to the reader is the step-by-step scenario of "Funeral," a familiar ritual whose
configuration has been decreed by society. All Congregationalist funerals followed very
much the same outline, and few readers will have difficulty in recognizing it: the
mourners who pay their respects, the church service, the removal to graveyard and burial,
the tolling of the bell as friends and family leave to resume the pursuits of the living.
What makes this poem startling, of course, is that the ritual observed in real life by the
mourners is reported here by the deceased itself.
Although it is an impossible feat, seeing one’s own funeral and reading one’s own
obituary are among the most common fantasies of our culture, and they have become stock
components of our literature as well. Congregationalist ministers enjoined the members of
their congregations to reflect upon the moment of death as a spiritual exercise, to
imagine how family and friends would feel (would they be confident of meeting the deceased
in Heaven, or would they fear an eternity of separation because the life of the deceased
had given no signs of saving Grace?). Mark Twain played humorously with the remnants of
this religious notion in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; and in the twentieth century
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town dramatized the pathos in life by using a proleptic
narrator who sees, among other things, her own funeral. The premise behind all of these is
the same: from the absolute vantage of death, we will be able to ascertain what is really
important in life–what events were significant, what values are enduring. At last,
perhaps, we can know what people really thought of us or how God will ultimately judge us:
seeing our funeral might allow us finally to understand our "self." This poem is
grotesque, and deliberately so, principally because Dickinson’s rendition of the
convention turns all the usual advantages of these literary devices against themselves. No
information about life or self can be gathered from this funeral. The mourners are
silent, muffled figures whose movement, though constant, "treading–treading,"
leads only "to and fro"; the funeral service has no sound but the relentless
"beating–beating" of the unmusical, toneless "Drum." One horror,
then, is the hollow abstraction of this retrospective view. Instead of confirming the
importance of certain particular events and values, instead of revealing the true feelings
of people for a specific soul now deceased, it suggests that nothing and no one can have
enduring value. The only lasting value is the unvarying ritual itself as ritual, and
both the reader and the proleptic Voice cling to the formal, abstract structure of the
ceremony that alone seems capable of imposing order upon death.
In ironic juxtaposition to the regularized, conventional progress of the funeral rites
is the second force in the poem, the disruptive capacity of death–a jumbling together of
all categories that apply to the speaker and serve to define identity. The funeral is
"felt"; the "Mind" becomes "numb"; the coffin is lifted
"across" the soul; being is reduced to "an Ear," as speaker and
"Silence" become members of the same "strange Race" of creatures. The
speaker’s plight in the penultimate stanza of the poem recollects Dickinson’s assertion
that Immortality is "the Flood subject," for even the possibility of
consciousness after death becomes confused and terrifying when both speaker and
"Silence" find themselves "Wrecked, solitary, here." The
"Plank" of reason in the last stanza may seem cryptic to a modern reader;
however, a contemporary reader might well have recognized Dickinson’s allusion to the
iconography of conservative, mid-nineteenth-century religious culture. In Holmes and
Barber’s Religious Allegories (1848), there is an emblem called "WALKING BY
FAITH" (modeled on the passage from II Corinthians 5:7, "For we walk by faith,
not by sight"). It depicts a man "just starting from what appears to be solid
ground, to walk upon a narrow plank [with the word 'FAITH' imprinted on it], stretched
across a deep "gulph" and which ends nobody knows whither." On one side is
life, and on the other is Heaven; only the plank of "FAITH" can provide
transport–so this emblem asserts. Yet having renounced faith, Dickinson substitutes a
"Plank in Reason," which breaks because no rational explanation can be adequate
to bridge the abyss between earth and Heaven. The poem concludes with a fall that is an
apotheosis of confusion. Perhaps it recapitulates that first fall into Hell (the poem’s
recourse to the emblem tradition supports this inference); perhaps it is the horror of a
residual self, dropping endlessly through infinite, interstellar space ("And hit a
World, at every plunge," seems to confirm this reading)–no Heaven or Hell, just
unbounded and eternal loneliness; perhaps it is a surrealistic fall into some dark,
endless, undefined interior of being (the initial placing of the funeral "in my
Brain" encourages this inference). And of all these possibilities, the first is
perhaps the most comforting because the resort to a familiar mythic world makes it at
least partially comprehensible.
