Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Style Historical Context Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study

Themes

Madness and Sanity

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is a poem that, in part, presents the impending mental collapse of its speaker, a collapse that Dickinson likens to the rituals of a funeral to ultimately explore the figurative “death” of the speaker’s sanity. The word felt in the poem’s opening line suggests that the first throbbings of the collapse could be physically perceived; this merging of physical sensation and mental perception is sustained throughout the poem. By comparing the speaker’s mental breakdown to a funeral, Dickinson suggests the horror and finality of such an event.

The funeral’s participants and rites can be read as metaphors for the speaker’s impending collapse; as the figurative funeral proceeds through its recognizable stages, the speaker’s sanity becomes more endangered until it finally “dies.” The mourners that the speaker feels repeatedly “treading — treading” in her brain are like the first recognizable signs (to her) that all is not well with her mind, despite the fact that her sense of what is happening to her is “breaking through” the sounds of the mourners’ footsteps. The funeral service here is not a peaceful eulogy or tearful farewell but an unpleasant sound “like a drum” that plagues her mind with its “beating — beating” until she reaches the point where she cannot stand any more of it, and her mind grows numb. At this point, she has no hope of fending off her approaching breakdown. Her mind is described here in physical terms (“numb”) to suggest its nearly incapacitated state. The carrying of the casket to the gravesite — the next logical step in the funeral rite — is used to convey the increased mental and even spiritual anguish of the speaker, for the pallbearers “creak across” her soul with “boots of lead” as they carry their mournful burden.

The tolling of the church bells is presented as a nearly indescribable source of pain: “all the heavens” are like one great “bell,” and her entire being is like a single “ear.” At this point, the speaker’s trauma has become so intense that she is “wrecked, solitary, here” in a place where her ability to describe her own mind has become almost totally diminished. The lowering of the casket into the ground is compared to the final onslaught of insanity; the poem ends with the speaker being “finished knowing” anything for certain. All of her previously held assumptions about her own mind and soul have been metaphorically buried, like the remains of her sanity.

Doubt and Uncertainty

While Dickinson’s poem can be read as a description of its speaker’s mental collapse, this is not the only valid interpretation. Indeed, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” can also be read as a depiction of an individual’s complete loss of religious faith. In this light, the funeral described is not one for the speaker’s sanity but for those religious or spiritual assumptions previously embraced by her. While the cause of such a loss is never mentioned, the effects of it are described as devastating. Funeral rites are very often religious ones, and the “service” here can be read as an ironic metaphor: the speaker’s loss of faith can only be described using religious terms. Words like “service,” “soul” and “heavens” all suggest the paradox of a person attempting to describe the loss of her beliefs using language that once took its meaning from those beliefs.

The pallbearers’ “creaking across” the speaker’s soul with “boots of lead” suggests a system of belief being metaphorically trod upon, and the entire universe tolling like a single bell suggests that the speaker finds her recent loss of faith both inescapable and undeniable. The poem’s end thus presents a person who is “finished knowing” what she once took as an article of faith before the “plank in reason broke,” that is, before her last hold on her previously held beliefs was destroyed, and she was plunged into the depths of doubt and skepticism. As Dickinson herself wrote elsewhere:

To lose one’s faith — surpass
The loss of an Estate —
Because Estates can be
Replenished — faith cannot —

Topics for Further Study

• Research modern psychological explanations of what happens to the human mind when it is faced with clinical depression or some other mental illness. Explain how Dickinson’s poem depicts these mental events in poetic terms.
• Explain how Dickinson’s depiction of the human mind may have been influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• Research the ways in which groundbreaking scientific ideas were first received, such as those put forth by Galileo (whose 1632 work Dialogue on the Great World Systems posited the sun as the center of the solar system) or Charles Darwin (whose 1859 work On the Origin of Species proposed the idea of natural selection). Explain how Dickinson’s poem dramatizes some of the early reactions to these radical ideas.
• Read Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and then explain how Dickinson’s work adheres to the ideals put forth within it.
• Research the ways that a woman’s role was defined in nineteenth-century New England. Explain how Dickinson’s life suited (or revolted against) the roles assigned to her by her era.