Dickinson’s poem features a first-person speaker who doesn’t reveal any information about their age, gender, race, or class. Because of this, we don’t have a lot to go on in terms of understanding their identity. However, we do know that the speaker is experiencing some kind of emotional or mental breakdown. They organize their description of this breakdown around the conceit of a funeral. We readers can’t be sure what this funeral signifies. Is it a reference to the actual death of a loved one? Or does it symbolize a more abstract type of death—perhaps the end of a close relationship, or even the giving-up of a cherished idea or belief? Since the speaker doesn’t provide any concrete descriptions of what’s really going on in their life, we simply cannot know for sure. Nevertheless, it’s evident that whatever the cause, the speaker feels increasingly disoriented, as if they are going out of their mind.

The clearest indication of the speaker’s breakdown occurs in the closing stanza (lines 17–20):

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

In these lines, the speaker describes reason as a wooden floor. This floor can typically be trusted to hold the speaker up. Here, however, a plank suddenly breaks, causing them to fall headlong into a cosmic void. The image of this vertiginous plunge clearly indicates the speaker’s disorientation. No longer propped up by reason, they fall into a chasm of madness where they crash violently into one “World” after another. As they continue to descend, the speaker makes the surprising announcement that they are “Finished knowing.” Finally, as if to suggest that their mind is no longer able to think or process their experience at all, the speaker cuts off mid-sentence. This startling conclusion to the poem indicates that the speaker has made a final break with reason. For our part, we readers are left in suspense, unsure of what happens next.

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