There is no narrative center to this poem. The Boots of Lead would still symbolize the pall bearers, but instead of carrying the speaker herself to the graveyard, they carry her sanity. By the oppressive weight of the treading mourners, the sense of the speaker experiences a break-up of her rational faculties. Kirby, Joan, Emily Dickinson, St. When the mourners were seated there was a drum heard, perhaps, as a part of the ceremony.
This plank is depicted as being broken in the last stanza. Just when the speaker thinks she has reached the limits of mental endurance, she learns that her casket can still drop another few feet. The blurring of the concrete and abstract continues and builds momentum. However, there is also evidence that her differences caused her to question her own sanity at times. The event that the funeral is used to describe, however, does not have to be interpreted as a mental breakdown. She attempts to explain this painful emotion through this poem using a variety of literary techniques that include metaphor, symbolism, personification and others.
Reprinted by permission of the author. 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. Parker misleads the reader in the first and second. Also a funeral is a formal event, whose rules and procedures suggest control and order. In the second stanza of the poem the poet presents the reader with a funeral setting. But the whole movement of the poem seems to be toward new discoveries.
The speaker hears it as a drum: rhythmic, repetitious, numbing. 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. Today: While transcendentalism is no longer the vibrant philosophical force it was during the nineteenth century, millions of readers still pore over the works of Emerson and Thoreau, hoping to glean some insight from these two important American thinkers. The figurative path to the complete loss of reason, and its attendant spatial dissolution, is difficult to follow. It is possible that the speaker means to communicate that she feels she is losing part of herself, and that part of herself is her sanity, her reason, and her ability to think clearly.
It could be referring to life or extinction after death, as some critics like John B. Joan Kirby in her book Emily Dickinson seems closer to the truth when she says that what is being depicted is the passing away of old thoughts, old ways of thinking, old approaches to the world. To finish up I would like with the words of the T. The whole process of the funeral functions as an objective correlative to the inapprehensible process of the unconscious. Some critics see it as a depiction of a real funeral.
It is dying, whether she likes it or not. The poem focuses on the concept of life after death. The Bell was ringing on the Great holidays. However, ironically, no matter how hard she tried to bury her mind, she was just fleeing away to another state — mad, solitary, wrecked and worst of all, hopeless. Instead of a period, Emily used a dash to end the poem, which tells the readers that there would be no end to this hopeless process but an eternal struggle with self-consciousness — an eternal inner torture.
The use of the slant rhyme wakes us up out of the boredom of the marching sound, and this turn also marks the waking up of Emily when she realized that something was wrong with her mind. We welcome your thoughts on a truly troubling, but brilliant, poem. The disintegration of the mind is nearly complete. The most obvious with a funeral is death. They also do not feel funerals in the brain. First there is sense breaking through, then there is the encounter with the tolling heavens, and finally there is the discovery of world after world.
Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. She finds in it, therefore, appropriate symbols to evoke the image of decay of the mind. It is a terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. Today: Free verse is so widely used that it is no longer seen as the revolutionary style it once was. Such kind of system is widely used for bringing the additional tension to the text —in order to underline the importance of the words being said. The war continues until 1865, when General Robert E. The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Earlier, the narrator feels the funeral through the to and fro treading of the mourners; a physical brain experiencing the sensation of physical footsteps. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. The metaphor of the funeral brings in ideas of mourning, closure, depression, blankness and inactivity. Yes, ironically, the least important thing seemed to be the dead guy; while the formality of the process was what only mattered. Her alienation and inability to communicate are indicated by her being enveloped by silence. Silence is alienated from the world of noise as much as the speaker is alienated from the world of rational beings.