case I wasn't clear yesterday about the relative simplicity and sweetness of Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," compare it to one of her darker poems, "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes." Maybe I'm just a downer-guy, or maybe depression, despair, and death are inherently weightier matters than hope. In any case, it seems to me that nothing in "Hope" matches the power and nuance of the imagery and state of mind at the center of "After Great Pain." I'm not sure I've experienced the poem's dark weight of mind, emotion, or spirit, but when Dickinson calmly states, "This is the hour lead," she makes me think I know what she's talking about. She makes me want to flee, except that she seems to know something I need to know, whether I want to or not.

We're probably left with more questions than answers in "Great Pain." Exactly what constitutes "great pain" and a "formal feeling"? What caused them? Or does a little voice then kick in and call us dishonest for pretending we need to ask?

Also, Dickinson tries to make herself clear, but the grey blankness of this state of mind (should we call it layered?) is too amorphous for clarity or logic, even though it has the color, heft, and authority of lead. The best Dickinson can do is offer images that might come close to capturing a condition as elusive as it is definite. It lacks definition; it is definitive. It's been said that paradox is the language of poetry.

In every stanza, if not every line, there's a word, phrase, or concept that stuns me. Who would have thought of this as a "formal" feeling? Less mysterious, but awfully interesting is the fact that it arrives "after" great pain. Wouldn't most of us have chosen pain itself as the subject rather than its aftermath?

Why is this state personified as "He," and how does He become a "bore"? Or is "bore" the past tense of "bear"? If that's the case, what was it that He bore? The formal feeling? How so? And is there a play on the word "boor"? This might be a spot where Dickinson's quirky punctuation and word choice are pushing things at least an inch too far. How can we not wonder if she's simply struggling for rhyme?

A what contentment? "Quartz," you say? And wait, you're associating this aftermath of great pain with some kind of "contentment"? And then those last two lines--what happens, in what order, and how does it amount to a "letting go"?

All of this illustrates one of the great purposes of poetry (and probably all art): to capture experiences rather than talk about them, to use imagery and metaphor to express the inexpressible. I doubt any writer has offered any Message that has the impact of Dickinson's attempt to render an experience here.

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Emily Dickinson, "Hope is the thing with feathers." Video, cardinal landing.

I'm not a Dickinson expert, but my sense is that "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers" is a favorite for many. I like the central metaphor of hope as a bird and the title's focus on feathers--maybe a bird's most fragile feature. However, E.D.'s development of that idea is a little sweet for my tastes, especially compared to the complexity of so many of her better poems.

On the other hand, I get sappy about birds, and cardinals in particular. I stumbled onto the video below while looking for images of cardinal chicks--I'm pretty sure I had one this morning, just after first light, with mom and dad at the platform feeder.

When I consider that chick, that plump grey ball, becoming Mr. Red adult--or Mrs. More Modest Red--one word that comes to mind is magic. Ditto the video's excellent close-ups of a cardinal's landings in some snow. Whatever else he might be, the cardinal as a metaphor for hope is a perfectly reasonable notion.

Hope is the thing with feathers

YouTube - Cardinal landing close up

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The Carter Family

YouTube - Anita Carter - Don't Worry 'Bout Me - Prague 1978

That's Anita Carter, sister of Helen and June Carter Cash. They are the daughters of Mother Maybelle Carter. If you don't know her or the family's classic, "Wildwood Flower," take a listen. This is American History, so sit down and be good. And watch Maybelle's right hand on the guitar. I recently read a description of her picking style, and it's baffling.

YouTube - The Carter Family - Wildwood Flower

I'm having a good time with June's 2003 CD, titled Wildwood Flower, one folk or country classic after another. Her version of "Sinking in the Lonseome Sea" is rivaled only by Odetta's version (titled "The Golden Vanity," I think). Now I want all of Anita Carter's songs plus Marty Robbins' oldie-goldies. Happy weekend, exploring the Carter family stuff available on YouTube. What a resource. Maybe progress isn't all bad after all.

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Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Arrogance, continued.

Big water in better days.

Hamlet says, “What a piece of work is a man.” I go back and forth between seeing a slab of meat hanging in a butcher shop—that’s a man—and more positive images—say, the artist if he’s striving for honest as well as elegant utterances, or the martyr if his cause is just (MLK or Gandhi, to be obvious).

Where do Tony Wayward, and the Enron boys, and other sociopaths among our elite, present and past, fit into “what a piece of work” man is? On the Great Chain of Being, what link do they occupy? What link do they think they occupy?

In an effort not to be arrogant about arrogance, I try once more to imagine myself in charge of an operation that could inflict the damage BP is doing. Here is my translation:

“On my watch, the lads have had more violations than any other oil company (which are not known for the choir boys among them). I ignored warnings from my underlings about imminent danger. At each stage of the explosion's aftermath, I lie and evade. I deliver sanitized bromides of regret to the millions of little guys on the Gulf, waiting for me to make it all (sound) better.

“That’s enough to make even a slick, hardened sociopath tired. I need to get away, so I'm off to a sailing thingy, with our kind of people, safely across a sea into which my machinery hasn’t yet defecated. But I’m really not a bad sort, not an arrogant bloke. With my boyish face, I'm rather liked in the circles I choose.”

