17 pages • 34 minutes read
Emily DickinsonI Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Attempting to Imagine Being Dead
The funeral in the speaker’s brain is not a literal ceremony; rather, it sets the stage for the speaker’s philosophical examination of what it might feel like to be dead. To approach this cognitively challenging topic, the poem goes from concrete description to abstract imagery as the speaker considers how to imagine one’s consciousness being absent from the world.
Stanzas 1-3 are full of the specifics of actual funeral services. There are “Mourners” (Line 2), a tolling death bell, and a procession that takes “a Box” (Line 9) away over a squeaky wooden floor. The speaker’s first attempt to know death is thus quite literal, seeing the mind as a corpse about to be buried. However, this tactic fails because the speaker can never actually picture being absent from this micro world: The funeral takes place in the speaker’s brain, the floorboards become the speaker’s “Soul” (Line 10), and the sentience that the speaker is trying to imagine disappearing is thus instead wholly and pervasively present.
Thus stymied, the speaker suddenly has a revelation: No consciousness can ever be fully extinguished because all of creation functions as “an Ear” (Line 14) whose purpose is to listen as “Space—began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell” (Lines 12-13). Absenting oneself from being this kind of ear—or imagining death as a final and irrevocable disappearance of the self—is devastating. In this scenario, the speaker is united with Silence, and together they are “some strange Race, / Wrecked, solitary” (Lines 15-16). The loneliness of this image of outcasts is so traumatic that the speaker must seek another way to see death.
The brief glimpse of the divine—the “heavens”—allows the speaker to access a revelation. Now working outside of logic, as “a Plank in Reason, broke” (Line 17), the speaker becomes mystical and Romantic, rather than rational and driven by the ideal of the Enlightenment. Transcending “reason” means falling. However, the speaker does not fall into punishment, like the famous falls of Lucifer or Adam and Eve from Christian mythology. Instead, the speaker falls into the realization that “Space” encompasses “a World, at every plunge” (Line 19). This evokes the Romantic notion of the sublime—the overwhelming experience of encountering a powerful natural or supernatural force. With this new understanding of death as a doorway into other realms of existence, the speaker “Finished knowing” (Line 20).
The Fragmenting of the Body
The theme of corporeal segmenting manifests when the speaker discusses the body as comprised of individual, and seemingly disconnected, elements. For example, the funeral isn’t happening to the speaker as a whole, but to different parts of their body: It takes place inside the speaker’s brain, which means that this organ becomes a setting for an elaborate ceremony that simultaneously entombs the rest of the speaker. Capitalizing the “Brain” (Line 1), thus making this noun into a proper name or title, adds to the effect, separating out the speaker’s brain from the other organs. Later, the speaker’s soul undergoes a similar removal—it becomes the flooring of the funeral space, as mourners “creak across” it (Line 10) in heavy boots. Emily Dickinson capitalizes “Soul” (Line 10), again using personification to give a distinct identity to this ostensibly integrated part of the speaker.
A slightly different effect is produced when the speaker reduces the phenomenon of being a person to “an Ear” (Line 14)—a single, separate body part. Instead of atomizing the body, this new formulation complicates the theme by simply withdrawing the function of any other body parts. Here, the speaker proposes that when “all the Heavens were a Bell” (Line 13), then the creation of this divine space can do nothing but listen and attempt to understand what the tolling bell’s message is.
Through this fragmentation of the physical self, Dickinson explores what death means to the human body. The theme arguably pulls the poem into the direction of trauma, a very modern term that Dickinson would never have used, but which does reflect the speaker’s turmoil at not being able to receive the revelation that almost comes when the mourners are “treading” (Line 2) or when the “bell” rings. Trauma breaks down the coherence of the body, fracturing one’s sense of self, leaving the speaker “[w]recked, solitary, here” (Line 16).
Hearing and Noises
Sounds mark the funeral: the stomp of the mourners treading back and forth in the speaker’s brain, the drum beat that makes the speaker’s mind go “numb” (Line 8), the creaking boots of the mourners funeral procession across the speaker’s soul, the tolling bell, the breaking of “a Plank in Reason” (Line 17), and even the sound of silence. Noise assaults the speaker throughout the poem, and silence is even more disturbing.
However, these unpleasant sounds also guide the speaker through the predicament of death. The harshness of the funeral is marked by the rhythmic sounds of marching feet and drums that suggest the futility and repetitiveness of one’s heartbeat—the plodding noise of the unexamined life that the speaker is trying to leave behind by imagining the reality of death.
Not all sounds are ostensibly bad. Once the space tolls, the speaker feels “all the Heavens were a Bell” (Line 13), linking the ringing to a message from the divine. At this point, the speaker recasts humanity as “an Ear” (Line 14)—an organ whose only function is to listen and attempt to discern what heaven’s bell is trying to get across.
Arguably, the poem’s most distressing sound is the alienating hush of silence. Joining this outcast being—“Silence” (Line 15) is capitalized and thus personified—the speaker provides an abject portrait of themselves: “Wrecked, solitary, here” (Line 16). The quiet is a place apart, where neither the heartbeat sounds of the funeral nor the clanging bell of heaven can be heard. This is what death would be like without the promise of an afterlife.
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