about "I felt a funeral in my Brain"

[spooky]

hi, i have some questions about this part of the poem:

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here

now English is not my first language, and i don't like reading translated poems, so i interpreted it this way:

by saying

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear

does she mean that she felt like an ear in a world full of bells? the word heavens doesn't have to be taken directly as heaven right?

and

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

what does race mean here? what's the meaning of the whole line? this line is puzzling me most...

thanks =)

[Nick Capozzoli]

hi, i have some questions about this part of the poem:

does she mean that she felt like an ear in a world full of bells? the word heavens doesn't have to be taken directly as heaven right?

and

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

what does race mean here? what's the meaning of the whole line? this line is puzzling me most...

thanks =)

I'm sure native English speakers would find this poem obscure and difficult to understand. Many of Ms. Dickinson's poems are spookily cryptic.

One of her themes seems to be the harsh separation of the individual ("self")from the rest of the physical world ("other"). In this case, "Being" is self and "the heavens" is the other. In other poems, she deals with the harsh separation of the living from the dead (a superb example is "'Twas warm at first like us").

The other makes noise, like a bell, and the self is an ear that hears the bell.



I think that she's saying that the

[Gladys]

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here

The poet speaks:

As a passionate observer at this imagined funeral, I hear 'them lift a Box', the coffin. Yet I am becoming rather more than an observer as pall bearers 'creak across my Soul', my inner self.

I am feeling alienated, I am dying, from the here and now, from 'Space' and 'the Heavens'. My existence has shrunk into 'an Ear', which listens but can no longer participate in life.

'I, and Silence' are two bedfellows disconnected from the human race, from the land of the living. The infinite 'Silence' of death is enveloping me 'Wrecked, solitary, here' on this planet.

Death is an impending and inevitable reality for the poet, as expressed in Hamlet's: 'if it be not now, yet it will come'.


See also My analysis of the entire poem

[spooky]

thanks for your replies =)

i always thought that this poem is about losing your sanity step by step, and the unbearable terror of being aware of it..so i liked interpreting that line as feeling like an ear in a world full of sounding bells...thinking about the maddening experience...but i'm never sure about Emily's poems, like Nick said her poems are spookily cryptic...so i like reading different explanations & points of view..

Gladys:
'I, and Silence' are two bedfellows disconnected from the human race, from the land of the living. The infinite 'Silence' of death is enveloping me 'Wrecked, solitary, here' on this planet.

I liked this explanation...it fits with my thoughts about this poem...just the "some strange race" part had confused me, but it's better now.. i also think these are the most powerful lines of this poem...

[Gladys]

i always thought that this poem is about losing your sanity step by step, and the unbearable terror of being aware of it.

The 'sanity' interpretation relies on 'And then a Plank in Reason, broke,', which comes so late in the poem that 'inevitable death' seems a better fit.

[spooky]

makes sense =) but the sanity interpretation always made the poem more beautiful/effective(right word?) for me

[mono]

Hi, spooky, welcome to the forum.
As Nick Capozzoli mentioned, even native English speakers have difficulty with Dickinson, and, over a century past her death, people even now feel perplexed over her poetry; personally, she fascinates me. Gladys and I discussed this poem you cited on this thread.
In order to read many of her poems, it seems difficult to analyze them fragment-by-fragment, so reading this one stanza from a multiple-stanza poem may not make a lot of sense without reading the poem in its entirety. One part of understanding Dickinson seems in comprehending her unique punctuation and capitalization of certain words. In this certain stanza, some understanding may come from subtracting some commas; she feels solitary, alone, and, upon her death, casted away from heaven, hell, everything, descending entirely into nothingness. Upon comparing heaven to a bell, and existence an ear, she deprives herself of all sense, including the sense of hearing, in my opinion, explaining why the complete poem ends mid-sentence, secluding herself in nonexistence.

