AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING
“ONLY EMOTIONS ENDURE”
Emily Dickinson: #341
After great pain, a formal feeling comes— The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round— Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone— This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
A formal feeling. You’ve survived, barely, but in the mind it’s not over. This is a poem about the aftermath of a romantic devastation or some equally traumatic event. Interestingly, it’s also about poetry. “The Feet, mechanical, go round,” describes its own plodding pace. And “A Quartz contentment,” overcomes the tragic mood for a moment, a glimmer of what a poem can accomplish: a crystallization of that dismal state of mind that might lead to the beginning of recovery. The rhyming couplets, which end each stanza, add a sense of formality, of artistic control. And the poem even has a moment of bitter humor—“was it He, that bore—” Humor, if you can manage it, is another way to come to grips with a shattering experience.
Of course in lyric poetry the emotion doesn’t have to be tragic. Wordsworth works it out for happier feelings, in his daffodils poem, remember: “I wandered lonely as a cloud…?” He ends that poems:
For oft when on my couch I lie in quiet or in pensive mood they flash upon the inward eye which is the bliss of solitude and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.
Wordsworth’s poem may at first seem to be an outburst of spontaneous joy, but there’s more to it. We know for instance that the opening line of the poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” isn’t accurate. We know this because we have the journal written by his sister Dorothy which describes the same incident. She was there too, and so Wordsworth’s isolation is an invention. Of course he could have said, “We wandered lonely as two clouds,” but poetic license took over—thank heaven!—from the literal truth.
And it’s worth recalling how Wordsworth defined the lyric poem: “emotion recollected in tranquility.” When the feelings are actually happening, they’re too strong in us and we live them, but can’t write them down. It’s only later, lying on your couch in a pensive mood, that a poem may get started.
Sometimes you can force a poem by giving yourself an assignment or writing down whatever pops into your head. But for now I want to get at a certain psychological truth about poetry in a crisis. In my first Substack post, I mentioned that Robert Frost called lyric poetry: “a momentary stay against confusion,” and quoted from an article in The American Poetry Review, where Gregory Orr spelled this out in more detail. Here’s the full quote:
“Our day-to-day consciousness can be characterized as an endlessly-shifting, back-and-forth awareness of the power and presence of disorder in our lives and our desire or need for a sense of order. Most of us live most of our lives more or less comfortably with the daily interplay of these two awarenesses, but in certain existential crises, disorder threatens to overwhelm us entirely and in those cases, the very integrity of the self is threatened, and its desire or ability to persist is challenged. Among the most obvious and dramatic of these upheavals we could include intense romantic passion or the sudden death of someone near and dear to us. And yet our instability is present to us almost daily in our unpredictable moods and the way memories haunt us and fantasies play themselves out at will on our inner mental screens. We are creatures whose volatile inner lives are both mysterious to us and beyond our control. How to respond to the strangeness and unpredictability of our own emotional being? One important answer to this question is the personal lyric, the ‘I’ poem dramatizing inner and outer experience.”
Orr gives as an example a tragic event from his own childhood, when he killed his brother in a hunting accident. It took him years to begin to come to grips with the guilt he felt, but poetry, when he discovered it in high school, was an important part of the healing process.
Let me give an example from my own experience. In November 1993, without warning, our son Ben went into a coma. He had to be medevacked to Seattle, and for five days we didn’t know if he would ever come out of it and if he did what shape he would be in. During that time I made myself write. I did it partly to get some kind or control over my feelings, and also to keep in touch with the writerly part of myself that I felt in danger of losing.
I wrote sonnets, because the tight fourteen line form gave me a greater sense of control. I don’t normally write in form, I write in free verse. But during this time the formal challenge helped me get things out and onto the page. I should also say that I knew at the time that those poems were not any good. I was writing them purely for myself, as therapy, to keep myself steady and objectify the chaos of my inner feelings. But a couple of years later, after Ben had recovered from his initial illness and was dealing with its long-term effects, I was ready to go back and write about our experiences thinking I might write them up as a memoir.
