After Great Pain A Formal Feeling Comes Flashcards
Key themes
Sensory failure, existence, death
Explain ‘after great pain, a formal feeling comes’
Death is being treated as a formality - as if going through pain is the real struggle and death is all that remains
Explain ‘the nerves sit…the stuff heart questions’
By personifying the body parts, a sense of control is introduced into the experience.
Explain ‘was is he, that bore?’
Reference to christ, who ‘bore’ the ultimate pain. -subversive of a momentous occasion
Explain ‘the feet mechanical, go round’
Pyschic immobility experienced whilst in pain - demonstrating the state in which people exist after enduring injury or grief. (They keep living but only through an ‘auto pilot’ effect
Explain ‘quartz contentment’
-more personification - if a person is as happy as a stone is does not say much for their state. Simultaneously ironic, abstract, oxymoronic and personifying
Explain ‘this is the hour of lead’
Defining line of the poem. Definitive point is accentuated by the word lead- mix of temporal and spatial dimension.
Explain ‘remembered, if outlived’
Concrete form introducing possibility of death of the speaker
Explain ‘first chill-then stupor-then letting go’
-demonstrates sensory shut down
-dashes stage chronology and slowing down of thought process
-form mirrors context
-‘chill’ implied exposure
‘Letting go’ implies lack of struggle
(After great pain the dying process is easy)
Sensory failure links to other poems
Fly buzz, funeral in my brain
Existence links to other poems
Funeral in my brain, world is not conclusion, it was not death
Links to death in other poems
Funeral in my brain, fly buzz, last night she lived, world is not conclusion, was not death etc
Key techniques
Synecdoche, oxymoron, personification
