Poetry Analysis: After a great pain, a formal feeling comes
...ke Tombs–’ suggests the image of a funeral, a sad and gloomy scenario of death. It also illustrates the passive ‘Nerves’, which relates to the overly inert situation that crestfallen people often find themselves in. This sense of numbness is further highlighted in lines 3–4. ‘The stiff Heart’ brilliantly dramatizes the emotional paralysis a person in pain goes through. It is that ‘stiff Heart’ that wonders how ‘He,’ probably Jesus Christ, survived all the pain on the cross. The question ‘was it He, that bore, / And Yesterday, or Centuries before?’ suggests the loss of the sense of time. The pain must have made the passage of time slow down or speed up. The second stanza elaborates the disassociation of one’s soul from the body. The whole of this stanza implies that whether the ‘Feet’ go on the hardness of the ground or the softness of the air, their path is wooden, or stiff, due to the paralysis within them. Since the person in pain can no longer feel nor command the ‘Feet’ where they should be going (‘Regardless grown’), they keep wandering in circles (line 5), suspended between life and death. Notice that this stanza has an additional line as compared to the other two. This, I believe, emphasizes the pointless wandering of the ‘mechanical Feet.’ The last line of the second stanza, ‘A quartz contentment, like a stone–,’ relates stoniness with the numbness of grief. Since quartz is a very hard crystal, line 9 suggests that contentment is now formed, as if the pain has gone. This thought seems to build up an ironic situation, because contentment is achieved not by the need to achieve it, but by the inability and to respond to its call due to the numbness within. The third stanza starts with ‘This is the Hour of Lead.’ This means that the cold, gray times have come, after having passed the initial state of shock. Also, ‘Wood,’ ‘Stone,’ and ‘Lead...