Loneliness, Depression, Death

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson

In Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain", the speaker describes a metaphorical funeral from the traditional showing of the body all the way to the burial.  Stanzas one, two, and three depict the funeral taking place: mourners pay their respects, the funeral ceremony proceeds, and men bury the deceased.  During these stanzas, the speaker is imaginatively located inside the coffin and experiences the entire funeral from that perspective.  The speaker's being located within the coffin elicits alienating feelings of being dead or worthless towards others.  As such, the first three stanzas all emphasize the speaker's feelings of loneliness and isolation.  Then, in stanza four, the speaker, utilizing several clever metaphors, adroitly describes an intense depression resulting from loneliness.  The speaker laments that if "the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear," then "I, and Silence," would be "solitary, here," (Dickinson 776).  Through the speaker and these metaphors, Dickinson compares heaven to a bell and life to hearing.  Therefore, when the speaker describes himself as being alone with silence, he expresses feelings of death, despair, and hopelessness, all resulting from his loneliness described in the first three stanzas.  At this point, the speaker has become distraught, depressed, lonely, and emotionally unstable.  As such, following the progression toward an even deeper form of sadness, the fifth stanza illustrates the speaker's mental collapse and suicide.  The phrase, "a Plank in Reason, broke," depicts the speaker succumbing to insanity and the final line, " . . . Finished knowing--then--", having been left unfinished allows one to infer that the speaker has killed himself due to his mental degeneration (Dickinson 776).