to the disruption of rationality (another sequence) quickly moves out of verbal reach (out
of sound). But that one phrase is the only hint that "[I felt a Cleaving in my Mind]
" cannot fully represent its subject. Its metaphors, strings of yarn torn from some
knitted whole and balls of yarn unraveling on the floor, are adequate to the task they are
given. The consistency of these analogies and the brevity of the poem are indices of a
certain conceptual neatness.
The difference in "[I felt a Funeral, in my Brain]" is not that its metaphors
are inadequate but that its subject is much more complicated and elusive than the subject
of poem 937. Here the figurative increases must be followed with decreasing certainty. In
stanza one, the speaker’s mental state is compared to a funeral and is characterized by
morbidity, monotony, and repetitiveness so oppressive that "it seemed / That Sense
was breaking through." In the second stanza, the monotony and repetitiveness
continue, but the sensation of motion (in the treading feet) decreases as "they all
were seated." The sound of a drum replaces the treading with even more monotonous and
repetitive beating until the speaker feels her mind "going numb." When, in
stanza three, she "hears" the creaking of the pall bearers’ steps carrying the
coffin "across [her] Soul," something changes. Perhaps the movement from the
interior space of the funeral service to the exterior space of the graveyard precipitates
the drastic figurative change when "Space–began to toll." The tolling of a
church bell to signal the burial of the dead is consistent with the metaphor thus far, as
the monotony of a ringing bell is akin to the insistent treading, beating, and creaking
that precede it. What is not consistent, however, is that all of "Space" is
tolling, not just a church bell. At the end of stanza three, then, the setting of the
initial figure is abandoned, and only the maddening sound persists to carry the metaphors
of the poem forward.
Vast, undifferentiated, resounding space is the setting of lines 11 through 14, a
setting, if it can any longer be termed such, of pure sound. Space tolls as [if] "all
the Heavens were a Bell" and "Being, but an Ear." Whatever the speaker
means by "Being," she is not included in that category, for she and
"Silence, some strange Race" are [ship]wrecked in this world of sound, like two
lost mariners washed up in some alien and, we discover, hostile land. "Wrecked,
solitary, here" suggests shipwreck and strange lands, but we must remember that the
speaker and her companion, Silence, are disembodied; and even Being, the native race of
this aural world, is "but an Ear." It is worth reflecting, before proceeding to
the final stanza, that the speaker has moved from the claustrophobic environment of the
funeral (perhaps of the coffin) to the boundless environment of pure sound; worse, the
mind-numbing experience of the beginning of the poem has reduced her to silence, rendering
her strange and solitary in this world of sound. It is this strangeness and isolation that
she amplifies in the final stanza.
The last stanza restores the spatial setting, at least to the limited extent that one
prop, a plank, from the material world is poised precariously over this aural abyss.
Balancing on the imagery of the preceding stanza, the speaker seems to be walking the
plank of a [pirate] ship, the victim of a nautical execution that recurs to the funeral
motif. When the "Plank in Reason" breaks, however, she plunges into space again,
rather than into the sea, and thus descends through the vast emptiness that here seems to
be outer space: she "hit[s] a World, at every plunge."
This dizzying perspective of the speaker tumbling through space yet colliding with
whole worlds (then bouncing off of them and continuing her fall?) is difficult to picture,
which is precisely the point of such excessive imagery. Once again the admission of
failure and the end of the poem coincide: "then," like "now" in
"[Grief is a Mouse]," points to a moment when the poem’s formulations recognize
defeat. "How then know" and "Finished knowing–then" bring their
respective poem’s processes of knowing to an end, though the way that
"—then–" in this poem is suspended between two dashes suggests both ending
and continuation: at that moment [then], I finished knowing; and, I finished knowing,
[and]. . . then [I can't convey what happened then]. In either case, what the poem is able
to do with words has ended.
From Gender and The Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade. Copyright ? 1997 by
the University Press of Mississippi. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
James R. Guthrie
In the first three stanzas Dickinson carefully erects a plausible physical setting,
which she then demolishes in the last two stanzas. The poem itself functions as a house
with a "cellar" in which the narrator listens to the mourners carrying a coffin,
perhaps her own, across the floor "above" her head; then, in the fourth stanza,
the word "here" suddenly becomes problematic, immediately before the narrator
drops, first, through the cellar floor, then through her own grave, and then through the
last line of the poem–multiple levels of reality or "World[s]" that her body
and consciousness pierce, at every "Plunge." The "here" at the end of
the poem, or the point of view from which the narrator describes the action, is finally a
very different "here" from that in the fourth stanza, the place where the
speaker stands as she listens to the heavens tolling like an immense bell. Because the
poem replicates the disappearance or appropriation of a physical space, it can inspire in
readers a sensation of bodily and intellectual disorientation that may begin to
approximate Dickinson’s own confusion as she made her way around the Dickinson household.
Furthermore, the narrator’s "unconsciousness" resulting from her
"fall" in the poem’s last line becomes a metaphor not only for the cessation of
consciousness that is death but for the soul shut out of heaven, condemned to pass from
world to world, existence to existence, without ever achieving the physical stability
which is analogous to spiritual salvation.
From Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry.
(University Press of Florida, 1998.) Copyright ? 1998 by the Board of Regents of the
State of Florida.