This week in class we continued working on our "What is Literature?" project, analyzed an article dealing the horrific prejudice still harbored in this country and explicated "I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson. We did not have time this Friday to write our essay about this poem so I will use this blog post to reflect on what this poem meant to me and what it taught me about reading poetry. Sometimes when I read poetry that has a hidden meaning or, like this one, at first glance seems to be random words arranged in a pretty pattern I wonder if the author even knew what her motivation was for writing it. It's sort of depressing to stare at a page and try to make sense of nonsense. What I did eventually come up with was that the speaker had felt a part of his/her soul decay and was now watching the funeral for that part of him/her. The popular opinion of the class was that the speaker was loosing his/her mind. I might suggest that the speaker had just experienced some horrible sadness or betrayal and felt that he/she could never be the same again after the incident. Everyone is shaped by the events in their lives the good and the bad, sometimes a previous source of happiness is ripped away and we need time to mourn for the part of us that was ripped away as well.
The speaker references "Sense" and "Reason" in the first and last stanzas of the poem. In the beginning he/she is clinging to the hope that sense will once again rule his/her thoughts. As the poem continues the speaker feels his/her mind "...going numb-" from the funeral service and the effort it takes to hold onto sense and logic. "And creak across my Soul, With those same Boots of Lead, again," The speaker is in pain and in the next stanza she looses her grip on reason and finally "And Finished knowing - then -" The speaker has given up trying to understand the way pain and suffering is distributed or trying to use sense and reason to analyze the aspects of life that just can't be explained. This is what I got out of the poem, it didn't say to me that anybody was loosing their mind. I know that the way I looked at this poem has a lot to do with my experiences and my life. Everyone in the class will have different experiences and a different way of looking at the text. Maybe Emily was just a loony and had no idea what she was saying but maybe just maybe she was mourning a part of her soul. But I'm not really sure it matters why she wrote the poem, it just matters how the words affect the reader.