Emily Dickinson's I Felt A Funeral In My Brain

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Emily Dickinson’s, “I felt a funeral in my brain” explains Dickinson’s deteriorating mental state, while also incorporating one of her most famous themes, death. Dickinson utilizes imagery, punctuation, and the extended metaphor of a funeral to explain the rites and the lingering aftermath of a funeral to showcase her insanity. Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” explores the speaker’s declining mental health through the metaphorical use of the image of a funeral. (everyone) The first stanza uses an extended metaphor to establish the poem’s setting of a funeral occurring in the speaker’s brain. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain/And Mourners to and fro/Kept treading - treading - till it seemed/That Sense was breaking through-” …show more content…

“And when they all were seated/A Service, like a Drum-/Kept beating - beating - till I thought/My mind was going numb-” (Dickinson 5-8). Dickinson includes a simile comparing the service to a drum. She then emphasizes the beating, as if this sensation in her head is relentless. A critic describes the drum: “Disorientation and compulsion are reinforced and heightened in stanza two by the unrelenting beating drum which threatens to paralyze or numb her mind completely,” (Ferlazzo 91). The final line in the stanza is a reflection of the speaker’s fear of the awaited consequences of the negative feelings enveloping her brain. Dickinson is experiencing a growing tension within her head, and as these feelings intensify, she becomes increasingly worried of the outcome of losing control. The use of a dash at the end of “numb” shows that the speaker is still unsure of herself and her mental health because it leaves her thought unfinished. This pressure the speaker is experiencing when developing an engulfing mental sickness is equated to the moments before the body is buried.

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