Snow-Blindness in Emily Dickinson's "Pain Poems"

Abstract

This brief essay will examine an aspect of Emily Dickinson's "pain poems." The three "pain poems" under our scrutiny, written in 1862 according to Thomas H. Johnson, form a distinctive node in Dickinson's poetry. In spite of their subject matter, they show neither "masochist impulse" which William R. Sherwood detects in her when she deals with pain and despair, nor "rigorous stoicism which he finds in the poems like "No Rack Can Torture Me" (J.384). And they have no special voice, as in "I Can Wade Grief" (J. 252), which moves Archibald MacLeish with its quiet restraint mixing heterogeneous elements like "But the least push of Joy/Breaks up my feet" in the grief.