17 pages • 34 minutes read
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Brain—is wider than the Sky” by Emily Dickinson (1862)
“The Brain—is wider than the Sky” details the immense power of the mind. Not only is it larger than the sky but it’s “deeper than the sea” (Line 5) and equal to the “weight of God” (Line 9). The supreme authority Emily Dickinson attributes to the brain connects this poem to “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and its recreation of an authentic experience of death.
“Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson (1863)
In this poem, death doesn’t come across as oppressive. There are no adversarial mourners or noxious sounds. Instead death is a “kindly” man who takes the speaker on an excursion to see the different stages that compose life. Just as “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” ends on a “then—” (Line 20), a hypothetical afterlife, “Because I could not stop for Death” also doesn’t give death the final say, as the speaker links themselves to immortality.
“Sonnet V: If I should learn, in some quite casual way” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917)
In this sonnet, the female speaker engages with death in an external, tangible way: On a train, the speaker learns from another passenger’s newspaper that a former lover died. Unlike the mourners in Dickinson’s poem, the speaker refuses to generate noise: “I should not cry aloud—I could not cry / Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place” (Lines 9-10). Rather, she’ll move on with her life.
Further Literary Resources
Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1932)
The daughter of Dickinson’s brother Austin and his wife Susan, Bianchi was Dickinson’s niece, and she spent a fair amount of time with her aunt. In this memoir, Bianchi portrays Dickinson as playful, humorous, and engaged with the world. However, she also describes Dickinson was a riddle who “puzzled those people she was not like, simply because she was not like everybody else of that day and place” (32). Bianchi says solitude was Dickinson’s “precious guest” (59), so she purposefully limited her interactions to focus on the “nature and destiny of the whole human enterprise” (48). Alone, Dickinson could investigate the fundamental issues of life, like death.
The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault (2012)
In his improvisations based on Dickinson’s poems, Legault, a poet and avid Dickinson fan, turns every Dickinson poem into a playful sentence or block of prose, building on her enigmatic reputation. These translations emphasize Dickinson’s fascination with the theme of death. Legault’s translation of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” reads as follows: “Suddenly it is as if all plurality becomes one thing, and in becoming so died. Or else I just died” (55). In Legault’s translation, the poem is about a destructive unity.
Dickinson (2019-2021)
American screenwriter Alena Smith turned Emily Dickinson’s life into a coming-of-age comedy series for Apple TV. The purposely anachronistic show follows a young version of Emily, putting the poet in relatable situations: finding her identity, managing family problems, and coping with an unjust society. Each episode carries the name of a Dickinson poem. The name Episode 10, the Season 1 finale, is “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”; the episode suggests that this poem is about death and deep emotions.
Listen to Poem
Hassan dramatically recites Dickinson’s poem as a part of the 2012 Poetry Out Loud national competition in Washington, DC; he was awarded third place in the competition.
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By Emily Dickinson
