In our lifetime we deal with a constant loss: the loss of time at the grocery line, in traffic, a bad relationship, and loss of things important to us, worldly possessions, loss of people dear to us, and those we never met, loss of love and finally loss of life. Perhaps there is nobody better to describe emotions associated with a loss but poets themselves. They are kind of people that dwell on emotions, write about them and make their livelihood off of them. In “I felt a Funeral, in My Brain” by Emily Dickinson and “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, the two noted American, female poets portray their own loss of a friend and sanity.
In “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain”, Dickinson uses structure and grammar to emphasize progression of the speakers’ mental breakdown. This is a five stanza poem, with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. The second and fourth lines in each stanza rhyme with an exception of the final stanza which does not rhyme at all; illustrating the breakdown. Throughout the poem the meter alternates between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Her use of the punctuations are structured and organized at first, but as the speaker is losing her sanity the punctuations turn chaotic, more frequent commas and dashes.
Dickinson lived in isolation, surrounded by her poetry and letters. Her lifestyle plays out in her poetry. She uses physical things and sounds she hears as metaphors to describe speakers’ emotional distress. Using repetition “treading - treading”, “beating - beating”, Dickinson influences readers’ ear with steady progression of sounds heard by the speaker like mourners footsteps. In a ritual of the funeral the poet is metaphorically describing stages and progression of speakers’ mental illness. “Funeral” used as a metaphor to describe a dying mind under enormous mental distress. Dickinson is placing herself in the role of a speaker, describing to us readers stages of her suffering under mental stress until she is no longer capable to cope with her emotions and goes numb. She is left with a feeling the words cannot describe “Mind” grows “numb”, and with that she stops mid-sentence; as she is in loss for words. The event that the “funeral” is used to describe doesn’t have to be interpreted solely as a mental breakdown, it can simply describe minds’ inability to cope with the pressure that was imposed by the outside world. Knowing poets life was surrounded with great privacy and solitude, inability of speaker to deal with outside influences to the point of numbness, can almost be understandable. She is describing the situation, far too familiar to most of us: when we worry, analyze, reanalyze, and rationalize things with our mind with fear and pressure, shortage and limit on time. We reach a point of no return, when our brain starts to hurt and our mind goes blank (Just remember when you tried to complete the test with a very short time limit) and it is all over and we lay our mind at rest just as our speaker does at the end of the poem.
