Literary Analysis of Dickinson’s I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson grew up in an affluent Puritan family. Although her parents had three children, they were not involved with them. Dickinson noted that her dad was “too busy with his briefs” and wrote a friend “I never had a mother.” With access to high-quality education and her preference for isolation, she became interested in creating works of literature. Before her death, and she spent several decades writing poems in her family home. Unfortunately, her “hard-to-read handwriting,” made publishers shy away from her literary works, so they published only seven poems during her lifetime. After her death in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, found almost 900 unpublished poems by Dickinson. The majority of them are unnamed and are undated. In 1955 on Thomas H. Johnson published a three-volume edition of her poems. In these, he referred to each unnamed poem as a number. Today her works are usually cited by either their number in the Johnson addition or the first line of the poem.

The themes of her hundreds of poems were usually subjects like change, death, God, love, nature, secrets or truth. In the many poems that make the reader has subtle changes in emotions, the choice of words and the imagery puts “emphasis on the ritual of death with a movement from sense to death”. In some of her poems the rhyme pattern is irregular and then becomes regulated. This could portray a loss of control or if it was the other way around, a gaining of control. Repetition and other literary devices emphasize her belief that time will continue after humankind. A great example of this is a repetition in “Because I could not stop for Death. In the poem I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, one of the first qualities of the poem that a reader would notice is the use of a multitude of dashes”. They represent the idea that words and statements come quickly and then leave. Even though Dickinson preferred to isolate herself alone in her room, historians believe that she did not have many or any relationships. In fact, neither her nor her sister married.

Although Dickinson was to be presumed to be mentally unstable, she still had a high degree of poetic skills. Richard B. Sewall noted, “she seems as close to touching bottom here as she ever got. But there was nothing wrong with her mind when she wrote [this] poem.” Although readers and prominent literary figures get a sense of disorder and loss of self from Dickinson’s poems, we must keep in mind the use of particular elements of poetry. Poetry requires a lot of reflection on oneself and reasoning. In many of her poems, there is movement in a negative direction. This negative energy could imply a journey to hell or entering psychological and spiritual depths. Her poems were “less straightforward, hinting at inscrutable silences and things left unspoken.” 

The first line of I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, reads “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and the tone of the poem is already depressing. Funerals are no happy event and the influence of the poem is debatable. The funeral could be a metaphor or an experience of Dickinson. She could express her feelings about an actual funeral or the deceased or the funeral is a metaphor for her deep, dark thoughts and feelings. The recurring topic and personification of death in Dickinson’s work reinforce the idea that she was convinced that death is inevitable and will arrive shortly. Another possibility is that the poems were a way of distracting or expressing what physical death means. According to Dickinson, “it is this oblivion where terror resides, not the process of dying.” She had believed death is almost a comfortable experience and that the uncontrollable part was the most terrifying. Most of her issues were within her mind. With all the time she had on her hands, she could think and overthink everything. Without her mental disorientation, she would not have been able to create stark and bleak literature. The amount of isolation kept the inside of her mind constantly busy. All this thinking resulted in vivid imagery. The concrete imagery communicates concepts and scenes with sensory language. Her use of words that represent colors, objects, textures, and sounds, etc. can help readers create a powerful image in their head while reading her poems.

She often used symbols in her work. A perfect example of using symbols regularly is the poem given the name I felt a Funeral, in my Brain. At the beginning of the first stanza, the speaker seems to try to face and interrogate death. The poem almost has a feeling of two different speaking perspectives of the living and the living dead.

The length of each line and height of each stanza helps to establish a tone and can also represent symbols. In I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, the lines and structure of lines are reminiscent of an epitaph on headstones:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

Dashed lines suggest ideas and statements come and go fast. These short dashes can also represent the life of an organism or idea.

Another theory Dickinson believed in is that death is indicated by loud bursts of sound and then instant silence. A real-life example could be thunder claps before silence. Death is sudden and stunning than it and everything else becomes silent. Another comparable scenario is “a clumsy pianist, stunning the subject with a hammering music, before dealing a knockout blow like a thunderbolt.” The repetition of the words “trading” and “beating” in I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, help the reader “hear what the speaker is hearing. Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that “the speaker is reporting, beyond the grave, on what went on at her own funeral.” Another interpretation of the funeral is the death of the love for Samuel Bowles.

The term “extended metaphor” is a metaphor that continues throughout a multiple sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem. It is often over one sentence and sometimes comprises a full paragraph or stanza. The funeral has mourners, a service, and the departure of a coffin in it. Dickinson’s “Plank of Reason” is a biblical reference to a man who crosses over the abyss between the world and heaven on a plank labeled “Faith.” If the plank were to break, the speaker would plummet downwards. The decent/drop represents either a journey to hell on psychological and/or spiritual depths.

With all the themes and symbols in mind, we must consider the context of her life. During her life, they knew Edgar Allan Poe for his use of onomatopoeia and “his explorations of subjective, often crazed, mental states.” His writing style with crazy mental states obviously heavily influenced Emily Dickinson. She did not refer to major historical events or other people, such as the oppression of 19th-century women and civil wars. Born into wealth, with access to quality education; she was nowhere near the average homemaker of America. Attention to psychology during this period also sparked some of her deep thoughts in her writings. Losing love for Samuel Gompers was not the only relationship that inspired her work. The death of a close friend, Sophia Holland, probably plummeted her into a deeper depression.