Thursday, September 9, 2010

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.

Number 11 will be addressed in this poem.

Figurative language: extended metaphor.

So, Emily, or Dickinson, uses the process of a funeral to describe a mental breakdown throughout the entire poem.
I read the first stanza as the beginning of the funeral, maybe even the showing. Everyone is walking back and forth. So in the mental breakdown this can serve as the speaker coming in and out of reality. When the people moved "to", she was capable and real, but when they moved "fro", everyone was gone. She was in her on world.

And then then everyone stopped. They didn't come "to" anymore. (Because the funeral started).
She's in this strange world, waiting to leave completely. And then she begins that journey on the way out of the funeral. "I heard them lift a box". Then silence came, probably in the hearse at this point. She is isolated and is about to leave this world.

"I dropped down, and down..." Now she is in the ground. She is gone. Her mental breakdown is complete; she is insane.

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