Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral in my Brain"

Just some thoughts our group talked about when discussing the poem.

• the poem is in hymn meter (alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter) which is related to Dickinson's religious fervor
• the first two stanzas are a progression up to the key third stanza, then there is a sharp contrast between the silence of the fourth stanza and the violence of the last
• the last two lines of the fourth stanza ("And I, and Silence, some strange Race,/Wrecked, solitary, here -") plays into the violence that starts the last stanza ("And then a Plank in Reason, broke,")
• the first two and last two stanzas both end with pauses, meaning that the end of the poem is in fact a long pause--this leaves the reader feeling abandoned and slows the line down
• there is a caesura in the last line of the third stanza ("Then Space - began to toll"), which echoes the sentiment that after the word space we as readers generally want space before starting again
• the form of the poem itself is a march downwards, just like the content of the poem involves the marching of the funeral towards death
• there are very few instances when Dickinson breaks the iambic foot-- two lines involving trochees ("Then Space - began to toll" and "Wrecked, solitary, here -") have the emphasis on the first syllable to illustrate the sense that everything is breaking down the closer the reader gets to the end of the poem, when everything ends