Emily Dickinson

Pain Has an Element

Pain Has an Element - meaning Summary

Pain's Self-enclosed Temporality

Dickinson’s short lyric contemplates the isolating nature of pain. The speaker describes pain as timeless and self-contained: it erases memory of its start and lacks a future beyond itself. Suffering folds past into its present, making new periods of pain that are self-sustaining. The poem suggests pain reorganizes experience around itself, becoming an all-encompassing temporal frame that consumes memory and generates recurring intensities.

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Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain.

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