Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” For Patricia and our students Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372 is not – technically speaking – a story. And Dickinson is not a storyteller per se. But her nearly 1,800 poems speak deeply and powerfully to the human condition. They give a still unparalleled account of what it is to be human. Poem 372 does have some elements of storytelling. Instead of “once upon a time,” we get “after this, then this.” And then Dickinson describes the numbing, the freezing, the letting go – perhaps the dying that follows loss, pain, trauma. Was she writing of a disappointment with her sister-in-law, Sue, believed by many to have been her lover? Was it a loss of a different kind? We will never know that part of the story – the who, what, when, where, perhaps not even the why. But we do very much know the how – how the loss affected her, how it feels as a human being to grieve, to feel pain. Without a doubt, this poem makes me think of my d