I Felt A Funeral In My Brain Analysis Essay

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In Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” the speaker expresses his/her collapse of his/her mental stability. The poem is set in the mind of the speaker, which serves as the location of the funeral, as described by the speaker. Dickinson’s use of style, rhythm, rhyme, and auditory imagery emphasizes the progressive deterioration of the speaker’s rationality of sense.
The poem opens, “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain/And Mourners to and fro,” the poetess uses capitalization to highlight the speaker’s tactile feelings or something peculiar (1-2). The capitalization of “Funeral” and “Brain” is significant for there is death physically occurring inside the speaker (1). The funeral serves as a suitable metaphor conveying the turmoil arising inside the speaker’s brain. The “Mourners,” a capitalized word, are moving “to and fro,” which when compared to traditional mourners, these actions are peculiar (2). The last lines of the stanzas follow, “Kept treading—treading—till it seemed/That Sense was breaking through—,” introduces rhyme, and rhythm through auditory imagery (3-4). The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABCB where the second and fourth lines of the stanzas slant rhyme. “Fro” and “through” are the slant rhymes in this stanza. The auditory imagery of the “Mourners” repetitive “treading” connotes stomping feet, which introduces a steady march of a funeral procession rhythm (2,4). This rhythm of a march in the brain of the speaker introduces the idea of a constant, steady pressure on the mental process of the speaker. The repetition of treading emphasizes the action because of it’s ability to cause “Sense [to] break[ing] through” (4). “Sense,” is defined as being fragile as it is able to be broken (4). The speaker is physicall...

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...recked” and “solitary” (16). Dickinson returns to the style of ending the stanzas with a dash, only emphasizing the third stanza as a transformative stanza.
The final stanza states, “And then a plank in reason, broke,/And I dropped down and down—“ serving as a metaphor of standing on a plank to describe the speaker's final descent into mental instability (17-18). The speakers hold onto her mental stability was insecure causing her to “hit a world at every plunge” (19). Unlike all other stanzas, the last words in the second and fourth lines do not rhyme, which is used to emphasize a transition. The final articulation of the speaker stops mid-way, ending in “then—” suggesting the speaker could have committed suicide as the crushing of her “Soul” and numbness of her “Mind” prove to be unbearable. In the end, the burial marks the death of the speaker’s mind (20,8,10).

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