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“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” has a tone that might be best described as discordant. Though the word can refer to any form of disagreement or incongruity, discordant also refers specifically to sounds that are harsh or jarring due to their lack of harmony. Dickinson does in fact explore the effects of discordant sounds throughout the poem. But the discordant quality of the poem’s tone has a deeper origin in Dickinson’s masterful control of form and content. For instance, there is a strong sense of discord that emerges from the contrast between the poem’s meter and its subject matter. Dickinson wrote “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” in a meter that’s commonly used for ballads, and which therefore has an intrinsic sing-song quality. But compared with the lively and even cheerful sound of common meter, the poem’s gravely serious themes of grief and madness feel strongly discordant. Similarly, there is a profound discord between the poem’s conceit of a funeral and the cosmic vision that seems to take over in the poem’s final stanzas. Whereas a funeral functions to help humans process their grief, the vast abyss of space that opens at the poem’s end effectively obliterates all human concerns.

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