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Dickinson’s poem takes place inside the speaker’s mind. The speaker suggests as much in the opening line: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” This line implies that everything in the poem should be understood as a metaphor for 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 funeral toll, and the burial. These five stages represent a series of emotional or psychic shifts that define the speaker’s personal experience. As the poem proceeds, however, the speaker seems to descend into a form of madness that they represent abstractly, through cosmic imagery. In the fourth stanza, for instance, the speaker likens the tolling of a church bell to a cosmic sound, “As all the Heavens were a Bell” (line 13). They expand on this image in the fifth stanza, where they describe themself plunging through a space-like void following the collapse of “a Plank in Reason” (line 17). In this way, the speaker describes an experience of going—literally and figuratively—out of their mind.

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