The poem is a lyric, as it’s short and focuses on a personal issue—how pain impacts a person’s body and mind. As the poem guides the reader through the consequences of acute suffering, it’s a didactic poem. In other words, it teaches the reader a lesson about trauma, providing a guide for the course suffering takes and how a person might survive it. The genre turns the speaker into a teacher, and the reader—the audience—into a student. By the conclusion of the poem, the audience learns how a person processes extreme distress and what permits a person to move on with their life.

The poem’s speaker doesn’t have a name or palpable characteristics. The speaker is a mere voice. They’re a vehicle for Emily Dickinson to convey her beliefs on the effects of suffering. As the authorial context reveals, it’s possible to think of Dickinson as the speaker, but the reader doesn’t have to make Dickinson the speaker to fathom the poem. Keeping the speaker separate from Dickinson acknowledges the difference between Dickinson and her poetic personae, and it reinforces the poem’s detached view of pain.