This is an extraordinarily self-conscious piece of verse, with Dickinson making both
artifice and the relationship between art and life explicit concerns of the poem. Thus two
forces, the familiar order of ritual and the expanding disjunction of categories that are
used to define the speaker’s existence, function to balance each other in some measure.
Without the systematic, articulated ceremony of the funeral rites, a reader might have no
idea what the speaker was describing, and the poem would lack coherence and unity; without
the steady distortion of the terms by which self is defined, the reader could not
apprehend the full experiential anguish of the process. Yet they work together in one
respect: each in its own way tacitly argues that human beings must create their own
order, for we live in a universe that has an imperative only for annihilation.
The ultimate horror is this: that the inescapable activity of destruction derives much
of its fearsomeness from being tied to the laws of unvarying and intractable
movement–time, the third major force at work in the poem. And whereas the sequential
order of the funeral and the violating disorder of disrupted categories are conveyed
through diction, time’s indifferent ruthlessness is rendered less directly–through
absences and through syntactic and rhythmic structures. Thus the reader feels the
force of time in the poem more keenly than he or she apprehends it intellectually.
We feel it first because of the oddities in the account of the funeral. In the
latter-day Puritan culture of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, funeral services were forms of
proto-narrative: since the ceremony was stylized, different portions of it were not of
equal importance, even though they might take equal amounts of time to enact. The
"narrative structure" of the funeral rite was dominated by the sermon, which
summed up the life of the deceased and served as the centerpiece of the ritual: everything
that preceded it was merely anticipatory; everything that followed was anticlimactic. A
funeral told the tale of transition from earth to afterlife, and its sermon was the dead
person’s final "earthly appearance." Drawing upon a tradition of many
centuries, the minister would begin with a suitable text from the Bible; he would then
select the most significant events in the dead person’s life in order to reveal his or her
essential Christian nature; finally, he would draw a conclusion concerning the spiritual
state of the newly deceased–sometimes even estimating the chances for salvation. Although
soul had been severed from body at death, society’s formal recognition of
this event did not occur until this moment, when the body lying in the casket was
explicitly distinguished from both the mortal being who had lived on earth and its soul,
now departed. The invariable chant at the graveside–"ashes to ashes, dust to
dust"–gives articulation to this recognition. Pivoting upon the sermon, then, the
funeral service balanced hope against apparent loss: all that was essential to the nature
of he departed had moved to an afterlife, saved (it was hoped) by the merciful sacrifice
of Christ; the mortal remains were thus no occasion for grief, for the "fall"
into the grave could be canceled by the "rise" into Heaven. Funeral sermons were
so important as exemplary renditions of Christian character and explicit instances of
God’s mercy that they were very often printed and published, to be read devotionally. Many
of Heman Humphrey’s and a number of Edward Hitchcock’s still survive in this form.
Any accurate recapitulation of the funeral "narrative," then, would be shaped
to mirror this structure, and such a recapitulation would of course reflect the crucial
significance of the sermon as final exegesis of identity. A merely sequential movement of
the verse would have to be modulated to highlight the central importance of this moment.
However, such is not the case n Dickinson’s version here. There is no narrative center
to this poem. Quite the opposite: there is a curiously detached, even clinical tone,
an apparent determination to tell only "what happened" in orderly, impartial,
and merely temporal sequence, a fading out at the end into terrible uncertainty. Thus,
although Dickinson employs the successive stages in the funeral ritual to establish a
recognizable sequence in the poem, she does not "shape" this temporal
arrangement to make the sermon take precedence: the "Service" is but one event
among many, each of apparently equal consequence. This is a brutal violation, this
flattening of the narrative so that temporal sequence provides the only order; and it
accomplishes one part of its effect merely through a felt absence. There is no
sermon in this service. The proleptic speaker’s individual character does not dominate
even her own funeral.
The second way a reader feels time’s force in this poem, however, is probably its
prominent feature: immutable clock-time conveyed grammatically through the driving,
implacable forward movement of parataxis. Events occurring without pause, without yielding
insight, without any logical relationship to one another, without any ordering of
importance: life is swept remorselessly along in the swift current of time, swept over the
edge, perhaps to come to rest in some unfathomed end, perhaps merely to fall forever.
