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Sound and Silence

A central motif in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” revolves around the tension between sound and silence. This tension develops over the course of the poem’s three middle stanzas. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the funeral service as if it were a drum whose repetitive “beating – beating” (line 7) had a mind-numbing effect. In the third stanza, however, sound takes on a more varied and disturbing quality (lines 9–12):

     And then I heard them lift a Box
     And creak across my Soul
     With those same Boots of Lead, again,
     Then Space – began to toll

Three distinct sounds organize this stanza: the creaking of the wood in the coffin and the floor, the tread of the mourners’ feet, and the tolling of the church bells. Intriguingly, the speaker references each of these sounds in an oblique way. The creaking of wood becomes, instead, a “creak across my Soul.” Likewise, the mourners’ footsteps are only implied through the phrase, “Boots of Lead.” Finally, instead of saying that the church bells rang, it is “Space” itself that “began to toll.” At this point, sound begins to take on a cosmic significance, one that the speaker elaborates in the fourth stanza (lines 13–16):

     As all the Heavens were a Bell,
     And Being, but an Ear,
     And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
     Wrecked, solitary, here –

Here, the bells seem to resonate through the entire cosmos, and the sound of their tolling stands in contrast to the “Silence” that the speaker associates with themself and their own “Being.” The cacophony of the heavens therefore stands in tension with the radical silence of the individual, who stands alone against the sonic swell, “Wrecked, solitary, here.”

Descent

The motif of descent plays out on two levels in Dickinson’s poem. The first level occurs with regard to the conceit of the funeral and the burial of the deceased’s corpse. As described in the essay on structure, the five stanzas of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” are organized in relation to the stages of a common funeral, beginning with the wake and ending with the burial. In the poem’s third stanza, the speaker describes how the mourners lift “a Box” (line 9)—that is, the coffin—in order to carry it down from the house and into the graveyard, where it will be lowered into the ground. At this point, the speaker’s language departs from the previous stanzas’ more concrete description of the funeral and grows increasingly abstract. The speaker uses particularly obscure language in the final stanza, where they represent the burial (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 –

Here, the descent of a corpse into the ground is represented as a plunge through the void of space. Significantly, however, the action depicted in these lines also strongly implies a second type of descent: that of the speaker’s mind into madness.

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