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?
Yes... another possibility. Or perhaps hers is even a suggestion of sensations after death itself... the funeral observed as the recently departed?
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Thanks for citing the whole poem. I wanted to point out the way that ED describes the sense of NUMBNESS in this poem, which is about death. ED wrote many poems that deal with death, and especially about her perception of the sharp and sudden distinction between the living and the dead. "'Twas warm at first like us" and "The difference between dispair" are fine examples of her efforts to describe this inscrutable and profound distinction.Originally Posted by stlukesguild
WC Williams wrote a great poem on the same topic. Although WCW's diction is quite different from ED's, I think that he was expressing exactly the same experience of the utter inscrutability of death. WCW's dead journalist is perceived at the transition between life and death...he even has a sort of frozen facial expression of "wonder" as if he had glimpsed the great beyond that he could not tell us about. At the moment of death something profound was revealed to the dead person, who suddenly becomes numb, frozen, and incapable of further expression. This is so Dickinsonian.
To a Dead Journalist
Behind that white brow
now the mind simply sleeps--
the eyes, closed, the
lips, the mouth
the chin, no longer useful,
the prow of the nose.
But rumors of the news,
unrealizable,
cling still among those
silent, butted features, a
sort of wonder at
this scoop
come now, too late:
beneath the lucid ripples
to have found so monstrous
an obscurity.
Man, you really do read literature like a visual artist! You description almost makes it sound like you're describing a painting rather than a poem. That's not a bad thing necessarily. Just stood out to me when reading your response.
Last edited by Drkshadow03; 07-29-2009 at 10:50 AM.
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
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Does this mean: the ultimate news scoop of a dying journalist, concerning the nature of death, hides under his serene but lifeless countenance - an inhuman travesty?
The poem in this form can really be read two ways; it is either a poem about a descent into madness or is a poem describing death.
The extended metaphor of a funeral for the speaker's brain is literally a funeral being held for the death of her mind. The first stanza with its treading mourners represents thoughts going back and forth in anticipation and realization that she is going crazy, hence why they are mourning (for the impending loss of the speaker's sanity), while the treading captures metaphorically the racing of thoughts.
Stanza 2's drums are a headache that grows worse and worse, and leads to her brain growing numb like anestesia being injected. She is losing the sensations of her mind.
Stanza 3, the mourner are departing with the funeral box that is the last vestiges of her mind. They creak across her soul, which gives a sensation that they are trying to escape in secret and robbing her of something important. Boots of lead makes the impending loss of her reason sound like a heavy burden, weighing her down. Immediately the world around her rings out with sound, almost chaotically, with no more sense or reason or a functioning mind to make sense of all the noise.
Stanza 4 continues the ending of Stanza 3. All existence has been transformed to an "ear." The ringing bell of heaven both symbolizes church bells ringing for the death of her sanity and the random noises and sounds of the world around her. She can no longer make heads or tails of reality, it exists completely in the forms of sensations, intense sounds, without a mind to bring it order. While she is left alone with silence inside her mind because at this point her mind is for the most part gone, with only a little bit left; she no longer has racing thoughts because her brain has separated from the world.
However, Stanza 5 comes and it turns out she did have a little bit of reason left. The plank of reason breaks and she plunges deeper and deeper into insanity, allowing her to view the world anew multiple times through the eyes of madness. Dickinson twists our notions about insanity with her last line. Only through madness can we truly know the world as it is. However, since you're mad there is no way you can communicate this knowledge to others, hence the ambiguity of the last line; she knows all about the metaphysics of the world thanks to her madness plunging into different worlds of perspective, but since she is mad there is no way to communicate this information intelligibly to others who aren't mad.
The other reading takes the death literally. When we die our brain dies; when our brain dies we die. She is the moment before death where you know you're about to die (stanzas 1-2), the actual moment of death (Stanza 3-4), and then the entering of heaven or hell or whatever awaits us after death (stanza 5), as all our reason that says such things cannot exist disappear, and we plunged down into whatever awaits us, finally knowing, leaving the ambiguity of what comes next.
Some editions cut out the last (fifth) stanza of the poem. The poem ends with the fourth stanza:
"As all then heavens were a bell,/And Being but an ear,/And I and silence some strange race,/Wrecked, solitary, here."
This changes the reading slightly through its different emphasis. The silence of the ending is being emphasized rather than the breaking of the last plank of reason and the descent into worlds of madness and the afterlife (as this last part is absent from this version of the poem). This creates a third possible reading for the poem. In this version the poem is about the individuals separation from the outside world. The funeral being held is for her social persona. The person who engages with society is dead, divorced from the outside world, leaving only the solitary hermit with silence for company. It is not a literal death or a death of the mind into a state of insanity, but rather a chosen separation from the things of the outside world. In a way, we might also say all three poems are about transformation, moving from one state of existence to another (sanity to insanity, life to death, social to recluse).
The second
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
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Thanks for an enlightening recount of three alternative readings. The 'madness' reading troubles me.
Stanza 1 - 'That sense was breaking through' implies coherence rather than madness in the poet.
Stanza 3 - 'And then I heard them lift a box' is an action 'in the brain' of poet, an action that affects her 'eternal' soul rather than her mind, the receptacle of madness.
Stanza 5 - 'And then a plank in reason, broke' suggests that, as senses failed her, the poet's reason was the last to collapse: she remains sane until a plank supporting reason breaks. If 'And finished knowing--then--' implies 'Only through madness can we truly know the world as it is', the poet’s '--then--' is almost meaningless.
I think the last line in the first stanza is the most problematic for the "madness" reading. We might also read the poem as describing the process of having an epiphany about the world.
The funeral in her brain being the end of one state of conscious and way of thinking about the world. The mourner treading still being racing thoughts, but now the racing thoughts seem on the verge of breaking through with a new understanding, new sense. Stanza 3 and 4 shows her new enlightened sense of the world where the heavens literally ring and existence is experienced through hearing, but then in Stanza 5 the reasoning behind this new epiphany, this ultimate understanding, breaks and she returns to the real world, no longer sure what she knows; she had an almost epiphany and then lost it. Stanza 2 doesn't fit in as well in this reading.
"You understand well enough what slavery is, but freedom you have never experienced, so you do not know if it tastes sweet or bitter. If you ever did come to experience it, you would advise us to fight for it not with spears only, but with axes too." - Herodotus
https://consolationofreading.wordpress.com/ - my book blog!
Feed the Hungry!
I appreciate your thoughts and enjoyed reading them. Thanks, stlukesguild.
Great stanza-by-stanza interpretations, Drkshadow, and, as Gladys mentioned, very noble of you to take multiple stances on the same poem. Dickinson seems to have that effect upon me, too; I still retain my interpretation upon this same poem on another thread, which I cited on the previous page of this thread, but I have read older posts of mine on this forum, analyzing Dickinson's poetry, and end up disagreeing with myself, wondering "what was I thinking then?" Her metaphors, unique language use, odd punctuation, and occasional vagueness really makes reading her poetry an experience worth encountering - each encounter seems to have its own individual mood to it that overwhelms one easily; on many occasions, I have even read her poetry, sat down to meditate upon it, then snapped out of an almost trance-like state, refinding myself several minutes later, almost as if I had woken up from a dream in a different place from minutes previous. Unlike many authors, she has that very intimate ability with her individual readers, and, from time to time, as I mentioned in the post that stlukesguild quoted, I wonder if she would have had the same effect upon her contemporaries, had she shared some of her poetry.
Yes, but it means so much more. It is really an apalling image. It means that the Journalist, at the moment he died, saw or otherwise experienced something quite startling...one imagines that it was an understanding of death, what it means to die, an ultimate realization. But at the precise moment of understanding, he died and left his body as a corpse, and all we, who remain alive can do is try to decipher what he felt at that ultimate moment, and what he felt is recorded in his facial expression. frozen at the moment of dealth. To A Dead Journalist is a masterful poem that bears comparison to ED's poems on the same subject.
I think Dickinson is describing someone else's funeral, but she does it so vividly that I feel she is touching death, and that she is talking about her own non-existence. On reading verse 5:
And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--
I am reading not one world of death, but a multitude, and it sure doesn't feel like anything I would describe as heaven. I think that's the point.
Check the "Beyond Assumptions" website.
Its reviewed there by Mr X, The Scarlet Pimpernell of this Forum.
I think you make an astute point. ED describes something outside herself. That's what brains do...they experience an outside world via sensations felt inside the perceiver's brain...thus, "I felt a funeral in my brain." Here the indefinite article a and the preposition in are critical operative words that establish the external object/internal subject split.
But I don't think she is talking about her own non-existence. She's talking about her internal existence in relation to experience of existence outside of herself. Reason is the structure of her experiential being; it is they way her brain makes sense of her experience of the world. It's a kind of scaffold she stands on. This poem apparently describes a failure of this scaffolding. It collapses and she falls down, passing through many levels of experience, none of which stop her fall. I think that what this poem is really about is the inability of a conscious being to connect with the world outside, at least while the being is conscious. As long as the being is conscious, there is a disconnect between experience and the world, resulting in a kind of constant experiential "slippage" such as that described by her fall after the plank in reason broke. The only time connection is possible is in death, when the conscious being losses consciousness and then becomes a part of the "other," or the outside world. At that pont, however, the now dead being has no "internal" existence, and nothing to say. It becomes a part of "the outside world, inamimate and ultimately inscrutable, like a rock or a marble bust "that cannot see."
Nick
I want to say that there is a great short poem by Philip Pain, an early American poet about whom little is known. It is cited by Yvor Winters, and goes as follows:
Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other's dead, and to my ear
Me thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to dye,
My pulses all would beat, I should not be
Drowned in this Deluge of Security.
This seems to me to be an expression of something
similar to what ED describes in her poem. The reaction
of both poets is one of panic, and I use the term in
its original etymological sense. Pain describes quickening
pulse and ED describes a sense of falling throgh broken
planks of reason.
Nick
The mysterious sounds of the Greek God Pan caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots. While Philip Pain's poem suggests the panic in the face of death, Emily Dickinson poem has more the flavour of existential angst regarding life.
I view them both as a panic reaction, with this difference: PP's poem is an agitated panic, while ED's expresses a numb panic.
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