After great pain, a formal feeling comes: Structure & Language Techniques

Structure

The poem is structured in three quatrains (four-line stanzas in iambic meter). The rigid structure mirrors the formality of the feeling that comes after pain.
The poem doesn’t have a consistent rhyme scheme, reflecting the chaotic and unpredictable nature of human emotions.
Dickinson often uses dashes to signal a pause or silence. This makes her poetry sound breathless, hurried, or interrupted.

Dickinson frequently uses metaphors to communicate abstract experiences. For example, the formal feeling is likened to ‘The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –’, demonstrating how emotional distress numbs or ‘kills’ the senses.
Her works display her characteristic capitalization of nouns, which gives them importance or personification. In this poem, ‘Nerves’, ‘Heart’, ‘Feet’ and ‘Tombs’ are capitalized to grant them an almost symbolic importance.
Cold and winter imagery are employed in lines like ‘The Feet, mechanical, go round – / A Wooden way’. These convey the feelings of numbness and lifelessness following ‘great pain’. The organic heart and feet are transformed into inorganic wood, showcasing emotional paralysis and a state of being disconnected with oneself.
Paradoxical images as in ‘Quartz contentment, like a stone’ indicate the solidity and undisturbed nature of the stone, yet it’s also cold and inanimate – demonstrating the harsh reality of dealing with pain.
The use of anaphora, repeating the introductory phrase ‘The’ at the beginning of lines 5, 6, 7, and 8, adds emphasis and rhythmic consistency.
The closing line ‘First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –’ employs the technique of asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions between clauses, to relive the gradual, step-by-step process of slipping into emotional numbness after a painful episode.