So can I see myself as that guy, as Tony Wayward? I honestly cannot, and if that sounds sanctimonious, so be it. Maybe it means I sit in safe havens, lacking the stuff of leadership in a major enterprise, which by definition risks both nature and humanity by the thousands of units. Maybe I’m a short-necked gander with no honk.

But no, I cannot see myself as that Tony-guy. And no, I don't have anything like envy for his daring or his life of luxury. (Or his absence of conscience, diligence, compassion). I don't want to be an empty suit when I grow up. Or is it a vacancy of soul we're trying to measure here?

Maybe we should all write lists of whom and what we cannot imagine being or doing, both the positive and negative models. Tony is not in my list of ways I can see myself. I'm sure it's my fault.




A World War II air combat poem might seem an unlikely companion to the above, but when I think of arrogance, I envision people who think of others as servants or objects. How would some of the high rollers in industry esteem this speaker, a mere ball turret gunner, dead, who hung in the belly of his bomber, exposed to enemy fighter planes in his transparent bubble? Are those the chunks of flesh the high roller sees when he regards the people and animals of the Gulf Coast? Wash 'em out with a hose.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

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Shelley's "Ozymandias" in Our Time

I’ve never entirely understood the spirit of conquest, or monuments to oneself or one’s tribe.

I had a friend once who was a serious mountain climber. Let’s say Ben was a Dartmouth grad (those names are close enough) and an ex-marine (he was that), and one day in casual conversation, he spoke of “attacking the summit” of Mt. McKinley.

I wondered if this was the way all Dartmouth grads thought. They desired an assault and more or less assumed they would succeed. And the mountain, I suppose, would hang its head in defeat. I’d always felt sure I wasn’t Ivy League material, so this was comforting—this clinched it, and it had nothing to do with IQ. Whatever Ben was demonstrating—pluck? scrappiness? confidence? ambition? arrogance? energy?—I didn’t have it and didn’t want it. And still don’t.

So now I consider the current environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. Then I work backward: the failure (and deceit) of the banks, the insurance companies, the insurer of the insurance companies, the infallibility and lack of redundancy in the Internet, the American auto companies and built-in obsolescence, the assault on Toyota’s competence and integrity, the fall of the Twin Towers, the Nixon presidency, Vietnam and imperialism in general (we even have margarine that's Imperial). Somebody is salivating at the prospect of somebody else's summit.

In that light, Shelley’s famous sonnet, “Ozymandias,” seems remarkably on target, though it goes all the way back to Egypt’s Ramses II for its model.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

This poem is perhaps over-taught and over-anthologized. But how can we over-expose the young or ourselves to such an important, chilling tale of arrogance? I doubt it will do any good; attacking summits or other people’s sand or retirement accounts is too much fun for too many scrappers and too many people on silver spoons in overdrive. But we can say we tried.

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Ted Kooser, "An Epiphany"

I've mentioned epiphany a few times. Is Kooser right in thinking that's what's happening in his spider scene?

An Epiphany by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Given Kooser’s talky voice, we might overlook his flirtation with rhyme. Now we have it, now we don’t. But with or without exact rhyme, we have the “r” and “l” sounds.

And rather than tie up everything—neatly and over-resolved—in the end, Kooser plays with those “r” sounds, ending on “finger” and “broken.” We can’t ignore the “r,” given the accumulation of the sound, but he slyly refuses to give us an exact rhyme, which would imply balance, order, peace, law, and justice as a conclusion, when in fact things are broken and the “me” is left alone at the end of a line, with no rhyming partner.

If there is an epiphany here, surely it has to do with “broken” things, and the speaker is alone with his understanding of that.


In the video below, the deer biz might be apropros of nothing, but I found it curiously interesting, understated, amusing, touching. Then, rather than re-running the Bambi pic, I figured some bison in the rain, near Corydon, Indiana, might be more interesting. I wonder if the restaurant makes them nervous.

That, in turn, has made me wonder if there's a thread here after all: spiders eat, bison eat, people eat. Everybody eats. Even Bambi. Welcome to Banjo Brain.

YouTube - Deer Calling Tips: Trail Grunt Sequence



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Favorite Lines: What Is It We Remember?

Whether or not she meant to, Altadenahiker in her visitor comment yesterday reminded me of the old writing guideline, "Show, don't tell." It works for both fiction and poetry, and I think I believe in it strongly.

On the other hand, I find myself as well as others loving lines that are at least on the verge of telling. Whether or not we mean to, I suspect we all go to writing and the arts for wisdom as well as beauty, entertainment, and other purposes.

Here are a few lines that come to my mind. If they’re not didactic, full of message, and “telling” more than showing, aren’t they perilously close to it? Yet I remember them and love them, whether or not I believe in them. And I am not a crook—though I wonder if there’s a streak of Bible-thumper in me that makes me like these truths. Truths? Well, there are no turkeys here.

Please feel free to offer your own favorites in response.


Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Ah, Margaret, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving? . . .
It is the blight man was born for.
It is Margaret you mourn for.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

A poem should not mean, but be.

. . .

And what if William Carlos Williams had not begun with “so much depends upon”?

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