Written during 1861—the first year of what is considered one of her most creative periods—“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain…” is both one of Emily Dickinson’s more well-known poems, and reflective of the themes of death, pain, and psychic disorientation that characterize much of her writing from this time in her life. The consistency with which she returns to these same themes have led some critics to argue that the poet herself had experienced some sort of extremely painful or traumatic event, but there isn’t sufficient evidence either to prove or to disprove this theory.
At just twenty short lines, “I felt a Funeral…” is still slightly on the longer side of Dickinson’s poems from this period. It consists of five stanzas of four lines each, in which the second and fourth lines are mostly either rhymed or off/near-rhymed. Though it takes the form of a narrative—i.e., recounting a sequence of events, many of them consistent with an actual funeral—the poem makes sense only as an extended metaphor of a primarily or entirely psychological experience of its first-person speaker. It possesses the somber, dense, and profoundly philosophical tone that makes so much of Dickinson’s poetry equally fascinating and bewildering to readers. Despite its short length, it is a deeply complex work that we can return to again and again, finding new meanings, discovering new depths, and, as Dickinson writes, “hit[ting] a World, at every plunge.”
