Metaphorical funeral

In Emily Dickinson's "I felt a funeral, in my brain" poem, she takes us into a metaphor of a funeral taking place in her brain. After I read the questions that went along with the poem, I then noticed that the sense of sight is missing from the poem. The most prevalent sense that Dickinson focuses on is the sense of hearing. When I first read the poem, I initially thought that maybe Dickinson was describing the world of someone who has become blind. It made sense to me because 1.) the funeral taking place would be for the sense of sight that was lost 2.) the person who has become blind is trying to make sense of the world around them by hearing things.

After discussing this poem in class, however, it makes way more sense to describe how the funeral taking place represents a person slowly loosing their mind. Especially in the last stanza when Dickinson describes "a plank in reason, broke" the fact that someone is loosing their mind justifies the lack of reasoning. The plank in reason that is breaking is all that makes sense to the person. There is no reason anymore, just the nonsense of a person who has lost their mind and the person is just slowly withering away.

Even though I was way off in my first interpretation of the poem, I was able to see the importance of the sensory language throughout the poem. The point of the poem is able to be conveyed to the reader through these sensory descriptions. In result of this, a reader can really imagine that a "funeral" is taking place in this person's brain.