A headache sucks, cognitive dissonance is even harder for someone who is discovering worlds as they fall from heaven’s own divine bells. An analysis of the poem ‘I Felt a Funeral in my Brain’ by Emily Dickinson is easy to perform because of how observant and easy to grasp it is in its use of metaphorical descriptions of a migraine.
Emily had a sense of humor most seem to ignore in her writing. She was also passionate and romantic, probably in love with a female friend for a while, and to some highly erotic in what she did not make explicit more than what she actually did.
She also played with children’s rhymes and nursery tales, and was an aunt and a failed mother who wanted a child if only she could find a husband worth falling for. But turning away from Victorian anger and patriarchal structures became this poet’s bane and gift. She simply avoided the unpleasantries of civilized courtship, in favor of rest and seances by herself in bed. She was a spirit channeler and ghost writer in the most literal definitions of those words.
But feeling a funeral in her brain must have been an inside joke for an author like Mary Shelly, whose own studies of human biology must have struck the prudes of their time as both horrific and grotesque. But that is a funny observation to begin a rhyme with. If she felt a funeral in her brain, who exactly was the deceased, and why did hearing the bells of paradise cause her to fall so much?
Funerals are long and dry, filled with family and friends, and usually sorrowful. What exactly caused Miss Dickinson to feel this way? Was the joke about an affair, feeling an orgasm as euphemisms by their little death suggest, and that falling off with the burial ceremonies? And did falling from grace, as the divine bells must have woke her up, remind her of how many worlds there were to explore?
Dickinson lifts her words and imagery from John Donne and his famous line, “whom do the bells toll for? / they toll for thee…” But her experience of death must have been broken by her waking to the possibility that there are so many suitors to encounter, and so many lives to lead. Perhaps she was becoming aware of just how popular her verses were getting, attracting the attention of onlookers and admirers bespectacled by her reclusiveness. She was plain in appearance, and small, a little too broad for some, and a little too performative for others.
I would have fallen in love with her words and been smitten by her average appearance. She would appreciate the sentiment, but alas, unless the day of resurrection comes sooner, we are not destined to meet physically in this reality. How those words fall like broken planks, we taking the plunge into despair and suicide, knowing we can see these worlds, and yet must wait to live in them. That must have been some funeral, indeed…
The Verse Universe 