Sastila Calista Sumbayak
183211029 / 6F
A New Critical Reading of “I felt a Funeral in my brain” by Emily Dickinson
New Criticism was a formalistic literary theory movement which in the mid-20th century
dominated American literary criticism. It focused the close reading, especially of poetry, of the
way literature functions as a self-referential object of aesthetics. For New Criticism, the
complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it.
[ CITATION Loi06 \l 1033 ]. Those complexities can be derived from the use of linguistic
devices such as metaphor, symbol and the plot itself. Let’s take a look on a poem by Emily
Dickinson, “I felt a funeral in my brain” below to analyze it with new criticism method.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Mourners to and fro And Being, but an Ear,
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
That Sense was breaking through - Wrecked, solitary, here -
And when they all were seated, And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
A Service, like a Drum - And I dropped down, and down -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought And hit a World, at every plunge,
My mind was going numb - And Finished knowing - then -
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
The title of the poem is the same with the first line in the first stanza of the poem. From
overall reading of the poem, it is shown that this poem bring upon ‘losing oneself sanity’ as the
theme. The speaker is someone who is slowly losing their own insanity, referring to the use of
‘brain’ and ‘sense’. The central tension of this poem is the tension between what the speaker feel
when in agony and when they encounter insanity. The reader can identify this through the use of
auditory imagery which can be seen from all stanzas in the poem. This lack of visual imagery,
becomes the main evident that everything happened in the poem is compared to the events in
funeral because the speaker could only listen to the sound of it, as they in the ‘box’
Then in the fourth line in the first stanza, the speaker said that ‘Sense’ was breaking
through. When all the mourners were busy walking back and forth, the speaker is trying so hard
to hold on to her senses, meaning, in the middle of all noises in the speaker’s mind, they
struggling to keep their rationality.
In the second stanza, “they” referred to the previous senses. So, when the speaker’s
senses finally calm, suddenly, the ‘drum’ (it can be referred to something that makes the speaker
triggered) come barge in, provoking them until the speaker’s mind going numb. Notice that in
the third stanza, the speaker is using ‘Box’ to refer some parts of the speaker’s common sense.
This poem is describing about funeral, so basically the box is a symbol of coffin, tells the readers
Sastila Calista Sumbayak
183211029 / 6F
immediately that some parts, mainly their rational thought, or even the soul itself, has died. It's in
the coffin and it's being carried away by people with lead boots. Lead boots is a very heavy
image; this can be referred to those who have made the speaker losing sanity, meaning the cause
of why the speaker feels that way. And since the body has died, it feels scary and leaves the
speaker nothing but the sound of ‘space’, explained in the fourth line of the third stanza ‘Then
Space - began to toll,’
The speaker now has left alone with the sound space only, because the speaker usual way
of thinking and being has been reduced down to just this sound, like being overwhelmed by this
sound, and even though the word ‘Heaven’ is in there, which sounds pretty positive, this loss of
sanity interpretation would have to say that this is a bad thing, that this sound is all the speaker’s
left with, and that the speaker has been stripped of every other usual way of being and thinking.
In other hand, the speaker now only with Silence (notice the capitalized S here, meaning that it’s
personified), and they are now ‘friends’ because they identified as ‘strange race’ among other
creatures and they are shipwrecked on this new place, this new kind of being, and that could be
extremely isolating and lonely.
In the last stanza, there is the funeral metaphor. So the plank is what holds the coffin. So
when the plank is taken away, the coffin drops into the ground. This could mean that the self has
finally dropped all the way down and is just in the chaotic unconscious. Dropping down and
down and hitting a world at every plunge, and ‘finished knowing’ sounds like the speaker could
no longer comprehend what was going on, they could no longer understand what was happening.
They just dissolved into nothing or into chaos.
To conclude all of the above, the poem has an organic unity because its theme is carried
by all of its formal elements; symbol and the plot. Furthermore, although the poem seems quite
simple, by using the new criticism, readers can reveals a surprising complexity in the operation
of its formal elements.
References
Balcarcel, Rebecca. (2013). Understanding “I felt a funeral in my brain” [YouTube Video].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ISE11zqic March 3, 2021 1.45 PM
Tyson, L. (2006). Critical theory today: a user friendly guide 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.
