Key Information:
- Title: “I Felt A Funeral in My Brain”
- Poet: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
- Published: 1896 (posthumous)
Theme: Madness, The Nature of Despair, The Irrational Universe.
Literary Device: Conceit, Metaphor, Simile, Alliteration, Repetition, Stream of Consciousness.
Summary
The poem “I Felt A Funeral in My Brain” was written by Emily Dickinson. It was published posthumously in 1896. She uses some wonderful imagery in this poem. In this poem, she sheds light on what the afterlife might look like.
The poem begins abruptly. In the first stanza, the poet says that he can feel a funeral in his brain. Here she is talking about her own funeral. She feels like she’s dead, but she can feel everything around her. She felt that people around her were lamenting. She is trying to understand what is really going on.
The second stanza says that the people who had been running around then fell silent. Now the poet feels that something like a drum has sounded and that drum continues to beat. After a while, the poet started to feel that her brain was getting numb as if she was getting lost.
At the beginning of the third stanza, the poet hears the sound of lifting the coffin. That is, she feels that the coffin in which she is lying is being carried to another place. People carry her on their shoulders and she also hears the sound of the boots of those who are carrying the coffin.
In the fourth stanza, the poet feels that she is no longer part of the human community. She feels very strange herself. It feels like heaven is calling her. She cannot see but hears everything. An uneasy silence all around. She became very lonely, no one around her except her own body and mind.
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