After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
What is the setting in the poem, After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes?
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There are no specific settings mentioned in the poem. Rather, the speaker refers vaguely to places like cemeteries and different elements of nature like "A Wooden Way," "Ground," and "Air" (6-7). Rather than locating the poem in any particular place, the speaker uses ambiguity to highlight the disorienting nature of grief. The speaker argues that in the aftermath of trauma, one can lose all sense of time and place, not knowing where they are or how they got there. Thus, the "settings" in the poem are fragmented and incomplete. Instead, the speaker focuses on the emotions associated with traumatic experience, attempting to represent the experience from an internal perspective while maintaining the impersonal tone of a "stupefied" person.
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes