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  • Essay / Analysis of I Felt a Funeral in My Brain by Emily Dickinson

    Table of ContentsRhyming Style of the PoemAnalysis of Metaphors as Key Elements of the PoemWorks Cited by Emily Dickinson, I Felt a Funeral in My Brain is a extremely dark poem that depicts a person going crazy. The general overview of the poem is that a funeral is taking place in his brain. A funeral service takes place, with mourners coming and going. She describes the loud noises she hears during the service. As the funeral ends, she begins to imagine an empty world and her mind begins to collapse, eventually not knowing what happened next. Dickinson's poem is complex and difficult to understand at first glance. To make the poem easier to understand, you need to analyze and think about it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Rhyming Style of the Poem The meter of Dickinson's poem is iambic, meaning that it consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Every second line has six syllables per line, while the other lines have around eight syllables. The rhythm of the poem is all over the place, with no clear rhyme scheme. The only consistent rhythm is that the poem opens and ends with slant rhymes. Slant rhymes are rhymes that have similar words but not identical sounds. Most slant rhymes come from words with identical consonants and different vowels, or even vice versa. For example, in the second and fourth lines of the first stanza, Dickinson uses the words “for” and “however.” These words look similar but don't actually rhyme. Dickinson also uses line breaks and dashes in her poem to emphasize what she is trying to describe. She adds dashes to give her control over the narrative and rhythm of the poem. An example of this is in line 7, “I kept beating – beating – until I thought,” is what Dickinson writes. Dashes play a major role in the format of the poem and give the reader cues about when to pause and emphasize the flow of the poem. The use of repetition and capitalization is also used a lot throughout the poem to show importance and enhance what she is trying to tell the reader. Personification is also another effect of capitalization in this poem. Capitalization transforms lifeless words into living beings. The perspective of the poem comes from Dickinson herself, as the speaker. She describes what is happening in her mind, without seeing it tangibly but feeling and imagining it. This shows his rapid descent into madness which leads to ultimate darkness. It is a petrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the speaker's descent into madness and feeling like he is going crazy. Analysis of Metaphors as Key Elements of the Poem Metaphors are an important factor in understanding the meaning of this poem. . Dickinson uses metaphors to illustrate how she feels by comparing physical things to arbitrary ideas. The funeral represents the speaker's feeling that she is dying and why she feels this unconsciousness. This is a simpler metaphor because funerals usually evoke death. The funeral here marks the transition from the state of life to the state of death, as well as from reason to madness, for the speaker. The speaker both attends the funeral while actively participating in it, showing that the "Self" is divided, eventually breaking into pieces at the end of the poem and creating the..