I felt a Funeral, in my Brain: Important Quotes Explained

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

The poem opens with this line, which at once gives it its title and establishes its central conceit: that of a metaphorical funeral that unfolds in the speaker’s mind. This line implies that everything in the poem should be understood as a figurative representation of what’s going on in the speaker’s head. Hence, the mourners who gather for the funeral are figments of the speaker's imagination. The same can be said of the five funerary stages outlined in the poem’s structure—the wake, the service, the procession, the tolling of the bells, and the burial. These five stages represent a series of emotional or psychic shifts that define the speaker’s personal experience.

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again

These lines (9–11) come from the third stanza, and in the context of the poem’s conceit, they represent the traditional funeral procession, where mourners carry the coffin —or “Box”—from the parlor out to the graveyard. Aside from representing the funeral procession, these lines are significant for the way they both echo and amplify the speaker’s attention to sound. In stanza one, for instance, the speaker notes how the sound of the mourners “treading – treading” (line 3) around the funeral parlor had an agitating effect on them. Likewise, in stanza two, the speaker describes the funeral service as if it were a drum whose repetitive “beating – beating” (line 7) had a mind-numbing effect. Here, the agitating tread of the mourner’s footsteps returns as they march with “those same Boots of Lead, again.” In addition to this sound, the speaker also emphasizes the unsettling squeak created by the wooden planks in the coffin and the floors. When the speaker says this sound “creak[s] across my Soul,” they suggest a powerful and disturbing correlation between the sounds of the funeral and their internal experience of grief.

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 –

In lines 12–16, the speaker represents the traditional tolling of the church bells to mark the burial of the deceased. Up to this point, each of the stages in the metaphorical funeral have been neatly contained within a single stanza. Here, however, a new stage begins at the end of the third stanza and stretches throughout the fourth. In this way, Dickinson elongates this stage of the funeral and thereby places more emphasis on it. Importantly, the elongation of this stage also coincides with the expansion of the poem’s frame of reference, moving as it does from an ordinary funeral to the cosmic reaches of “Space.” The bells don’t simply ring in the churchyard; they resonate throughout “the Heavens.” In addition to expanding the poem’s frame of reference, these lines also lay out a tightly constructed series of parallel metaphors. Just as the speaker likens “the Heavens” to “a Bell,” so too do they liken “Being” to an “Ear,” and “I” and “Silence” to “some strange Race.” Taken together, these parallel metaphors generate a complex image in which “Being” is passively receptive like an “Ear,” listening in “Silence” as a cosmic “Bell” resounds throughout the vastness of the cosmos.

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

The closing stanza (lines 17–20) represents the “burial” stage of the funeral. However, in these lines the descent of a corpse into the ground becomes conflated with a second type of descent: that of the speaker’s mind into madness. The speaker opens the final stanza by stating, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke” (line 17). This moment marks the speaker’s transition into a state of increasing disorientation. The speaker likens this state to the experience of plunging headlong through a cosmic void—a plunge that begins when this “Plank in Reason” breaks. By describing “Reason” as being made of planks, the speaker implicitly likens rationality to a wooden floor. Just as a floor provides a ground to stand on and move about, rationality is a sort of metaphorical ground. Such a metaphorical ground provides a necessary foundation for thinking. But if that substructure collapses, then so does our capacity to think rationally, which plunges us into a disorienting abyss of madness. So disorienting is the break from rationality that, by the poem’s final line, the speaker claims that they have “Finished knowing.” Furthermore, their words suddenly break off as though they’ve entirely lost their ability to speak.