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Funeral In My Brain Diction

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In her poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (340),” Emily Dickinson describes the experience of listening to a funeral inside one’s head. During this experience, Dickinson mixes the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual realities in order to portray the speaker’s descent into insanity. In the first stanza, the speaker announces that he or she feels a funeral inside his or her brain. Those who have come to mourn the dead are moving around “to and fro” (153). The mourners keep walking (“treading—treading”) until it seemed “that Sense was breaking through—“(153). Dickinson’s repetition of the word treading imitates a walk similar to pacing. At the beginning of the second stanza, the mourners are all seated, and the funeral can begin. The service feels like a beating drum to the speaker, beating just as the mourners were treading. The drums continue beating until the speaker feels as if his or …show more content…

First, the ringing bell extends into “the Heavens” (153). The ringing fills the empty world with sound in which the “Being” is “but an ear” (153). If human beings are simply an ear, then they are only listeners to the noises of the universe. As passive listeners, the audience (human beings) are wrecked along with the speaker (“And I”) and “Silence” (153). Silence, the absence of sound, is wrecked along with the speaker as the ringing bells fill the empty space. In the final stanza, the floor the speaker is standing on breaks, and the speaker begins to fall. Dickinson writes, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke, / And I dropped down, and down—“(153). The floor the speaker has been supported by is “Reason,” suggesting that reason—intellect or sanity is all that has been sustaining the speaker. As the speaker falls, he or she hits “a World, at every plunge” (153). The speaker falls from reason, into another world: a world without reason, so the speaker is “Finished

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