I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

The poem is a lyric: It’s short and the product of personal feelings—in this case, the speaker contemplates the end of one’s consciousness. As the poem focuses on death and funerals, it also borrows from the genres of dirge and elegy—though it is not about a literal funeral. As the poem is tricky to decipher, the riddle genre applies as well; the poem’s lesson (if there is a specific lesson) depends on how the reader solves the puzzle.

The speaker is elusive. The poem doesn’t supply a name, a gender, or much information about who is speaking and why they feel there’s a funeral in their brain. Nevertheless, the dramatic and exaggerated diction (or, choice of words) gives the reader a clue that the speaker is confronting something serious—perhaps grave. Due to Emily Dickinson’s intense, personal relationship with her poetry, many people equate her with the speaker; however, critical consensus is to separate her poetic personas from the real-life Dickinson. Even if Dickinson were the speaker, neutral pronouns still make sense: As the American cultural critic Camilla Paglia notes in Sexual Personae, Dickinson frequently embraced boyish identities in her letters (Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Yale University Press, 1990).

The poem opens with a declarative announcement: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Line 1). Capitalizing the words “funeral” and “brain” turns these common nouns into proper nouns or perhaps even personifies them. It’s as if the Funeral has its own sentience, while the Brain is a separate being in the speaker’s body.

The poem introduces the first of its several groups of would-be people: “Mourners to and fro / Kept treading—treading” (Lines 2-3). The diction is deliberate here: The repeated verb “treading” implies heavy, burdened movement, as though through water, and its repetition gives the funeral a sense of futility, as the ongoing steps lead the mourners nowhere. However, the verb has another referent: This way of walking is also associated with the movement of beasts of burden powering machines like mills. Similarly to this industrial process, the treading eventually produces a result: The heavy steps become almost a message, and the speaker feels as if “Sense was breaking through” (Line 4). The mourners’ march puts the speaker on the verge of a realization or an epiphany.

The potential for a breakthrough is short-lived, however, and the mourners are seated. The speaker then creates an unsettling atmosphere with a simile: The funeral service is like a drum that beats so incessantly, it makes the speaker feel as if their “mind was going numb” (Line 8). Although the sonic quality of the drum echoes the rhythmic stomping of the mourners’ feet, the effect is quite different. In Line 4, the speaker was on the verge of becoming aware of something. Four lines later, their mind has become desensitized—a striking contrast.

The speaker hears the mourners “lift a Box” (Line 9) and “creak across my Soul” (Line 10). The movement and sound of the mourners has altered once more. Their plodding footsteps have become almost furtive, as they go across what Dickinson’s contemporary readers would have pictured as a “creaking” wooden floor, almost as though they feel guilty for transporting the coffin. When they move, the mourners continue to represent industrialized oppression: They wear “Boots of Lead” (Line 11), which mark them as prisoners chained together with leg irons.

The poem’s setting is particularly mysterious and unsettling. The first line locates us in the speaker’s mind, but the description of the funeral, the mourners’ pointless steps, and the carrying of the coffin across a creaky floor together give the impression of an enclosed, manmade building. However, the removal of the “Box” transforms the setting entirely. The speaker describes the shift by declaring, “Then Space—began to toll” (Line 12). Space is an abstract word, and the speaker doesn’t specify the space in question, though the distinct impression is that one has left the more specific construct where one has been and has entered the space that makes up the world—an echoing chaos that makes the reader think that “all the Heavens were a Bell” (Line 13). This bell is ambiguous: Is it the hopeful peal of church bells ringing the Christian belief in an afterlife, or is it the sad toll of the funeral bell? The reference to heaven seems to point to the former, but the replacement of traditional images of heaven as an idyllic resting place with an empty space filled with only bell noise undercuts this hope. In response to this kind of heaven, all earthly “Being” becomes “but an Ear” (Line 14): People are forever straining to hear the message of the divine, but the poem offers no suggestion that one can ever really hear what the bell is trying to convey.

This failure to commune with heaven’s bell puts the speaker alongside “Silence” (Line 15), another personified abstraction with whom the speaker finds some common ground. Neither Silence nor the speaker makes noise, and together they are a “strange Race” (Line 15)—a separate or unique group. Thus removed from other beings, the speaker and Silence are “Wrecked, solitary, here” (Line 16). The hyperbolic diction conveys the deep suffering of the speaker after the failure to fully hear or understand the bell of heaven. The turmoil makes the speaker a part of Silence or with Silence. They feel destroyed and alone, yet they’re present—they remain in the moment: They’re not running away from the ordeal.

Then, the floor of the built environment that housed the funeral returns. The speaker depicts reason as a “Plank” (Line 17), or a floorboard. When this board breaks, the speaker falls through what appeared to be the only possible sphere of existence and hits multiple other worlds on the way down. Unlike the Christian Fall from the idyll of the Garden of Eden, this fall does not seem to come after a transgression. Instead, the encounter with a multiverse is potentially the breakthrough the speaker almost had until the mourners stopped stomping: the potential to interact with an infinite number of worlds, or levels of cognition.

The ending maintains the puzzle. the speaker “Finished knowing—then—” (Line 20). There are multiple readings available here. Grammatically, the subject of the verb “finished” is the “I” from Line 18; if the speaker has “finished knowing,” then possibly the funeral is over, the mourners have buried the coffin that contains the speaker’s mind, and so the speaker no longer has the ability to know. However, it is possible that the words “finished” and “knowing” do not go together, but instead both modify the “I”; in this case, what is finished is the speaker’s fall, which is followed by a revelation that the speaker is about to share, starting with the introductory “then—”(Line 20), but unable to continue after arriving into another world or space incomprehensible to the living reader.