The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Dickinson, Emily. "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson (1976).

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

Emily Dickinson, now considered a canonical poet in American literature, only published a handful of poems during her lifetime. She spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born and where her family resided. Known for her reclusive personality, Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems during her life of isolation. Her poetry tends to explore existential concepts like death, illness, abstract emotions, and religion, and she has become famous for her eccentric use of dashes and capitalization in the majority of her poems. Many of Dickinson's poems are written in iambic tetrameter or iambic trimeter, and critics have noted that a number of poems can be read or sung along to the tune of the Christian hymn "Amazing Grace."

"After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (372) is one of Dickinson's lesser-known poems. It was not included in the original posthumous publication of her poetry and instead appeared nearly half a century later in the Atlantic Monthly. The poem describes the experience of surviving a traumatic event, detailing the emotions one might feel in the aftermath of pain and suffering. In the poem, the speaker likens the aftermath of trauma to a form of death itself. The poem ends on an ambiguous note, questioning whether one can ever truly recover from a traumatic experience. Despite its later date of publication, the poem showcases many of the stylistic idiosyncrasies for which Dickinson is now known.