How does the poet use language in the poem, After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes?

The language in the poem is generally accessible, with few instances of elevated vocabulary or complexity. However, it is also surprising at points and often ambiguous. The pairing of the words "nerves," "ceremonious," and "tombs" (2), for example, is a unique metaphor that conjures images of death, but also of formality and grandeur. Later, the speaker compares a person's grief to a "Quartz contentment" (9), invoking a dual sense of entrapment and peacefulness. In this way, Dickinson develops throughout the poem a profound ambivalence toward mortality, a common theme in her poetry and a common tone she attributes to many of her speakers. At the end of the poem, the speaker imagines that the end of grief is a "letting go" (13), but also uses this phrase to describe the process of freezing to death in the snow. The ambiguity of these final lines once again encourages readers to perceive death as something neither sinister nor celebratory, instead presenting a speaker who exudes a sense of calm over the prospect of both dying and living with grief.