There is a pain so utter
Emily Dickinson
THERE is a pain so utter It swallows Being up, Then covers the abyss with trance So memory can step Around, across, upon it, As One within a swoon Goes steady, when an open eye Would drop him bone by bone.
Of note
The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, a professional body for trauma clinicians and researchers, includes this poem in its "Trauma and World Literature" series. The entry introduces it with biographer Alfred Habegger's view that Dickinson wrote with rare insight about "the way the mind protects itself."
FREE AND OPEN: Hello Doggo’s music, recordings and artwork: CC0 1.0, credit optional. The source poem has its own rights status: Poem is public domain.
TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1929 in Further Poems of Emily Dickinson · Text from Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929), ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, via Wikisource.
Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929)
Play narration using the audio controls. Download narration MP3