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Emily Dickinson's Poem: Deterioration Of The Brain

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Emily Dickinson's Poem: Deterioration Of The Brain
Explication on Emily Dickinson Poem: Deterioration of the Brain

Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” 340 [280] exemplifies two meanings in the poem. The speaker is either losing her mind or she is having some serious pains in her head that makes her wish she were deceased. The speaker sight sees the machineries of the human mind under pressure and attempts to copy the stages of a mental breakdown through the overall metaphor of a funeral. The mutual ceremonials of a funeral are used by Dickinson to mark the stages of the speaker’s mental breakdown until she faces a devastation that no words can clear. This poem sets a very dark and black tone. When you think of a funeral you think of death, sadness and sad relatives moaning and grieving. Often times you have the guilty ones (loud ones) and love ones (silent weepers) at the funeral, but both are showing signs of emotion for the person who has passed away. “And Mourners to and fro, Kept treading- treading-till it seemed, That Sense was …show more content…
It gives present what bothers her more than anything without giving us the consent to creep into the concealment of her own feelings or without actually telling us that she is having some mental issues. She never states what is bothering her and neither does she say how it is effecting her, but she does let us know that her brain is troubled. The poem starts with the speaker feeling the funeral, then, she talks about not feeling the funeral. It was not until the second to last stanza, that the speaker comes out of her numbness, and gives us a hint that it is pertaining to what is happening in her mind and that is allegorical of her in a mental state, not the tale of an actual drawn out funeral. I believe Dickinson used (funeral) because it was something everybody could relate too. She never gives us information on how she feels about the funeral. Neither did she say that she was an attendee of the
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