POEM ANALYSIS METHOD:
TPCASTT: Title, paraphrase, connotation, Attitude, Shifts, Title and Theme
TPCASTT Analysis
After Great Pain, A Formal
Feeling Comes
by Emily Dickinson
After great pain, a formal feeling
comes-The Nerves sit ceremonious, like
Toombs-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--
Paraphrase
T: What is Dickinson’s great pain – Time will help us recover from
physical or emotional? Either?
the immediacy of a painful event
What is a formal feeling? One
and give us greater perspective.
rationally explainable and distant?
~
~
Tragedy or trauma can be
C: nerves sit ceremonius, like toombs numbing, and it may be hard to
= simile and personification
feel anything anymore. Though
The nerves are compared to a tomb the active pain may have ceased,
which would be a house of the body, there is a residual effect from the
the process or action leading to the
pain.
death is over
C: contentment like a stone = simile
and personification
Stones have no feelings
C: mechanical feet: they have no
independence or volition
People, after pain/trauma, go
C: rhyming patterns – last two lines of about their daily business but they
each stanza showcase the focus on the have lost their meaning and their
end (death)
purpose in it. They just do it as a
matter of routine. They have no
C: Freezing persons recollect: When feeling.
people freeze it is at first painful but
then they lose the sense of it before
they die.
C: What is the hour of lead? The hour
before letting go, the hour before dying, If you survive the pain/trauma,
the time before we let go of our
then you can remember how
pain/trauma?
painful it was and your shock –
but if you can no longer let the
S: Steps of separation until there is no pain/trauma affect you, then it is
longer a connection = letting go
only a memory and you can go on.
There is a shift from shock (lines1-13)
to detachment from physical self (lines 1418) ending in
letting go (resolution) in last line
A: great pain, tombs, mechanical,
wooden, stone, hour of lead, freezing,
snow, chill, stupor, letting go = antilife, depression
A: Why are there so many uses of
dashes?
Theme Investigation
Plot: person experiences great pain and basically goes into a form of shock .
Subject: Great pain ~ Title Revisited: Time is an analgesic for a Great Pain
Theme: Recovery from suffering a great loss will either end in death or,
will take stages of loss and then accepting ("letting go)