17 pages • 34 minutes read
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
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Symbols & Motifs
The Mourners
Due to the puzzling nature of the poem, the mourners can represent allies and an oppressive force.
The mourners keep “treading” (Line 3) in the speaker’s brain, and then they “creak” (Line 10) across the speaker’s soul with “Boots of Lead” (Line 11). The diction connects the mourners to oppression. Their treading movement and the metal footwear mark the mourners as captives—they march in unison, their feet bound. Written during the Industrial Revolution, this imagery recalls either the toil of factory workers whose repetitive steps power machinery, or the connected path of convicts, chained together with leg irons. The mourners are doomed to their repetitive march, whose rhythmic stomping recalls the speaker’s heartbeat—the relentless continuation of the unexamined life. Yet when the speaker breaks from the mourners, the speaker joins “Silence” (Line 15), and together, they find themselves “Wrecked” and “solitary” (Line 16). Their investigation into death has come with a deeply troubling price.
The mourners also symbolize guides. However antagonistically, they help the speaker envision the process of death, to experience “every plunge” (Line 19) of the mystery of nonexistence.
The Brain
The poem starts in the speaker’s mind, so the brain propels the poem, acting as its setting and as the origin of the speaker’s exploration of the end of cognition. Through the mind, the speaker experiences the death of the self, constructing this phenomenon first as a logical observer, and then as a mystic who breaks through the boundaries of reason. As the speaker’s focal point, the brain represents power: the power of the intellectual imagination, the power of philosophical contemplation, and ultimately, the power of the sublime experience.
Although the poem also includes the speaker’s soul and equates being human to functioning as “an Ear” (Line 14), the speaker’s brain remains at the top of the bodily hierarchy.
The Ear
In the poem, the ear symbolizes the subordinate quality of being human. After the importance of sounds is emphasized by the many noises of the funeral, the speaker broadens the inquiry into death. They hear the death bell and the treading, creaking mourners, and the sounds bring clarity to the situation and make the speaker feel as if “Sense was breaking through” (Line 4). Here, the first of the poem’s revelations strikes: the importance of listening to the world, especially to the message being tolled by the divine. If “all the Heavens were a Bell” (Line 13), then “Being” has no other purpose than to function as “an Ear” (Line 14).
In the absence of being an ear, existence loses meaning. Trapped alongside “Silence” (Line 15), the speaker recognizes being in a doleful situation—the end of cognition without the promise of an afterlife. The heavenly bells give the speaker the ability to connect a multiplicity of worlds. Becoming more than an ear, they plunge into the abyss.
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Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
