I Felt a Funeral in My Brain Analysis and Summary for Study Guides.
I Felt a Funeral in My Brain Analysis – Emily Dickinson wrote, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” in 1861, the beginning of what is regarded as her most creative period. The poem employs Dickinson’s characteristic use of metaphor and a rather experimental form to explore themes of madness, despair, and the irrational nature of the universe.
This intriguing poem presents a number of enigmas for the reader, like many of Emily Dickinson’s poems. In this article, it is our intention to offer a short summary and analysis of ‘I felt a Funeral, in My Brain’ and to try to clear away some of the obscurities and ambiguities.
It is important for us to start with the poems before we go into ‘I Felt a Funeral in My Brain Analysis’.
I Felt a Funeral in My Brain Analysis
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 –
A Brief Summary of the Poem
This summary quickly reveals how odd it is, even by Emily Dickinson’s wonderfully eccentric standards.
But then, ‘I felt a Funeral in My Brain’ is a poem that talks about going mad, about losing one’s grip on reality and feeling sanity slide away – at least, in one interpretation or analysis of the poem.
In the first stanza, the poem’s speaker uses the metaphor of the funeral for what is going on inside her head (we will assume that the speaker is female here, though this is only a surmise: Dickinson often uses male speakers in her poetry).
Her sanity and reason have died, and the chaos inside her mind is like the mourners at a funeral walking backward and forward.
The insistent repetition of ‘treading – treading’ evokes the hammering and turbulence within the speaker’s brain. These mourners sit down and the service takes place, featuring first a drum beating and then – following the creaking lift of the lid of a box – a sound that reminds the speaker of a bell (suggesting the tolling of a funeral bell to announce someone’s death).
Yet, as so often with an Emily Dickinson poem, the meaning is not – cannot – be as straightforward as this. The funeral suggests the loss of something, but is it reason and sanity that are lost, or is it reason and sanity that kill off something else? Who, or what is this ‘Funeral in my brain’ for? The poem withholds this information.
Note how at the end of that first stanza, Dickinson’s speaker says that ‘it seemed / That Sense was breaking through. If sense – common sense, reason, sanity – is breaking through, that could suggest that they are making progress, that sense is conquering irrationality and it is unreason, rather than reason, that has died.
This is, perhaps, an inevitable part of getting old: we lose our sense of fun, our childlike irrationality as our mind hardens into reason and sense (and being sensible).
Part of the problem lies in how we view the phrase ‘breaking through’, which could either mean ‘coming into view’ (like a shaft of sunlight through a gap in the curtains) or ‘falling and collapsing’ through something, such as the floorboards. (Note, in this connection, the image of the ‘plank’ later in the poem.)
What’s more, a funeral is traditionally a solemn and sober affair, formal and orderly: more evocative of sensible reason than wild irrationality. If irrationality (or madness) had broken through and taken over instead, wouldn’t we expect something more chaotic and disorderly to be going on than a funeral, with the mourners ‘seated’ and the mind going ‘numb’?
The latter parts of the poem seem to suggest that we were perhaps right first time, however, and that the speaker has lost her mind: the speaker finds herself along with ‘Silence’, solitary like a shipwrecked person.
And then, perhaps helped along by this solitude and silence, a ‘Plank in Reason’ broke, and the speaker describes the following sensation as like falling through the floor.
She loses her sense of being grounded and stable, falling ‘down, and down’. It appears that she has lost her reason. Yet the final line of Dickinson’s poem is ambiguous:
And Finished knowing – then –
‘Finished knowing’ as in stopped knowing something, or ended up by knowing something? ‘Finished knowing’ is ambiguous. Does the speaker gain or lose knowledge at the end of the poem? And if she does gain knowledge, knowledge of what?
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain Analysis
Stanza One
I felt a Funeral, In my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading-treading-till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through
Emily Dickinson, in this poem, writes everything through a keen sense of hearing. She hears all that is going on around her, and she feels it, but she cannot see it. First, she says that she felt a funeral in her brain.
The beginning of this poem is quite striking to the readers. Many people have been to a funeral, seen a funeral, or heard about a funeral. But this opening line causes the readers to wonder what it would be like to feel a funeral. Most can relate to some extent because they have felt grief and sorrow before.
However, as Dickinson continues to describe the sounds and feelings she experienced, the readers soon become aware that this is not a normal feeling of sorrow or grief that comes from loss. This is something different, and entirely personal.
The speaker describes the treading. She can hear and feel people walking “to and fro”. And for a moment, she thinks that maybe she will be able to understand what it is that she is experiencing.
