Renowned as one of the creators of the American poetic voice, Emily Dickinson is renowned for her unique poetic treatment of the dark subject of personal trauma. Although his poems are based on his reactions to traumatic events, they are still relatable to a wide audience because he omits the actual description of the event, instead focusing on what comes after. His poetry explores how trauma permanently alters the human psyche. A specific example comes from “The Night of the First Day Had Come” in Paper 15, which discusses each mental state the speaker goes through following a distressing incident. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In this poem, the speaker's naive attitude toward pain becomes progressively darker as he gains an understanding of the situation. Dickinson conveys this tonal shift through her references to time. This can be seen in the first stanza when he writes, “The night of the first day had come / And thankful that a thing / so terrible had been borne” (Dickinson 1-3), as the speaker seems to believe that the pain following the L The unnamed incident will end after just one night. The speaker does not realize that the effects of trauma can be long-lasting and that there are aftershock-like repercussions that follow the event. This belief continues in the second stanza, when Dickinson writes “And so to mend it he gave me work / Until another Morn” (Dickinson 7-8). Once again, the speaker does not understand that it will take more than a day to recover from a traumatic event. It is only in the third stanza that the speaker is confronted with the shocking realization that just because the physical event is over does not mean that the pain it can cause is over. The poem takes on a darker tone when Dickinson writes, “so great a day / As yesterday in pairs, / Explained its horror to my face” (Dickinson 9-11). It is at this moment that the speaker is confronted with reality and this change is followed by the slow unraveling of his sanity. The speaker displays PTSD-like symptoms in the second half of the piece, which is reflected in the lines “And tho 'tis Years ago that Day / My Brain still chuckling” (Dickinson 17-18). At this point in the piece, any hope the speaker may have had is gone and she is trapped reliving the horror of the event years after it occurred. Similarly, Dickinson uses a tense shift to indicate how much time has passed since the accident. The first three stanzas are told entirely in the past tense, as if the speaker is telling a story from an earlier stage in his life, and in the fourth stanza there is a shift to the present tense in the line “My Brain keeps giggling still” (Dickinson 16 ).Dickinson continues to write in the present tense in the final stanza, writing "That person I was / And this doesn't feel the same" (Dickinson 18-19), thus indicating that the speaker still suffers from the symptoms of madness in the present. Dickinson's allusion to the extreme passage of time indicates how difficult it is to fully recover from trauma, as one must always live with the memory of the event. Furthermore, the harmful effects of trauma are conveyed through the use of figurative language by Dickinson. In the first stanza, he uses personification to express the speaker's inability to communicate following the incident in the lines "I told my soul to sing / It said its strings were broken / Its bow to the atoms it blew" (Dickinson 4-5). His use of the words “broken” and “to atoms.