But looking over the poems I’d written at the time, I found that some of them were salvageable, and others reminded me of details that I could use to make new poems about that experience. Out of this came the sequence Spells and Auguries. These are not tight sonnets. The rhyming is only occasional and I loosened the form by introducing dropped lines—that is, breaking some lines in each poem in half, so the poems don’t have that square, boxy sonnet look. But they were all originally fourteen lines long and the best of them have a true sonnet feel of powerful emotions being controlled by form.
There are twenty-four poems in all, covering about five years. Here are three that deal with the first few days of Ben’s illness.
SIRENS AND FLASHING LIGHTS
November 8, 1993, 7 A.M.
Your cry, half howl, half moan, rocks us awake.
We rush in, find you
lurching out of control,
eyes fixed and fingers crimped—our son, eleven,
healthy yesterday. Your body twitches, sways.
Nancy’s about to faint, so I say, “Sit ,”
and press her head between
her knees, then phone
for help. She throws things in a bag, sensing
already that our lives have changed.
I call again and scream at the dispatcher.
“They’re on their way,” she says, concerned. Our common
thought: your brain in pieces like a shattered
glass, you may
never find yourself again.
Sirens and flashing lights intensify
our sense of helplessness as help arrives.
Nancy flew with Ben on the medivac plane from Fairbanks to Seattle, and this next poem is in her voice.
SLEEPLESS TO SEATTLE: NANCY
November 10
I wore my parka with two blankets over
like a mummy and they kept asking how
I was and I’d say,
‘How is he?’ and they’d say,
‘Doing great!’ but the oxygen wasn’t flowing
on the plane so they had to pump this bellows
thing by hand to keep
him breathing and
I hadn’t slept for two days and couldn’t stop
my shivers. I must’ve been in shock.
Then at the hospital, all hell broke loose.
They crushed in all at once—the specialists—
to hook him up
and get their systems going
and one of them came over to me yelling,
‘Christ—why didn’t you bring him sooner?’
as though Fairbanks was right around the corner.
INTENSIVE CARE
November 13
The delicate hiss of the pump pulling
phlegm from your chest, green
scribbles on the screen
snaking up and down, and a nurse on
permanent duty who says just ignore
those stats and look at the calm sleeping face
of the boy with the tube up his nose, the drip
in his arm and
the probe screwed into his skull
gauging pressure on the brain—just watch
his steady breathing. Something is there
inside that was almost taken away,
something coiled and firm waits for another
day, to stick out his tongue on command
and open his
bleary eyes and when asked,
“Who is that?” to say, “Why that’s my dad.”
If you’d like to see the whole 24 poem sequence of “Spells and Auguries” it’s included in my collected early poems, The Moving Out from Salmon Poetry, and is available on Amazon.
*
Around a hundred years ago, reacting against the artificiality of Romantic Period practices, Ezra Pound said a number of very smart things about writing poetry and “making it new.” Poems, he argued, should be composed using only natural words in their natural order, avoiding awkward inversions like “the sky blue.” They should include no words that don’t contribute to the presentation, i.e. nothing merely decorative. He stressed the importance of the image as a basic unit in poetry (as opposed to rhyme and meter) and he famously intoned: “Go in fear of abstraction.”
There’s one other Poundian pronouncement that I call to mind when I’m writing a lyric poem: “Only emotions endure.” Pound was a conscientious craftsman and he didn’t mean that you could pour raw emotions onto the page and expect them to last. The craft has to be there too. But in the long run a well-made poem that lacks an emotional punch is not likely to be remembered.
In a sense, then, the raw material of poetry is emotion. But paradoxically the Emily Dickinson poem with which this Substack begins describes the numbness that comes after an emotional event. It’s a hauntingly powerful poem about that aftershock. Sometimes the feeling behind a poem can be stated directly, as in this poem’s opening line—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—but it’s also important to find the images to carry the emotion, as Dickinson does throughout the rest of the poem. This imagery is what transmits the feeling deeper into the reader’s mind. Dickinson knew this, of course, and so she ends her poem with an image of hypothermia: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—”