An Analysis of Irony in Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”

The w raft poem was in the past tense, comely like relating to the poets nostalgic retrospective, telling a story that truly happened to her. Whats so alarming a part more or less the poem is, if without the first line, the major subject a Funeral that Emily once went with by herself, offering readers an angle of view from their own coffins, alive. The poem, thus, has put up a question believably with no answer what if you died and were about to be buried, but were still conscious tout ensemble the time through with(predicate) the funeral?.Since a coffin bottomland directly represent a loss of life, Emily tried to hand use of that wizard of loneliness and isolation (yet devoid of a feeling of terror), which can be erect in a coffin, to denote a social function worse than death a loss of sense, as opposed to a loss of life. In fact, thats just the beginning of Emilys irony, which is, entombment several(prenominal)one that merely lost herself (or himself) instead of h er (or his) life. The point is that in Emilys mind, it was stock-still worse than death to lose ones own Self.The first vision video display up and running through the whole poem is the Mourners. In common sense, they were supposed to sob or wail over the lost person while on the contrary, in that respect were no extends of sadness at all in the funeral, which is quite ironic. The only sound that the poem was trying to convey is their stupid exhibit treading, treading and their so-called service beating, beating, resembling an army of cumbersome robots in their Boots of Lead disposing a bin of trashes or nastily, corpses.Weirdly enough, no mourning attire, no face, no interaction (for example, bestowing a rose on the dead, or whispering obtuse with one another about the dead), and even no slightest feeling are described, at least for the interestingness of the dead person instead, all in all is merely a simple terra firmament of a routine procedure (arriving taking a se at waiting for the Bell ringing then droping the coffin), so as to give the poem, in its least sense, the tone of a funeral procession. Yes, ironically, the least important thing seemed to be the dead guy while the formality of the process was what only mattered.In pursuit of consistency, Emily also employ a ballad meter style, of which the strong rhythmic tone could exactly cater to the marching music sound and play as similar to a dirge, and the simmpleness sensed in this meter could call in with that of the funeral. In addition, this simple rhythm had been also achieved by the repetition of the same words treading and treading, beating, beating and dropped down, down, where the sense of motion had been created for readers to feel by themselves and been stressed by alliteration as well.However, on the other hand, the simplicity, both in the sense of the funeral and the Mourners, crazye a sharp contrast with the poets relatively tangled mind. And ironically, the only thin g that was very likely to satirise that stupid simplicity had gone mad or even been lost, which is why Emily felt a Funeral in her Brain. Besides the visual imagery of Mourners, the sound of a Bell is another auditory one and its tolling was meant to signal the end of the funeral, which is, in fact, an echo to the imagery of Mourners.In the fourth Stanza, Emily referred universe to an ear partly in that the living Mourners, just like the lifeless robots without the ability of independent thinking, was awaiting the next-step instructions, and apart from a heart, a brain created to sense feelings and thinking, an ear was the only organ they needed to simply absorb orders to proceed the funeral partly in that hearing a sound can be a sign of being and is privileged to the being, both of which she was no all-night in possession, and this in part explains why Silence and she belonged to some strange Race.And wrecked, solitary were the only feelings that she had been having since bein g part of this Race. Apparently, the Mourners are a metaphor for all the people in her life that once mattered and since they were of the same race, they talked and acted in the same means that unfortunately she would never approve of and would do her best to make fun by despising them with a pen. She thought that stay puting reclusive could help maintain her superiority over the reprimand of the society, but is this really the case?At first, they began their treading and gradually, their noise started to make sense and affect her in some port. That Sense was breaking through indicates that she had a momentary impression that her sense (or her mind) was escaping and continued to go extraneous(predicate) as the speed implies. The treading evolved into the beating, which confused her and finally managed to numb her mind. For them, the treading and the beating would never be enough for such a complicated and mature mind thus, they planned to beat it down, put it into a coffin and bury it and before all that happened, they worryingd it again and again, as with the same Boots of Lead, again implies. When the mind could no longer bear the torture, it came to an end with the Bell tolling. Finally, finally it surrendered and was determined to be estranged from the outside world and stay lonely in her coffin by stopping communicating with those ears, but the torment went on. Everything seemed fine until a Plank in Reason, broke and she began to descend madness, madness, madness. What could have been more awful if there was a hole on her mind?But whats worse, even though she kept dropping, experiencing all types of mental disorders, there was no demise and there would never be one, which means that she had to be kept under torture and pain. This is the most horrible thing, worse than death. The ironic part lies in that the pain she had been through was actually brought about by her own self. She built herself a coffin to avoid harm or obstacles in her way a nd keep her mind intact, which unavoidably led to her emptiness or even depression. There is a acquire in rhyme in the last stanza And I dropped down, and down- /And hit a World, at every plunge, /And absolute knowing then.The use of the slant rhyme wakes us up out of the boredom of the marching sound, and this turn also marks the waking up of Emily when she realized that something was wrong with her mind. This blink of realization was actually caused by the speed of the dropping, as Emily used plunge to depict her situation. Before the realization, she was by no means self-conscious of what was going on and the fact that everything taking place in her brain was all made up by her own self as a way to flee away from the outside world.However, ironically, no matter how hard she tried to bury her mind, she was just fleeing away to another state mad, solitary, wrecked and worst of all, hopeless. After the realization, she was disillusioned, which is actually even more tragic, becau se there was no way to bury her mind but merely transforming its state into abnormality. Instead of a period, Emily used a dash to end the poem, which tells the readers that there would be no end to this hopeless process but an eternal contest with self-consciousness an eternal inner torture.