Tuesday, June 23, 2015

What is the tone of each line of "I felt a Funeral In My Brain"?

In the first line we are surprised that the funeral is
‘felt’ rather than experienced, and this creates a tone of depression or a terminal view
of the imagination coming to an end. The second and third lines show no peace in this
‘death’ with the mourners repetitive ‘treading’ which seems to add pressure to this
catastrophic brain event. ‘Sense… breaking through’ in the fourth line implies that
despite the funeral metaphor it may not mean a death, that there is hope of resurrection
from this torpid state.


The second stanza continues the
tone of desperate tension in that the beating sounds suggest a pulse, or a regular life
rhythm that has not yet been thwarted despite the ‘Service’ – the process of the funeral
and acknowledging the death – continuing. The poem has been said to be connected to a
mental breakdown, but here we may interpret hope; that not all is lost at this
point.


The contrast of being part of the funeral and yet
experiencing sensation in the third stanza shows that the narrator is not yet departed
the physical world –


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And then I heard them lift a Box
And
creak across my Soul



She is
cut off from the mourners, but experiencing still. There is an exciting contrast in the
death not being literal, but being experienced as if it were
so.


There is obvious isolation in the fourth stanza as the
narrator is ‘solitary’ in ‘silence’ as Dickinson uses the synecdoche of the bell to
approximate all sound, which the narrator is cut off
from.


The final stanza has been interpreted as the point of
mental breakdown-


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 And then a Plank in Reason,
broke,



However, as the
narrator does not fall into an abyss, or the fires of hell, but



hit a World,
at every plunge,



I feel that
she is not leaving the human world, but entering it. She is catapulted not out of the
world but into it. Dickinson was quite a recluse, and felt human contact more keenly and
sensitively than most.  I feel she is emerging into the world rather than out of it. The
incomplete final line


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 And Finished
knowing—then—



Marks the
unknown, the future of life, which perhaps doers not have the comforts of the clear
rituals of death that the narrator can adhere to. The future is uncertain, unwritten and
unknown. There is both excitement and trepidation in these
lines.

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