I Felt A Funeral March 11

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
BY EM IL Y DIC KI NS ON
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 -
ANALYSIS
‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is poem number 280 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete

Poems. This intriguing poem presents a number of enigmas for the reader, like many
of Emily Dickinson’s poems. In this post 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.

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
A brief summary of the poem quickly reveals how odd it is, even by Emily
Dickinson’s wonderfully eccentric standards. But then ‘I felt a Funeral, in my
Brain’ is 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 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.
LITERATURE
A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
A critical reading of a classic Dickinson poem by Dr Oliver Tearle



A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

Then Space – began to toll,

Wrecked, solitary, here –
And I dropped down, and down –
And Finished knowing – then –
LEARN MORE
A brief summary of the poem quickly reveals how odd it is, even by Emily
Dickinson’s wonderfully eccentric standards. But then ‘I felt a Funeral, in my
Brain’ is 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 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.
Q1: Who was the speaker.
Q2: how the metaphor relate to the speaker?
Q3. Explain why their is sanity being mentioned in the first stanza?
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.
Q4. Relate the mourners in the poem and the mourners of today?
Q5. Explain the line “ THe funeral suggest the loss of something.
Q6 Who was the reason behind their sanity?
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.)
Q7 What do you mean by “ Breaking through” from the poem and your own
experience?
Q8. What I s the image of the “plank’ in the poem mean?

LITERATURE
A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
A critical reading of a classic Dickinson poem by Dr Oliver Tearle



A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

Then Space – began to toll,

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And I dropped down, and down –
And Finished knowing – then –
About Emily Dickinson
Perhaps no other poet has attained such a high reputation after their death that was
unknown to them during their lifetime. Born in 1830, Emily Dickinson lived her
whole life within the few miles around her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. She
never married, despite several romantic correspondences, and was better-known as a
gardener than as a poet while she was alive.
Nevertheless, it’s not quite true (as it’s sometimes alleged) that none of Dickinson’s
poems was published during her own lifetime. A handful – fewer than a dozen of
some 1,800 poems she wrote in total – appeared in an 1864 anthology, Drum Beat,
published to raise money for Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War. But it was four
years after her death, in 1890, that a book of her poetry would appear before the
American public for the first time and her posthumous career would begin to take off.
Dickinson collected around eight hundred of her poems into little manuscript books
which she lovingly put together without telling anyone. Her poetry is instantly
recognisable for her idiosyncratic use of dashes in place of other forms of
punctuation. She frequently uses the four-line stanza (or quatrain), and, unusually for
a nineteenth-century poet, utilises pararhyme or half-rhyme as often as full rhyme.
The epitaph on Emily Dickinson’s gravestone, composed by the poet herself, features
just two words: ‘called back’.
Campus Journalism
Out of the Emily Dickinson, please wrote a news article using hard news and soft
news.

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I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)

And when they all were seated,

And then I heard them lift a Box

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is poem number 280 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

A critical reading of a classic Dickinson poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is poem number 280 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And when they all were seated,

And then I heard them lift a Box

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

Q1: Who was the speaker.

Q2: how the metaphor relate to the speaker?

Yet, as so often with an Emily Dickinson

Q6 Who was the reason behind their sanity?

Q8. What I s the image of the “plank’ in the poem mean?

A critical reading of a classic Dickinson poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ is poem number 280 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And when they all were seated,

And then I heard them lift a Box

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

About Emily Dickinson

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