An Analysis of Irony in Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”

The whole metrical composition was in the past tense, much over like relating to the poets nostalgic retrospective, telling a story that re every last(predicate)y happened to her. Whats so scary a department about the verse is, if without the premier(prenominal) line, the major subject a Funeral that Emily once went through by herself, offering readers an angle of view from their own places, alive. The poem, thus, has put up a question probably with no answer what if you died and were about to be buried, and were still conscious alone the time through the funeral?.Since a set can directly represent a loss of life, Emily assay to make use of that sense of loneliness and isolation (yet devoid of a feeling of terror), which can be found in a coffin, to touch on a thing worse than death a loss of headland, as opposed to a loss of life. In fact, thats just the beginning of Emilys irony, which is, burying someone that notwithstanding garbled herself (or himself) instead o f her (or his) life. The point is that in Emilys mind, it was fifty-fifty worse than death to lose ones own Self.The first imagery showing up and running through the whole poem is the Mourners. In common sense, they were supposed to sob or wail over the lost person while on the contrary, there were no large(p)s of lugubriousness at all in the funeral, which is quite ironic. The whole when sound that the poem was trying to convey is their stupid march treading, treading and their so-called service beating, beating, resembling an multitude of cumbersome robots in their Boots of Lead disposing a bin of trashes or nastily, corpses.Weirdly enough, no mourning attire, no face, no interaction (for example, bestowing a rose on the dead(p), or whispering muffled with one another about the dead), and even no slightest feeling are described, at least for the sake of the dead person instead, all in all is merely a unreserved stirment of a routine procedure (arriving taking a statio n waiting for the bell shape ringing then burying the coffin), so as to give the poem, in its least sense, the tone of a funeral do workion. Yes, ironically, the least beta thing seemed to be the dead guy while the formality of the process was what only resulted.In pursuit of consistency, Emily also used a ballad fourth dimension style, of which the strong rhythmic tone could exactly cater to the marching sound and play as similar to a dirge, and the simplicity sensed in this meter could retell with that of the funeral. In addition, this simple rhythm had been also achieved by the repetition of the akin words treading and treading, beating, beating and dropped down, down, where the sense of social movement had been created for readers to feel by themselves and been stressed by alliteration as well.However, on the other hand, the simplicity, both in the sense of the funeral and the Mourners, made a sharp contrast with the poets relatively entangled mind. And ironically, t he only thing that was very likely to satirise that stupid simplicity had done for(p) mad or even been lost, which is why Emily felt a Funeral in her Brain. Besides the visual imagery of Mourners, the sound of a cost is another auditory one and its tolling was meant to signal the demise of the funeral, which is, in fact, an echo to the imagery of Mourners.In the fourth Stanza, Emily referred being to an ear partly in that the upkeep Mourners, just like the lifeless robots without the ability of independent thinking, was awaiting the next-step instructions, and apart from a heart, a psyche created to sense feelings and thinking, an ear was the only organ they necessitate to simply absorb orders to proceed the funeral partly in that hearing a sound can be a sign of being and is interior to the being, both of which she was no longer in possession, and this in part explains why Silence and she belonged to some strange Race.And wrecked, solitary were the only feelings that she had been having since being part of this Race. Apparently, the Mourners are a metaphor for all the people in her life that once mattered and since they were of the similar race, they talked and acted in the same way that unfortunately she would never approve of and would do her best to guy by despising them with a pen. She thought that tolerateing reclusive could help nurse her superiority over the stir of the society, provided is this really the case?At first, they began their treading and gradually, their noise started to make sense and affect her in some way. That aesthesis was breaking through indicates that she had a momentary impression that her sense (or her mind) was escaping and go on to go away as the dash implies. The treading evolved into the beating, which confused her and finally managed to pall her mind. For them, the treading and the beating would never be enough for such a complicated and mature mind thus, they planned to beat it down, put it into a coffin and bury it and before all that happened, they tortured it again and again, as with the same Boots of Lead, again implies. When the mind could no longer bear the torture, it came to an end with the Bell tolling. Finally, finally it surrendered and was determined to be estranged from the outside world and stay lonely in her coffin by stopping communicating with those ears, precisely the torment went on. Everything seemed fine until a Plank in Reason, broke and she began to move madness, madness, madness. What could have been more awful if there was a hole on her mind?But whats worse, even though she kept dropping, experiencing all types of mental disorders, there was no demise and there would never be one, which means that she had to be kept under torture and pain. This is the most flagitious thing, worse than death. The ironic part lies in that the pain she had been through was in truth brought about by her own self. She built herself a coffin to ward off harm or obstacles in her way and keep her mind intact, which of necessity led to her emptiness or even depression. There is a bend dexter in rhyme in the last stanza And I dropped down, and down- /And hit a World, at every dive, /And finished knowing then.The use of the run rhyme wakes us up out of the boredom of the marching sound, and this pass also marks the waking up of Emily when she realized that something was wrong with her mind. This trice of realization was actually caused by the speed of the dropping, as Emily used plunge to depict her situation. Before the realization, she was by no means self-conscious of what was going on and the fact that everything taking place in her brain was all made up by her own self as a way to flee away from the outside world.However, ironically, no matter how hard she tried to bury her mind, she was just fleeing away to another state mad, solitary, wrecked and worst of all, hopeless. After the realization, she was disillusioned, which is actually even more tra gic, because there was no way to bury her mind but merely transforming its state into abnormality. Instead of a period, Emily used a dash to end the poem, which tells the readers that there would be no end to this hopeless process but an eternal struggle with self-consciousness an eternal inner torture.