[Gladys]

Upon comparing heaven to a bell, and existence an ear, she deprives herself of all sense, including the sense of hearing, in my opinion, explaining why the complete poem ends mid-sentence, secluding herself in nonexistence.

The emptied poet, accosted now by silence, is ceasing to hear 'the Heavens' tolling her own death!

[Nick Capozzoli]

Mono made some excellent points. Thanks, Mono.

[spooky]

thanks for your comments mono =)

i read the topic you mentioned, it was very enlightening, i should've done more research on this forum before opening this thread

i now come to think that this poem can be interpreted as a journal(i couldn't find a better word) telling about emily's isolation from society...begins with death of something inside her, Kept treading - treading, Kept beating - beating refers to everything/everyone about her, voices of them becoming a torment for her slowly--but surely, to the point that her mind was going numb, and maybe As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear means that she came to a point at which that everything/everyone every voice around her seems to her nothing but sounding bells, with no meanings, just disturbing sounds....to the point when a Plank in Reason, broke and she finished knowing-then-

[Gladys]

i now come to think that this poem can be interpreted as a journal(i couldn't find a better word) telling about emily's isolation from society ... she came to a point at which that everything/everyone every voice around her seems to her nothing but sounding bells, with no meanings, just disturbing sounds....to the point when a Plank in Reason, broke and she finished knowing-then-

If social isolation, does 'Finished knowing' mean insanity? And what do you make of '- then -'?

[spooky]

no, doesn't have to be insanity then, but i think in the case of social isolation, 'Finished knowing' and then- can be interpreted as the final stages of the isolation...like my surroundings were not more meaningful to me than sounding bells first, then they ceased too, now just blank, complete isolation, and may be insanity with it...or not...doesn't have to be...

[stlukesguild]

Mono... I'm addressing these comments on Dickinson here as the discussion upon her merits might be a bit too far off the OP over on the thread n the "value of fiction".

...she actually never intended her poetry for anyone's eyes, except for the poetry she addressed to others (family, friends) and the few poems she published in her lifetime, which equalled to less than 10 out of the over 1500 written - what we have of hers, we have robbed, hence her alleged "lack of achievement," in your opinion, makes me question the value of her poetry as opposed to others, like Coleridge or Eliot, whose works received great inspiration and acclaim from writing/literary groups, while Dickinson composed her work entirely alone without intention of fame or even the least attention. I would place a high value on her poetry not only for its uniquity, attention to detail by the most acute senses, featuring the deepest introspection, but also as a posthumous work, much like how many place a high value on The Diary of Anne Frank (which the teenager Frank never attempted to publish, especially considering the circumstances)...

Perhaps Dickinson does not deserve a seat in the "class with the first rank of writers," but her introversion, emotional instability, and sensitivity, the woman behind the poet, impeded her possibly successful life as a published poet in her time; instead, we have her rawest emotion, as unbiased and unhindered as a diary, bound in twine, in quantitatively more than most poets write in a lifetime. Personally, I would place the utmost value upon such a beautiful and touching thing.

Mortalterror has made clear on more than one occasion his difficulty with attributing greatness to any artist unable to pull off at least one long or epic work. I question that bias. I would argue that Bach would still be one of the central giants of Western music (if not THE central figure still) even if he had never composed his great oratorios and Mass in B. Rembrandt, to my mind, stands second only to Michelangelo in spite of the fact that he rarely ever painted anything that might be considered "large" in scale... surely nothing approaching the epic scale attained by Michelangelo, Rubens, Raphael, and numerous others. By the same token, Baudelaire rarely exceeds the length of a single page, and yet he is undoubtedly the greatest poet of France...although one may certainly argue that the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal read as a single great unified work. But can we not argue the same of Dickinson?

