Emily Dickinson Imagery

In this poem “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain”, Emily Dickinson seems to be suffering a traumatic experience or situation at that time, difficult to control inside her brain. She attempts to explain this painful emotion through this poem using a variety of literary techniques that include metaphor, symbolism, personification and others. It is clear that Dickinson is not using her sense of reasoning in this poem, she seems gone from the world around her, as if her mind state is deteriorating and she is going from sanity to insanity. From my point of view of the poem, Emily seems to be trying to convey readers her own tragic experience from the perspective of a dead person that is still able to use some of her senses and is conscious the whole time narrating the poem inside a coffin. However, it 's still not clear whether the speaker is living or dead, but she is definitely afraid and disturbed of what will happen when she finally loses her sanity.

Emily Dickinson’s poem, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-“is a profound portrayal of the debilitating process of grief human beings undergo when confronted with a horrific tragedy. The response to that ultimate pain is the predominance of numbness, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-/The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-“(1-2). This is a poem that must be read slowly to become saturated in the melancholy, the dehumanization of suffering as it affects each aspect of the body without reference to the chaotic emotionality of it. The abundance of metaphors within Dickinson’s poem provides the means to empathize the necessity of numbness. It is also through the use of punctuation and capitalization, depicting the presence of a

In the poem, by Emily Dickinson, the speaker conveys multiple literary devices to show the complexity of the death of her friend on “The last night she lived.” The speaker utilizes juxtaposition in the first stanza in order to show an extreme pain towards the idea of death yet treat it as an understatement. Another emotion the speaker conveys through diction is how inevitable the death of her friend is, how she can do nothing about it other than be with her by her side. In the third stanza the speaker utilizes imagery when she talks about one room being filled with death and the other of those who will live. Lastly, the speaker facilitates diction to convey the jealousy for the woman who has died and no longer has to deal with emotions when she says,” A jealousy for her arose.” All of these emotions and actions all contribute to the complex attitude the speaker portrays in the poem.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 1800s. Dickinson, who was known to be quite the recluse, lived and died in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, spending the majority of her days alone in her room writing poetry. What few friends she did have would testify that Dickinson was a rather introverted and melancholy person, which shows in a number of her poems where regular themes include death and mortality. One such poem that exemplifies her “dark side” is, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”. In this piece, Dickinson tells the story of a soul’s transition into the afterlife showing that time and death have outright power over our lives and can make what was once significant become meaningless.

Though death is accepted by some, others dread the idea of it. Those that are terrified of death can become absolutely consumed with horror. The poem “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” by Emily Dickinson describes a scene in which the character is suffering through mental deterioration and lacks the ability to control their emotions. The poem depicts the weakening of the character’s mind through the imagined occurrence of a funeral within her brain. The distressful situation of the funeral caused “mourners, to and fro, [to keep] treading, treading” (Source B). Once the mourners were seated for the funeral to begin, the “service like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I thought my mind was going numb” (Source B) and the agitated mood of the funeral increased. The alarming beat of the drum caused such commotion that the character became dazed and traumatized further. The

Emily Dickinson concentrates many of her poems on the theme of death, predominantly her own. These “poems about death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above all a refusal to be comforted (“Emily Dickinson 1830-1886” 1659). While this was not an out of the ordinary topic during the American Romantic era, Dickinson seemed near obsessive in her focus. Additionally, Dickinson seems questionable in her thoughts on religion, another theme popular during the American Romantic era. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” both explicitly examine the concept of death, the afterlife, and the author’s obsession with the melancholy.

“The straightforward mention of ‘reason’ suffering some kind of misfortune makes it hard not to conclude that Dickinson is specifically referring to some kind of madness. She is not using a metaphor of a storm in this poem. She is openly declaring that she felt as if something in her brain has died” (Hart, Par. 9). While Dickinson tends to use metaphors in most of her poems to describe her emotions, the only metaphorical reference in this poem is the actual funeral itself. The funeral is simply a representation of the feelings of depression taking over her brain. More symbolism can be interpreted in this poem when considering the confined life that Dickinson lived. She spent much of her time in her room, isolating herself from the world and writing poetry. As the casket is part of a funeral service, it can be interpreted that it is a resemblance of her mind and body being trapped inside a restricted place, where she cannot escape. From an article written by Eleanor Wilner, she describes how Dickinson’s secluded life contributed to her pains in life and desire to write poetry. “The struggle involved in such a total project of suppression is reflected in many of her poems, like the often quoted ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,’ which suggest a mind threatened with dissolution, turning it on itself, walling itself up as she did in her father’s house, using

Dickinson’s views of death come with a very natural feeling of dying, and at the same time uses personification, metaphors and symbolism to connect to the readers and make them understand how she views death. In the first couple stanzas of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, the speaker is representing the image of dying and how it’s very natural. In the first sentence of the poem, and throughout the

All three poems had their unique features, but I preferred “Hope #314.”. One of the reasons why Emily Dickinson’s poem grasped my attention was because of the figurative language she used. “ And sweetest in the Gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm,” is my favorite stanza. This stanza represents how all of us can still have hope regardless of our own storms. Our own storms may get terrible at one point of life, but we’ll always be able to count with hope since it’s infinite. The bird is a symbol of hope which was the main idea of the poem. “ A Dream Deferred,” by Langston Hughes, provided several rhetorical questions, “ Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like

In the poem "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" Emily Dickinson exposes a person's intense anguish and suffering as they sink into a state of extreme madness. The poem is a carefully constructed analysis of the speaker's own mental experience. Dickinson uses the image of a funeral-service to symbolize the death of the speaker's sanity. The poem is terrifying for the reader as it depicts a realization of the collapse of one's mental stability, which is horrifying for most. The reader experiences the horror of the speaker's descending madness as the speaker's mind disintegrates and loses its grasp on reality. "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,"

Despite the fact that Dickinson's poem “Death sets a Thing significant” has a more depressing overall tone, most of her writings on death are of “tender delight,” as Ruth Flanders McNaughton remarks. Her poems that mention death are unique because Dickinson speaks so gleefully of the grave. In “The grave my little cottage is,” the narrator refers to her grave as a home that they keep clean and make tea. Dickinson describes graves a “cordial” and writes coffins as “Sweet safe houses- glad

Dickinson’s poem " I felt a Funeral, in my Brain", is a prime example of complicity embodied by simple style and language. In this piece, Dickinson chronicles psychic fall. The use of many different devices such as sound, repetition, and metaphors, all help to develop the theme of the poem.

In the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” Emily Dickinson uses symbolism to convey some sort of mental funeral that the speaker is experiencing. The funeral image that Dickinson depicts in the first line of the poem: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” does not literally represent a funeral, but it is used to symbolism a mental breakdown and agony that the speaker is going through. By using this symbolism, the speaker is imagining the death of old ways of thought. Dickinson writes that when the funeral service was “like a Drum—“ (Dickinson 43) and that it “Kept beating—beating—till I thought My Mind was going numb—“ (43), leaving readers believing that the speaker is going mad. By depicting this image, Dickinson reveals that with the death of old thought; there is some sort of numbness or pain that is necessary to “progress to a better state” (Goldfarb 2). By repeating the beating sound two times, along with the rhyming sequence in the previous lines of the poem, Dickinson is stressing the numbness and the importance of it.

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.