A Funeral in My Brain
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Daniel Harouni
July 13, 2005
Revised-Essay
I Felt a Funeral in My Brian
“I felt a funeral in my brain” by Emily Dickinson traces the speaker’s descent into madness. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the speaker’s descending madness and the horror most of us feel about going crazy.
Dickinson uses the metaphor of a funeral to represent the speaker’s sense that a part of her is dying. This is reason for her, being overwhelmed by the irrationality of the unconscious. A funeral is an appropriate image for this ordeal. The most obvious connotation with a funeral is death. Also a funeral is a formal event, whose rules and procedures suggest control and order. The control and order implicit in a funeral contrast ironically with the lack of control and loss of rationality that threaten the speaker. In addition, a funeral marks the passage from one state to another, life to death, sanity to insanity. However, the poet is not observing the funeral but is feeling it. She is both, observer of the funeral and participant, indicating that the self is divided. The end of the poem illustrates that the self will have shattered into pieces or chaos.
The mourners are a metaphor to express her pain. Their “treading” indicates a pressure that is pushing her down. The repetition of the word “treading,” gives emphasis and suggests the action. The speaker has a momentary impression that reason “sense” is escaping or being lost. The pressure of the