Depressing Tone of Dickinson's Poem 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain'
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson grew up in an affluent Puritan family. Although her parents had 3 children, they were not very involved with them. Emily noted that her dad was “too busy with his briefs” and wrote a friend “I never had a mother.” With access to a high quality education and her personal preference for isolation, she became interested in creating works of literature. Before her death and she spent multiple decades writing poems in her family home. Unfortunately her “hard-to-read handwriting,” made publishers shy away from her literary works, so only 7 poems were published during her lifetime. After her death in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, found almost 900 unpublished poems by Emily. Majority of them are unnamed and are undated. In 1955 on Thomas H Johnson published a three volume edition of her poems. In these he referred to each unnamed poem as a number. Today her works are usually cited by either their number in the Johnson addition for the first line of the poem.
The themes of her hundreds of poems were usually subjects like change, death, God, love, nature, secrets, or truth. In the many poems that make the reader have subtle changes in emotions, the choice of words and the imagery puts “emphasis on the ritual of death with a movement from sense to death”.
The first line of I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, reads “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and the tone of the poem is already depressing. Funerals are no happy event and the influence of the poem is debatable. The funeral could be a metaphor or an actual experience of Emily. She could be expressing her feelings about an actual funeral or the deceased or the funeral is a metaphor for her deep, dark thoughts and feelings. The The recurring topic and personification of death in Dickinson’s work reinforces the idea that she was convinced that death is inevitable and will arrive shortly. Another possibility is that the poems were a way of distracting or expressing the idea of what physical death means. Oblivion is more terrifying than the process of dying. Man versus self. Mental disorientation. Stark and bleak. The inside of mind. Concrete imagery.
She frequently used symbols in her work. A perfect example of using symbols regularly in a poem is the poem given the name I felt a Funeral, in my Brain. Confront and interrogate death. Lines and structure of lines that is reminiscent of a epitaphs on headstones. Dashed lines suggest ideas and statements come and go fast. Thunder clap before silence. S and D sounds in “safe in their alabaster chambers”. Death is stunning and then you are silent. Death shows metaphors for birth, growth, and death. “Trading”. “Beating”. “Creak” in boots of lead. Burial. Grave. Ear. Shipwreck/“wrecked solitary”. Funeral. Extended metaphor. Sound/silence. Unity and isolation. Plank. Decent/drop. Break plank. Death. Death of reason.
Although Dickinson was to be presumed to be mentally unstable, she still had a high degree of poetic skills. Richard B Sewall noted “she seems as close to touching bottom here as she ever got. But there was nothing wrong with her mind when she wrote [this, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”] poem.” Although readers and prominent literary figures get the sense of disorder and loss of self from Emily’s poems, we must keep in mind the use of particular elements of poetry. Poetry requires a lot of reflecting on oneself and reasoning. In many of her poems there is movement in a negative direction. This negative energy could imply a journey to hell or entering into psychological and spiritual depths. Her poems are difficult to read and vague yet very detailed.
