By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’: with this arresting opening line, Emily Dickinson begins one of her most studied and powerful evocations of grief and suffering, and the ‘element of Blank’ (as she puts it in another of her poems about pain) that follows a painful event or experience. The language and imagery Dickinson employs in this poem will take a bit of unravelling and analysis …