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“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is a highly structured poem that Dickinson based on the stages of a funeral. Each of the poem’s five stanzas is organized around one of these stages. The first stanza, for instance, represents the wake. A wake conventionally takes place prior to the funeral itself, and it involves the gathering of close friends and family to view and pay their respects to the deceased. The mourners who tread “to and fro” (line 2) seem to have gathered for just such an event. The second stanza moves on to the funeral service. Here, the mourners take their seats and listen to readings from religious texts meant to console those the deceased has left behind. The third stanza moves into the funeral procession, where the coffin is carried out of the church or funeral parlor and into the burial grounds. As the third stanza transitions into the fourth, the speaker references the traditional tolling of the bell, which ritually announces the deceased person’s passing. Finally, the fifth stanza concludes the poem with the burial. Although not depicted directly, the speaker’s downward plunge symbolically echoes the corpse’s descent into the ground.

In addition to this tightly controlled structure, Dickinson’s poem outlines a spatial trajectory that moves from inside the speaker’s mind out into the cosmos. The speaker announces the internalized setting of the poem in the opening line: “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” This line suggests that everything in the poem should be understood as a metaphor for what’s going on in the speaker’s head. Hence, the five funerary stages outline above may be interpreted as emotional or psychic shifts that are taking place in the speaker’s internal experience. Yet an important transition takes place between the third and fourth stanzas, where the speaker announces the tolling of the funeral bell. At this point, the representation of the funerary stages grows increasingly abstract and cosmic in nature. The fourth stanza likens the tolling of a church bell to a cosmic sound, “As all the Heavens were a Bell” (line 13). The fifth stanza expands on this image, detailing how the speaker plunges through a space-like void and hits one “World” after another. In this way, the poem follows the speaker as they go—literally and figuratively—out of their mind.

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