I Felt A Funeral In My Brain Analysis

In the poem "I felt A Funeral In My Brain", there are many different ways to interpret the meaning of this poem. It can be assumed that the speaker is going through a very traumatic event in her life. The funeral going on in her head was very traumatic for the speaker, and she did not like it at all. The poem could be the metaphor for the traumatic event. It is also possible that the speaker just has a really bad headache and wanted to write about it. And it can be assumed the speaker was not a social person, so she probably did not appreciate being around other people. She was obviously very afraid of death, or maybe she was very curious about what would happen to her after hearing death. The fact that the image is reiterated …show more content…
In the poem, “treading—treading” and “beating—beating” this symbolizes the slow pace of the elevation of her pain and it is very hard to read the poem in anything other than the dragging of the pace in the funeral. When Dickinson writes that the mourners kept treading through her brain in the leaden boots until “Sense was breaking through” she says two things: the actual physical sensations described have broken through into the brain itself as if it were a floor beneath the feet, and that her conscious senses were being broken, and the falling through the floor of the brain. This situates an image sets up in the last stanza when a “Plank in Reason” breaks and her aware self-drops “down, and down” until ultimately she lost all her knowledge and awareness. The floor that the speaker is standing on literally drops out from beneath her.This floor is made of planks, so it must be wood. The idea of a wooden floor described in the poem fit with the illustration of creaking and breaking earlier in the