Emily Dickinson's Poems

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

Death is a controversial and sensitive subject. When discussing death, several questions come to mind about what happens in our afterlife, such as: where do you go and what do you see? Emily Dickinson is a poet who explores her curiosity of death and the afterlife through her creative writing ability. She displays different views on death by writing two contrasting poems: one of a softer side and another of a more ridged and scary side. When looking at dissimilar observations of death it can be seen how private and special it is; it is also understood that death is inevitable so coping with it can be taken in different ways. Emily Dickinson’s poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died” show both

The ensuing line states, “He kindly stopped for me” (Line 2). From this, the reader could possibly deduce that the narrator was glad to see death. Dickinson was known throughout her life to have been oddly fascinated with death and immortality, so it’s not out of the question to assume that this fascination was reflected in the narrator’s personality and was why death was welcomed. However, a more likely conclusion is that Dickinson was merely being ironic. Death is ominous as it is a leap into the unknown; we simply cannot fathom the eternity of afterlife. Taking us without consent from our lives (which we already have no power over), and thrusting us into an incomprehensible eternity is not exactly a kind act to commit, thus irony was used in this case. This further strengthens the idea that our lives are out of our control because with or without consent, death will choose to take a life whenever he pleases.

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

“I Felt a Funeral in my Brain”, by Emily Dickenson, is a poem of despair, narrating the experience and feelings associated with sinking into an episode of depression, and arguably losing her sanity in the process. Depression is defined as feelings of severe despondency and dejection, and is described as a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest, affecting how you think, feel, and behave. Creating difficulty in maintaining day to day life, and feeling as though life is not worth living.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential poets of all time, and has a unique way of using literal imagery to paint a picture in the readers mind. The best poets are those that excel at using their words to create clear, concrete images and intrigue their reader. Dickinson began writing poetry around the year 1855, and prospered for another 10 years. Some of her most famous poems include “I Taste a liquor Never Brewed”, “Success is Counted Sweetest”, and “Wild nights – Wild Nights!”, all of which have influenced many aspiring writers to become poets, and show her true colors as a poet. Among her works of poetry, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, is one that resembles the frequent patterns of Dickinson’s style of

The subject of death, including her own was a very prevalent theme in Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. Some may find her preoccupation with death morbid, but this was not unusual for her time period. The mindset during Ms. Dickinson’s time was that of being prepared to die, in the 19th century people died of illness and accidents at an alarming rate, not to mention the Civil War had a high number of casualties, she also lived 15 years of her youth next to a cemetery. Dickinson’s view on death was never one of something to be feared she almost romanized death, in her poem “Because I Could not Stop for Death”, she actually personifies death while narrating from beyond the grave. In the first stanza she states “I could not stop for

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,"

In I felt a Funeral in my Brain Emily Dickson crosses the boundary of sanity to insanity, struggle to a forced acceptance, and life to death through an extended funeral metaphor and powerful figurative language.

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.

This poem conjures images of a solemn ceremony in which the soul reigns superior by shutting out everyone, including the emperor, similar to the shutting out of everyone that Dickinson did. In one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “I heard a Fly buzz,” the theme of death is presented as well as a symptomatic characteristic of bi-polar disorder. The poem itself epitomizes her preoccupation with death and the macabre and also shows how the small, normally ignorable sound of a fly buzzing becomes the only thing heard, she magnifies this sound in a situation when it seems that everything else is much more important, but this inability to drown out extraneous noises is typical of someone suffering from manic-depression. The form of this poem employs all of Dickinson’s formal patterns: trimeter and tetrameter iambic lines, her specific use of the dash to interrupt the meter of the poem, and it is in ABCB rhyme scheme.

We are immediately made aware at the beginning of the poem that there is nothing out of place about this day except that they lost a family member. Dickinson was letting it be known that while the rest of the world continued as usual, they sat there in a room watching one of their suffering family members take her last breath. Death makes life different somehow. As Dickinson states, “-this to Us Made Nature Different” (lines 3,4), she tells us that when her family member died it changed them. This poem shows the raw emotion of sadness and the effect of grief overtaken her in just 6 short stanzas.

Emily Dickinson was thought to have an obsession with death due to her many poems and letters that contain the subject. In the later stages of her life, many of her friends and family members died. There is a window in the house where she lived that looked over the cemetery where she was a witness to many funerals that occurred. To see such a repeated reminder of loved ones lost and the presence of death in her backyard, her thoughts frequently turned to death. Poems like 280, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (87) shows a clear insight into how she was affected by death. In that poem, Emily Dickinson wrote about a funeral service that she must have witnessed. “And Mourners to and fro/ Keep treading – treading – till it seemed/ That Sense was breaking through”(87). Funerals can be very hard to digest for the people attending. From the few funerals I have attended, people are