“After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” is among Emily Dickinson’s most unique and affecting poems. In three short stanzas, Dickinson registers the subtle interior procession of thoughts and feelings that follow an episode of pain and grief. The poem is especially memorable for Dickinson’s distinctive and unpredictable use of imagery to render the speaker’s interior landscapes into language.

Skills: analysis, drawing inferences from text, close reading, identifying the relationship between words

About This Document

The Owl Eyes Imagery activity gives students an opportunity to practice identifying and analyzing imagery. Imagery within a text creates a sensory experience that can connect readers to a text’s setting, atmosphere, or overall aesthetic. Studying imagery will help students understand how narrators or principal characters feel. The main components of this worksheet include the following:

• A brief introduction to the text
• A handout on types of imagery with examples from classic texts
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• Selected examples of imagery from the text

In completing this worksheet, students will learn to identify and analyze different kinds of imagery in order to develop close reading skills and identify the effect imagery has on their reading experience.