I Feel Dickinson in My Brain

Excerpt from “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson

And then I heard them lift a box

And creak across my soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here –

What is it about Dickinson’s words in these two stanzas, that draws me back again and again? There are two answers. The reader’s answer and the scholar’s. Like it or not, I am both a reader and a scholar now and cannot be content to like or dislike a piece of art without examining my reasoning and the artist’s approach. The reader’s answer is based on nothing more that feeling. My answer as a scholar digs a little deeper and examines the primary literary tool at work here, the sublime.

There are moments in life when I read a passage so moving that it immediately makes itself a home deep in memory, as if it has always been there, hidden in the code, waiting to be unlocked. This poem turns over something heavy in my mind that I cannot quite describe. Without learning the terms and themes of American romantic literature in these last several weeks, that is as far as I could have gone in answering, ‘Why?’ These two stanzas are good because they evoke a feeling of utter isolation and I relate to dark themes and despair more than to sunshine and joy. That would have been enough of an explanation two months ago. Now I have access to better terms for the structure and impact of Dickinson’s work.

Surprisingly, newly acquired vocabulary and analytic skills do not diminish the power of Dickinson’s words. In fact, the experience is deeper for this new knowledge because the sublime is no cheap trick, but a tool which interacts with the arcane wiring of the mind in a way neither the poet nor the neuroscientist understands. Sublime imagery is not the only romantic element at work in the poem, but it is definitely the centerpiece. Hints of gothic in the disrepair implied by a creaking floor and the overall funereal setting serve the larger goal of creating an uncomfortable awe. The course website on the sublime includes “principal sources of elevated language” from Longinus on the Sublime which help to explain Dickinson’s mastery of the sublime in this passage. Dickinson creates an expansive vision by first introducing a small scene, a funeral, and then interrupting it with “Space” and “the Heavens” tolling like a cosmic bell. The simile conveys oppressive scale, placing the reader inside the vast confines of heavy brass. Suddenly the funeral is forgotten in a reverberating universe where hearing is the only sense. Then comes the second element of elevated language, a powerful emotional response – in this case, desolation: “And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here -.” Dickinson’s choice of words and the composition of punctuation, capital letters and line breaks work to heighten the terrifying rapture of isolation before the final stanza.

How does Emily Dickinson say so much with so little? As a student, I must ask the question, but as a reader, the answer is irrelevant. Art catalyzes introspection and intellectual growth. Great art stands up to analysis without losing meaning. In the case of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” dissection deepens the mystery.