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Emily Dickinson frequently used a metrical form called common meter. Common meter features alternating lines of eight and six syllables. When analyzed using conventional methods of scansion, this structure is often equivalent to oscillating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. (Recall that an iamb is a metrical foot with one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word “to-day.”) The alternation between four-foot and three-foot lines creates an overall rhythm that has a strong sing-song quality. And indeed, common meter frequently appears in ballads, songs, and popular hymns. For a typical example of common meter, consider lines 9–12:

     And then / I heard / them lift / a Box
     And creak / a-cross / my Soul
     With those / same Boots / of Lead, / a-gain,
     Then Space – / be-gan / to toll.

These lines have a lively and even cheerful quality that starkly contrasts with the serious image of mourners carrying a coffin to its final resting place. Because the poem’s central conceit revolves around a funeral, we might expect the poem’s meter to mimic the slow drag of a funeral march. Instead, Dickinson invests her poem with a contrasting energy that exists in tension with the subject matter.

Although Dickinson uses common meter throughout “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” she isn’t always perfectly strict. In fact, the opening line in each of the poem’s first two stanzas contains an uneven number of syllables. The poem begins with a nine-syllable line:

     I felt / a Fun- / er-al, in / my Brain

The extra syllable here appears in the middle of the line, making the third foot of the line into an anapest (unstressed–unstressed–stressed) rather than an iamb. Dickinson makes similar alterations to the expected metrical patterns throughout the poem. These alterations create rhythmic variations that prevent the poem from becoming excessively songlike. However, such alterations also reflect the poem’s thematic interest in the jarring nature of the unexpected. Consider the final stanza (lines 17–20), in which the speaker unexpectedly falls headlong into a cosmic abyss:

     And then / a Plank / in Rea- / son, broke,
     And I / dropped down, / and down –
     And hit / a World, / at ev- / er-y plunge,
     And Fin- / ished know- / ing – then –

One clear rhythmic alteration appears in the final foot of the third line, which features an anapest whose extra syllable echoes the speaker’s prolonged plunge. It’s also worth noting that punctuation interrupts the final foot of both the first and fourth lines. The punctuation introduces an unexpected pause that cuts the metrical foot in half, perhaps suggesting the abruptness with which death cuts life short.

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