Dickinson

The main thing I've noticed that Emily Dickinson's poems have in common with each other is an anti-war sentiment. "The name -- of it -- is Autumn" paints a gruesome image of the normally beautiful colors of autumn transformed into blood red everything. War is everywhere in this poem, and the blood is inescapable. Both "I like a look of Agony" and "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" convey emotional scars from the war. It's strange to hear someone say that they like seeing people in agony and corpses, but Dickinson says so because she "know[s] it's true" (line 2). This poem reveals her jaded and pessimistic outlook on life that the war has wrought on her. She only trusts the suffering and dead. This attitude is also expressed in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." This poem describes how the war robs people of their emotions and turns them into jaded pieces of stone. They stop feeling and take on a formal attitude all the time. In both poems the characters seem to be characterized by unnatural feelings - whether they seek refuge in the sight of a corpse or don't feel anything at all. All these poems depict the negative effects of war, both physical, as in "The name -- of it -- is Autumn" and psychological, as in the other two. While Dickinson does not name the war directly in any of them, or give particular indicators that she speaks of the Civil War, there are clues in the text. Coupled with the fact that they were written around the time of the Civil War, it is safe to conclude that this was the "great pain" she was talking about.