Who is the speaker in the poem, After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes?

The speaker of the poem is unnamed, and does not speak from the first-person perspective as many of Dickinson's other speakers do. Instead, the speaker describes the aftermath of trauma from a more detached point of view, noting the body parts with the article "the" instead of attaching them to any particular person: "The Nerves" (2), "The stiff Heart" (3), "The feet" (5). This detachment helps emphasize the sense of numbness that the poem articulates, and presents the reader with a speaker who communicates in much the same way as someone undergoing the experience described in the poem. This correlation ultimately suggests that the speaker is speaking from experience, rendering the poem a personal and intimate look at grief at the same time it avoids a first-person lens.

The speaker is notably ambivalent about the subject matter, at times appearing disheartened by the state of post-traumatic grief and at other times appearing contented by it. The speaker's confusion, disorientation, and competing imagery help underscore the ambiguity of the subject matter itself. The speaker, like many grieving people, cannot discern how they feel about the aftermath of trauma; instead, they simply go through life in repetitive and habitual ways. At the end of the poem, the speaker implies that the period of grief will end with either death or freedom, which they ultimately suggest could be one and the same.