The Mystery of Pain
The Mystery of Pain - meaning Summary
Pain as Self-contained Time
The poem presents pain as an autonomous, timeless state that erases origins and resists ordinary memory. Dickinson argues pain lacks a conventional past or future, existing instead in an "infinite" present that both contains and reframes earlier suffering. The language compresses the experience into a claustrophobic, self-contained duration, suggesting that pain reorganizes personal history around itself and becomes the primary temporal frame for the sufferer.
Read Complete AnalysesPain 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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