I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is one of many Emily Dickinson intensely lyrical poems about death. It is comparable to other famous works, such as “Because I could not stop for Death” (1863), in which death takes the speaker on something like a date. Another poem on a similar theme is “It was not Death, for I stood up” (1862), in which Dickinson couples death and keen suffering and doesn’t provide a clear lesson for either; this poem too ends on a dangling “then” (Line 20) like “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” Turning the tables, “My life had stood — a Loaded Gun,” gives the speaker the power to kill. While in “I felt a Funeral,” the speaker has a different kind of power, imagining the mind’s funeral. Dickinson reinforces this almighty power of the mind in “The Brain—is wider than the Sky” (1862), which compares cognition to the sky and to God.

Some of Dickinson’s poetic descendants are 20th-century American confessional poets, whose work tackles similar weighty issues of death and acute suffering. Though people often read Dickinson’s poetry as somewhat confessional—a guide to her feelings—they’re too puzzling to qualify as outright confessions.