Comments on "I felt a funeral in my brain"
Thursday, 4. May 2006, 02:39:37
Commentary: A fine description of the experience of depression or melancholia. The author feels "a funeral in my brain"--mourners treading, drums beating. They "lift a Box" and tread across her soul with "Boots of Lead" until "a Plank in Reason" breaks.
"I felt a funeral in my brain" traces the speaker's descent into madness. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the speaker's descending madness and the horror most of us feel about going crazy.
Dickinson uses the metaphor of a funeral to represent the speaker's sense that a part of her is dying, that is, her reason is being overwhelmed by the irrationality of the unconscious. A funeral is an appropriate image for this ordeal. The most obvious connotation with a funeral is death. Also a funeral is a formal event, whose rules and procedures suggest control and order. The control and order implicit in a funeral contrast ironically with the lack of control and loss of rationality that threaten the speaker. In addition, a funeral marks the passage from one state to another (life to death, sanity to insanity). However, the poet is not observing the funeral but is feeling it. She is both observer of the funeral and participant, indicating that the Self is divided. By the end of the poem, the Self will have shattered into pieces or chaos.
The mourners are a metaphor to express her pain. Their treading (note the repetition of the word, which gives emphasis and suggests the action) indicates a pressure that is pushing her down. The speaker has a momentary impression that reason ("sense") is escaping or being lost. The pressure of the treading is reasserted with the repetition, "beating, beating." This time her mind, the source of reasoning, goes "numb," a further deterioration in her condition.
You can trace the process of the speaker's loss of rationality in stanzas three and four. The last two lines of stanza four assess her condition; she sees herself as "wrecked, solitary." Her descent into irrationality separates her from other human beings, making her a member of "some strange race." Her alienation and inability to communicate are indicated by her being enveloped by silence.
The funeral imagery, replete with mourners, coffin, and service, seems both to distract from the poem's subject of repression and to insist on the severity of its consequences. But it is in the tension between the two modes of knowing and of representation, between an allegorical structure and an ironic one, that the poem's interest lies. For structure and sequence fall away in the ironic judgment of the poem’s last line, which suggests, if implicitly, that action (exteriority) and knowledge (interiority) will always diverge. Even the attempt to reconstruct the experience and do it over with a different consequence leads, as it did the first time, to blankness. This divergence is further exemplified in the odd order of the poem's events: the funeral precedes death, at least the death of consciousness. Such inversion of normal sequence necessitates a figural reading of the poem and makes perfect sense within it, for Dickinson seems to be claiming we cannot "not know" in isolation and at will. What we choose not to know, what we submerge, like the buried root of a plant that sucks all water and life toward its source, pulls us down with a vengeance toward it.
"I felt a funeral in my brain" traces the speaker's descent into madness. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the speaker's descending madness and the horror most of us feel about going crazy.
Dickinson uses the metaphor of a funeral to represent the speaker's sense that a part of her is dying, that is, her reason is being overwhelmed by the irrationality of the unconscious. A funeral is an appropriate image for this ordeal. The most obvious connotation with a funeral is death. Also a funeral is a formal event, whose rules and procedures suggest control and order. The control and order implicit in a funeral contrast ironically with the lack of control and loss of rationality that threaten the speaker. In addition, a funeral marks the passage from one state to another (life to death, sanity to insanity). However, the poet is not observing the funeral but is feeling it. She is both observer of the funeral and participant, indicating that the Self is divided. By the end of the poem, the Self will have shattered into pieces or chaos.
The mourners are a metaphor to express her pain. Their treading (note the repetition of the word, which gives emphasis and suggests the action) indicates a pressure that is pushing her down. The speaker has a momentary impression that reason ("sense") is escaping or being lost. The pressure of the treading is reasserted with the repetition, "beating, beating." This time her mind, the source of reasoning, goes "numb," a further deterioration in her condition.
You can trace the process of the speaker's loss of rationality in stanzas three and four. The last two lines of stanza four assess her condition; she sees herself as "wrecked, solitary." Her descent into irrationality separates her from other human beings, making her a member of "some strange race." Her alienation and inability to communicate are indicated by her being enveloped by silence.
The funeral imagery, replete with mourners, coffin, and service, seems both to distract from the poem's subject of repression and to insist on the severity of its consequences. But it is in the tension between the two modes of knowing and of representation, between an allegorical structure and an ironic one, that the poem's interest lies. For structure and sequence fall away in the ironic judgment of the poem’s last line, which suggests, if implicitly, that action (exteriority) and knowledge (interiority) will always diverge. Even the attempt to reconstruct the experience and do it over with a different consequence leads, as it did the first time, to blankness. This divergence is further exemplified in the odd order of the poem's events: the funeral precedes death, at least the death of consciousness. Such inversion of normal sequence necessitates a figural reading of the poem and makes perfect sense within it, for Dickinson seems to be claiming we cannot "not know" in isolation and at will. What we choose not to know, what we submerge, like the buried root of a plant that sucks all water and life toward its source, pulls us down with a vengeance toward it.
WIDGETIZE
DarkAngel # 11. May 2006, 16:49
This is another art of poetry from Dickson. Using various metaphors, aural imagery and certain rhythm, Dickinson make it possible for us to feel and understand the pain through the use of language. Dickinson is often known for the ambiguity of her poem. It is also observed in this poem. Without fertile imagination, it is nigh on impossible for a reader to fathom this poem. Dickson depicts the feeling of literal pain in head through the metaphor of funeral, suggesting her headache is so severe that she would rather die.
- figurative language
Dickinson uses figurative language to describe her pain (headache or migraine) to create imagery associated with a funeral. With the word “funeral” in the first line, we are introduced to a funeral metaphor, herewith reader’s mind may immediately be filled with all the images associated with a funeral, such as mourners, caskets and funeral dirges.
In the second stanza, Dickinson uses another funeral metaphor “going numb” that is associated with grieving to describe the result of the pain. This pain is so great that it has anesthetized the senses.
In the last stanza, church “bell” is another funeral metaphor for a ringing in the speaker’s ears (a symptom of the headache). In the last two lines, she uses “silence” and “solitude”(“And I and Silence some strange Race/ Wrecked, solitary, here”) to resonate the image of a corpse lying still in a coffin. According to some comments, “silence” and “solitude” are very appropriate words for headache because one needs to be left alone in silence when suffering from headache.
- Aural imagery
The majority of the imagery in this poem is aural. Dickinson uses rich aural imageries so that reader may feel everything about the funeral with eyes closed.
In the first stanza, “treading” of mourners suggests the grinding sound of heavy feet, being comparable to thumps in head the speakers suffers. (“Kept treading, treading, till it seemed /That sense was breaking through.”)
In the second stanza, Dickinson uses “beating”“drum” to depict a funeral dirge. The beating rhythm of the drum suggests a pounding in the head, or a pulsating in the temples due to severe headache or a migraine.
In the fourth stanza , Dickinson depicts she hear the lifting of the box. In the line "And creak across my Soul", the word “creak” sounds like a creaking of a box, and it works very effectively in describing a excruciating headache. She uses the word “heard” to describe lifting the box to enable readers to sense the aural imagery. With “And Being but an Ear”, Dickinson emphasizes that everything she is experiencing in this metaphoric funeral is through her sense of hearing.
- Repetition of certain words
Dickinson also uses repetition of certain words in the first and second stanza to create a sound associated with the marching or dragging of feet in the funeral procession, suggesting a constant ache in speaker’s head (“Kept treading- treading…””Kept beating- beating…”)