‘Dickinson’s poetry is striking in its individual expression of happiness and suffering or death.’ Discuss this statement, supporting your answer by quotation from or reference to the poems by Emily Dickinson on your course. Emily Dickinson uses many unique techniques to express a poetry, which is striking. Her originality and eccentricity is seen in the unacceptable capitalisation, which defies all poetry forms. Dickinson also uses the dash frequently in her poetry and the dash seems to me to suggest some hesitation. Her inspiration for poetry came from the kind of life she lived. Dickinson grew up in a part of New York called Amherst. She lived in her father’s house all her life and at one stage in her life she spent fifteen years in side the house, infrequently making contact with the outside. During these fifteen years she composed most of her poetry. Dickinson wrote a poem titled “I felt a funeral in my brain” during this period and she gives an account of the sensation of nervous breakdown through the account of one witnessing, from the darkness of her coffin, her own funeral and burial. When I first read “I felt a funeral in my brain” I couldn’t bear the thought of someone imagining his or her own funeral and burial. I found it hard to understand. It sounded a bit weird. I finally came to terms with Dickinson’s whole meaning of the poem and her reasoning for writing such a frightening poem after further reading. I feel the funeral refers to the speaker’s own mind and the threat to her brain’s sanity. Dickinson seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She opens the poem with the lines “I felt a funeral in my brain, /and mourners to and fro/kept treading-treading-till it seemed/that sense was breaking through-”. This stanza is very unusual. She is imagining her own death, the time when mourners will come to pay their respects. The movement of ‘to’ and ‘fro’ and the harshness of ‘treading’ are images of restlessness. In the last line of the stanza “that sense was breaking through-” Dickinson refers to breaking through which seems to mean here breaking down or giving way. In stanza two the mourners introduced in line two are seated. The stanza emphasises how hearing became the sense through which she received the world. But the sound was experienced as a constant drumming, which “kept beating-beating-till I thought/my mind was going numb-”. The experience, which she writes about in this poem, is not fully understood by her: ‘it seemed’, ‘I thought’. In the third stanza it is as if she cannot see what is happening and she has only the use of her ears: “and then I heard them lift a box/and creak across my soul”. Imagining oneself in a coffin at one’s own funeral is a courageous and chilling thought. It really makes me think about why anyone would want to imagine his or her own funeral and burial. I believe you would have to be suffering great anguish and be depressed to have such an image like Dickinson had. But Dickinson says in the phrase ‘creak across my soul’ suggesting that the soul is being hurt.
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