This is why she says that she thinks that “sense was breaking through”. Dickinson uses capital letters for the words she wishes to personify as if they were proper nouns, actual beings.
The Funeral is capitalized because it is as if it is a separate being that she is encountering. Likewise, “Brain” is capitalized, because it is almost as if her own brain is existing apart from herself in this experience. The “Mourners” are, of course, people and so they have been given the capitalized letter for a proper noun.
Stanza Two
And when they all were seated
A Service, like a Drum-
Kept beating- beating- till I thought
My Mind was going Numb-
When her surroundings finally quiet down, the speaker can feel the silence and knows that the Mourners have been seated for the funeral. This is when she hears the drum roll in her mind.
Again, “Drum” is capitalized here because it is as if it were a separate being, personified as the one bringing the bad news. And it kept beating until she thought she would lose consciousness altogether.
Her “Mind” like her “Brain” seems to exist as a separate being altogether. The word “Numb” is also capitalized to personify it as something that is taking over her mind.
Stanza Three
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,
The speaker’s sense of hearing and ability to feel is still the primary focus of ‘I felt a Funeral, in My Brain’, and she describes the sound of a box being lifted. “Box” is also capitalized to signify the importance. The second line of this stanza signifies something important.
As the speaker hears a box being lifted, she also feels something “creak across [her] soul”. This hints that the funeral she has felt is actually her own. This is why she cannot see anything.
She can, however, feel it. And she is only partly conscious of what is going on around her. When the box is lifted, however, and she feels it, the readers can begin to understand that this is in fact, her own funeral. Perhaps the readers can understand this before the speaker herself is able to.
In the third line of this stanza, she is being carried in her coffin to her burial place. And the sound of those who carry her there is like “Boots of Lead”. Again, the words “Boots” and “Lead” are capitalized because it is as if they are the ones doing the action of carrying her in her coffin.
The final line in this stanza says that the “Space- began to toll”. The speaker can feel herself moving through space. She can hear the sound of the boots on the ground, but she cannot see what is happening.
Stanza Four
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being but an Ear.
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here-
At this point in ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’, it seems that the speaker is beginning to become aware of where she is and what is happening. She mentions Heaven and the possibility that it is ringing its bells for her, and she being only an “Ear” can hear heaven calling to her.
She cannot see what is going on around her, but she can hear and feel everything. And in this stanza, she begins to hear a metaphorical bell. The words “Bell” and “Ear” are capitalized, because she suggests that she herself has become nothing but an “Ear”. And the “Bell” is also a separate being, calling to her.
In the third line, the speaker realizes that she has become something strange. She is not among the human race anymore. This is why she says that she has become “some strange Race”. The word “Silence” is capitalized because it is personified as something that surrounds her and hovers over here and does not allow her to speak.
It is what has made her a “strange Race”, a race that is not human. She becomes aware that she is alone. She is destroyed, and alone. This is why she says that she is “Wrecked” and “solitary”.
Stanza Five
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down-
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing- then-
In this final stanza, the speaker becomes entirely aware of what has been happening to her. The funeral she felt in her brain, was her own. The coffin was her own. The “Boots of Lead” were those of her own pallbearers.
She is silent because she is dead. She is blind because her eyes have been closed in death. She can hear, and she can feel, but she is no longer a living, breathing human being.
This is the speaker’s terrifying description of death. In the first line of this stanza, she describes the “Plank” or piece of wood that broke as her coffin was lowered into the earth. She says that it broke in “Reason” because this is the moment when she became aware of what was actually happening.
The word “Reason” is capitalized, because it is personified as the one who finally broke through to the speaker, causing her to become fully aware of what was happening to her.
And as she “dropped down, and down” she claims that she “hit a World, at every plunge”. Worlds of different thoughts hit her as she plunged to her final resting place.
Perhaps she felt confusion, panic, wonder, maybe even acceptance. The speaker does not explicitly explain the content or significance of the worlds that she experienced as she was being lowered into her grave, but she does reveal that when she came to the very bottom of her grave, the full realization of her own death dawned on her.
‘I felt a Funeral in my Brain’ analysis is one of Emily Dickinson’s most puzzling poems in that its meaning could be interpreted in two very divergent ways.
The ambiguities aren’t simply a matter of difference in meaning, but of sheer opposition. Whose funeral is it anyway? Our analysis cannot answer that question. We welcome your thoughts on a truly troubling, but brilliant, poem.
And feel free to add your thoughts about the poem in the comment box below.
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