I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—


And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—


And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange
Race Wrecked, solitary, here—


And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—

Emerson and New England Transcendentalism

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A reaction to Puritanism of America's past
• Against the rigid attention to reason 
• In opposition to enlightenment writers
• Divinity of humans, supremacy of individuals

Extended Metaphor of Funeral

• The turmoil in the persona's mind
• The physical death=the death of sanity
• Burial of Rational Thought

Analysis

• Function of the Mourners
• The Burial Process
• State of Abyss

The Mourners

• "To and Fro" - oscillation of a pendulum
• "Treading" - repetitive structure, violation of space
• The loss of stability and "sense"
• Double entendre: sensory perception and rational thinking
• Use of dashes as a compensation for the fragmentation

The Mourners

• Brain vs. Mind
• The use of sound and silence
• Sounds as attacks to her sanity
• Parallel structure: "treading", "breaking"
• Loss of connection with the outer world

The Burial Process

• "Box" as a symbol for coffin
• "Tread, break" and "creak"-internal rhyme, parallel
• "Boots of Lead"-pressure
• Loss of sense of space, "toll"
• Lack of coherence echoed in the last 2 stanzas' structure

The Burial Process

• Absence of clarity and reason
• "Heavens were a Hell or a Bell?"
• Bells signalling the figurative death of reason

The State of Abyss

• "Wrecked", "solitary"
• Insider her coffin?
• Figurative mental place?
• The function of noise and silence in the race
• Ambiguity of narration=difficulty of articulation

The State of Abyss

• "Plank" and "Casket"
• The mind plummeting into the darkness and madness
• The Plank of Reason is broken
• "A World"-different than our physical world
• Assumptions are challenges, knowledge is nullified

The State of Abyss

• Difficulty of communication of thoughts
• Last line - ambiguous meaning, 2 possibilities
• 1)Epiphany about her own mind
• 2)Onset of one's collapse
• Terrors of mental collapse in vague language