There is virtually no syntactic subordination in this poem; the few instances are either
hypothetical ("As [if]") or, more commonly, temporal ("till … when …
till … then … then … then"). The insistent beat of "when" and
"then" merely reinforces the drumming tattoo of ticking time, which becomes more
insistent with each stanza and climaxes with the paratactic thumping of "And"
that is concentrated in the fifth stanza ("And … And … And … And") as the
Voice recounts its final, undefined descent beyond understanding. It is thus that the
reader is propelled forward by the driving force of time: urgent, impatient, uncaring.
Here, the metrical dominance of "eights and sixes" hymnal cadence, serves as
bitter irony–the hope offered by Christ utterly forsworn by the bleak vision of the
verse; and probably Dickinson intended a trope for metrical foot in the image of
"those same Boots of Lead, again"–death busy about his usual work of blight and
annihilation.
The somber implication of paratactic movement is by no means confined to this one poem:
it is rendered unmistakably (though unobtrusively) in "A Clock stopped–" by
"Nods from the Gilded pointers–/ Nods from the Seconds slim–"; and the
irony in that poem is that God is as completely entrapped by the inflexible nature of His
invention as mankind is. Indeed, throughout Dickinson’s work, the use of parataxis almost
always signals the inexorable drive toward death.
From Emily Dickinson. Copyright ? 1988 by Cynthia Griffin Wolff.
Karen Ford
The relationship between figurative excess and endings that lack closure suggests why
so many of Dickinson’s poems were originally published with their difficult endings
deleted (or not selected for publication at all until they were published in the complete,
variorum edition in 1955). "[I felt a Funeral, in my Brain]" (P 280) was
typically printed without its last stanza:
[. . . .]
And then a Plank in Reason, broke
And I dropped down, and down–
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing–then–
Yet, if we recognize the final stanza as a product of figurative escalations that are
excessive rather than standard, we begin to understand its place in the poem.
"[I felt a Funeral--in my Brain]" begins, as so many of the poems do, with an
assertion whose stability sounds unquestionable. Despite its semantic oddness, the first
line is delivered with rhetorical assurance that temporarily contains its volatile subject
matter. The sense of containment is not merely a product of orderly syntax and confident
tone, however; it also derives from the claustrophobic setting of the funeral. Though the
feeling of a funeral occurs in the speaker’s brain, the analogy suggests premature burial.
The mental state the speaker describes is not merely like a funeral in her brain, it is
like being buried alive: the heightened awareness of sounds (treading, beating, creaking,
tolling) and the sense of enclosure ("in my Brain," they all were seated,"
"a Box") combine with other evidence in the poem to suggest that the mourners
are conducting a funeral service for a speaker who is not yet dead ("My Mind was
going numb," "creak across my Soul").
The mental state described here begins as a numbing, monotonous, claustrophobic feeling
but proceeds to its opposite. If the beginning of the poem figures extreme interiority,
the ending of the poem depicts an even more disturbing exteriority whose boundlessness is
finally indescribable. The "Plank in Reason" that breaks in the final stanza is
anticipated in the shift from interior to exterior space, as though the walls, floor, and
ceiling of the room (or the sides, lid, and bottom of the coffin), all made of planks,
suddenly disappear, plunging the speaker into limitless and terrifying space.
The figurative path to the complete loss of reason, and its attendant spatial
dissolution, is difficult to follow. Comparison with the more logical sequence of a
similar poem offers an instructive contrast. "[I felt a Cleaving in my Mind]" (P
937) employs a metaphor that describes exactly what "[I felt a Funeral, in my
Brain]" enacts (that is, poem 937 says what poem 280 does):
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind–
As if my Brain had split–
I tried to match it–Seam by Seam—
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before–
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls–upon a Floor.
The word "cleaving" may abbreviate the contradictions of "[I felt a
Funeral, in my Brain]" between the description of the mental state as claustrophobic
(cleaving together) and boundless (cleaving apart). The second line establishes that the
sensation being described here is some sort of mental falling apart. The orderly
progression of thoughts, compared to a string of yarn or thread, cannot be knit or sewn
together into a coherent sequence. On the contrary, the balls of yarn (perhaps a graphic
corollary for the brain with its bundled folds and convolutions) unravel when they roll to
the floor.
Not only does this poem describe the movement toward disintegration that poem 280
undertakes to depict, but it also refers to the difficulty of such representation:
"But Sequence ravelled out of Sound" is not just a description of mental
undoing, it is an account of linguistic failure. The sequence of mental events that leads