"Beautiful" and "touching"? At times... yes. But to a great extent such terms greatly undermine and underestimate this poet. Milton can be "beautiful" and "touching"... but he is so much more. So is Dickinson. Her intention as a poet is irrelevant to me (although I will note that she did show a good deal of he poetic output to Thomas Wentworth Higginson among others). Franz Kafka demanded that the majority of his papers be burnt (as did Dickinson) yet I would not second guess him as a writer. A great many "artists" working in any field would never have considered themselves "artists" or "writers" in the modern sense... but that does not make them any less so. Fernando Pessoa's reputation continues to grow as more and more of his writings locked away in an old trunk and found after his death are deciphered and translated. The fact that Dickinson may never have intended a public audience in the manner that a recognized and published figure like Tennyson or Wordsworth did only increases my admiration for a poet that clearly wrote for reasons beyond any thoughts of recognition or wealth.

What I recall from my first real experience with Dickinson, was my initial sense of "shock and awe". My high school teachers had presented her as some sort of overly sentimental New England dowager... the famous "woman in white". I remember getting the impression of a prudish Puritan spinster, forever dressed up like some Victorian doll... locked in her room... writing delicate verses that she bound in pink ribbon. I college, she was "rehabilitated" as "Saint Emily," the holy icon of feminists and lesbians everywhere (along with Virginia Woolf). My initial serious reading of her work shattered all of these illusions. It became quite clear that Dickinson far surpassed either of these stereotypes.

Her verse is taut... austere... dense... and gem-like, and yet it often reveals vast hidden depths of meaning upon closer inspection. Her vocabulary (which rarely exceeds 2 or 3 syllable words) and her verse forms are brilliantly compressed... and yet I am struck again and again by the sudden unexpected image or metaphor. Her "hide and seek" syntax, sudden shifts in rhyme, and those ever present pauses and "eccentric" capitalization (similar to Blake?) seem ever laden with significance. In fact, I always get the feeling that every poem is something of a riddle in need of a solution, and every word means more than is first revealed. Roger Shattuck offers just such an insightful word for word analysis of one of Dickinson's shorter poems, "The Charm" (no. 421) in his book, "Forbidden Knowledge". I highly recommend it for anyone reading her work.

Critic Harold Bloom, indeed goes so far as to declare Dickinson as the most cognitively original poet in Western Literature outside of William Blake (and Dante). I wouldn't suggest that I think myself capable of agreeing or disagreeing with Bloom... although I must state that as a great lover of the cognitive challenges of Blake and Dante that is some high praise, indeed. I do agree, however, that she is an incredibly original poet, second to no one among American poets... surely every bit equal to Whitman. Her work may be partially credited to a brilliant fusion of a variety of diverse poetic inspirations: Milton's sonnet's, the poems of John Donne, Emerson, New England's hymns, nursery rhymes, puns and riddles... but then, it is always made uniquely her own. A poet friend of mine has described her poems as "stern little boxes", it reminds me of the fact that the artist I most think of in connection with Dickinson, is Joseph Cornell, who was an equally innovative, self-taught original... a great American artist most known for his brilliantly structured boxes.

[stlukesguild]

Returning to the initial posting, I agree that the poem suggests something of a descent into madness:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

In the stanza in question I agree that she reaches the point of a loss of reason as "all the heavens were a bell, And Being but and ear..." suggests that to her mind everywhere is noise... ringing... and existence itself (as suggested by the capitalized "Being") is an ear. Yet the poet, like silence, is an outsider... foreign to all this existence. I especially love the ambiguity of the ending as her reason breaks she finishes knowing...?

[Gladys]

Her verse is taut... austere... dense... and gem-like, and yet it often reveals vast hidden depths of meaning upon closer inspection.

I am attracted to Emily Dickenson by a guileless intensity, present also in Keats.

Returning to the initial posting, I agree that the poem suggests something of a descent into madness ... I especially love the ambiguity of the ending as her reason breaks she finishes knowing...?

Is hers a 'descent into madness', or insensibility in the final phase of dying, in which case '--then--' alludes to a possible afterlife? Since the poem is saturated with images of death and burial, aren’t faint suggestions of ‘social isolation’ and 'madness' better explained by the poet's appreciation of the annihilation inherent in dying?