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By referring closely to 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' and one other appropriately selected poem, and making use of relevant external biographical information, examine the poetic methods which Dickinson uses to write about the experience of mental€13,61
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By referring closely to 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' and one other appropriately selected poem, and making use of relevant external biographical information, examine the poetic methods which Dickinson uses to write about the experience of mental
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Drama and poetry pre-1900
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Essay comparing and contrasting 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain' and ‘It was not Death for I stood up,’ on the theme of mental anguish
By referring closely to 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' and one other appropriately selected poem, and
making use of relevant external biographical information, examine the poetic methods which Dickinson
uses to write about the experience of mental anguish.
During the lifetime of Emily Dickinson new unseen frontiers of human understanding developed. One that
grasped the attention of the public was the frontier of the mind and its mystical and complex abilities. This
fascination persists to the present day through interest in 19th century ideas such as hypnotism and
psychology which has a expanded through the work of thinkers such as Sigmund Freud. However, with new
understanding brought forth new challenges. As physical conditions improved the mind was left behind
and deteriorated leading to an epidemic of mental anguish. This widespread internal torment of mental
anguish reflected in the literature of the time such as in the excellent poems of Dickinson ‘I felt a Funeral,
in my Brain,’ and ‘It was not Death for I stood up.’ These expressions of the self came to provide personal
reflections on mental anguish especially with the rediscovery of the true Dickinson in the rediscovery of
her fascicles in 1955.
Firstly, the structure of both poems allows the reader to explore the theme of mental anguish through
Dickinson’s deft poetic craft. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,’ consists of five quatrains and looks at mental
anguish in the aftermath of death. Each stanza considers a different portion of a traditional funeral: the
wake, the service, the funeral procession, the death knells and finally the burial. The perversion of these
sombre ingredients in the structural fabric of the poem demonstrates the power of mental anguish that is
evoked by death. These five episodes that constitute the poem, dominate the thoughts of the speaker and
become a conclusive part of their identity in the poem. Grief is no stranger to Dickinson as she met the
cold face of death at the age of fourteen when her cousin and close childhood friend Sophia Holland, died
of typhus. This experience haunted the poet like a spectre throughout her prolific periods of writing. This
loss would form mental anguish out of the grief experienced by Dickinson and perhaps, anguish that would
collect over the poet’s life and subtly reveal itself in poems such as this.
Similarly, in ‘It was not Death for I stood up,’ we see the structure reveal insights into the mental anguish
of the poet. In a lot of Dickinson’s poems, we see her employ common metre (alternating lines of iambic
tetrameter and iambic trimeter) and this poem is no exception. This metre is commonly seen elsewhere in
Christian hymns but provides a beautiful lyricism to Dickinson’s more sombre topic matters. This choice of
metre is combined with frequent caesuras that are spotted throughout the six stanzas of ‘It was not Death
for I stood up,’ mainly in the form of the synonymous Dickinson dash but also through other modes of
punctuation. However, it should be noted that dashes are especially prevalent in this poem, appearing
nineteen times in total. This frequent caesura together with the common metre reflects the internal
workings of the mind; as if the sentences we are reading are internally formed within our own heads.
These techniques pull the reader into Dickinson’s mind to witness the mental anguish that resides there
and is reflected in her poetry. Readers of ‘It was not Death for I stood up,’ cannot escape the speaker’s
mind just as the speaker cannot escape from their mental anguish, linking the speaker to the reader
through their shared experience of the poem’s encapsulated mental anguish.
Furthermore, both ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,’ and ‘It was not Death for I stood up,’ employ a central
conceit that compares mental anguish to death. In ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,’ this can be seen in the
poems opening lines, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading – treading…”
The metaphor that opens this poem and lingers throughout it, demonstrates the mental anguish that
resides within the mind of the speaker. The mental anguish can be construed to be powerful through
Dickinson’s capitalisation that focuses the reader to the internal pain caused by it as it isolates and
dominates the speaker through the prevalent use of personal pronouns. The powerful pain of mental
anguish seen here is intensified by the epizeuxis of ‘treading’ and juxtaposing prepositions that create an
overwhelming sense of heavy motion like footsteps pounding the mind of the speaker. A similar sensation
is created later in the poem through more epizeuxis and a simile to generate this painful throbbing effect in
the quote, “A Service, like a Drum –Kept beating – beating…” This physical pain is not evoked by an
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